“Growth happens outside your comfort zone” is a popular saying applicable to every individual including your proficient employees. Every individual seeks motivation and growth to upscale the trajectory of his career. If your employee is doing the same kind of work for a considerable amount of time, there is a high chance that he may lose interest in doing it. Ask yourself, if you are acknowledging the real potential of your efficient employees and giving them opportunities to grow and propel in their career. If not, then you are turning them into robots who are doing the monotonous job for the sake of doing. Moreover, there is a possibility of you losing your able employees by not utilizing their full potential.
Acknowledging the potential of your highly proficient employee is a win-win situation. While you are delegating leadership roles to your highly skilled employees and thereby ensuring their growth, you are also facilitating business growth by utilizing their talents and skills.
However, a million-dollar question remains, how would you get your highly proficient employees ready for leadership roles or delegate new responsibilities by ensuring a healthy work environment for their growth? Following are the five ways you can turn your deserving employees into leaders:
1. Guide them to Network
Start infusing leadership qualities among your seasoned employees by guiding them on how to network, initiate conversations with strangers, and how to ask for things they want. These are basic yet profound skills for a leader to have at any stage. Thus, ensure that you are educating your employees to get started with networking as soon as possible.
You can arrange various employee engagement programs to invite your potential employees and give them a platform to discuss and explore their knowledge and expertise. This way, you are not just initiating better interaction with employees, but you are also motivating them to channelize their efforts and expertise in the right direction. Various business events help employees build contacts and seek support from experts.
2. Help them build the right experience
You as a manager need to go deeper and start explaining your unique duties to your employees. This way, your employee would understand the managerial work. You can avail experiences by introducing them to various tasks such as managing other employees, meet monthly objectives and work coordinately. Tasks like these help to impart managerial skills in them.
3. Allow them to explore things on their own
In the pursuit of fulfilling your managerial duties, you might help your employees with their tasks or other concerns. But to mentor your employees to acquire leadership qualities, you must give them space to figure things out on their own.
This way you are also showing trust in them which in turn makes them more confident.
4. Develop a mentor-mentee relationship with them
Throughout the process of mentoring your potential future leaders, make sure you are keeping this mentor-mentee relationship intact. Such a relationship will continue to hone their leadership skills so that you can utilize them to the fullest.
For instance, you can think of starting an informal book club where you can encourage the employee to read books on leadership and management. Once your employees are reading these books, have discussions with them about the learnings offered by these books.
You can also hone this relationship by having regular one-on-one meetings with them to discuss new ideas, struggles or challenges they face.
5. Inducing ownership mentality
Inducing ownership mentality doesn’t simply mean that you are equipping your employees with all the necessary tools. You must impart trust in your employees to allow them to start exhibiting their leadership qualities. They should feel that they are valued and their opinions and ideas can boost company sales. Eventually, they will become more confident in the actual decision making.
Conclusion
If you are a growing business, you must have highly skilled employees whose work has contributed to the growth your business is experiencing. However, employee management is a critical aspect of any growing business. Identifying the hidden gems in an employee and utilizing it for the betterment of an organization is a great deal to consider. So explore your team and discover the potential each team member holds and guide them to becoming the future leaders.
