As your business grows, you will need the right talent to support your growth plans, and this includes strong leaders who are ready to lead and inspire your teams to success. Focusing on your existing employees and developing them into future leaders can be a cost-effective and advantageous strategy when done correctly.

By upskilling employees from within your organisation to become leaders, you can increase morale, maintain the cohesiveness of your teams, and importantly, maintain a positive work culture.

What are the qualities of a great leader?

Before we look into how we can develop future leaders from within your organisation, we need to be able to recognise who in our organisation will make a good leader. Some of the qualities might include:

• Ability to motivate and inspire others
• Assertiveness to overcome obstacles
• Is both trusting and trustworthy
• Understands the importance of accountability and can give constructive feedback
• Is able to clearly delegate tasks to others
• Can hold strong boundaries that create respect from their team members

Identify high potential employees

First off is to identify those employees who have the potential to lead and develop others. It’s important at this stage to differentiate between high potential employees and high performing ones. Just because an employee performs consistently and hits their targets does not mean they will make good managers. Refer to the list above as a quick reminder of what makes a good leader.

Promoting a team member to a leader just because they are good at their job can have a negative impact on your organisation and those they manage.

Practice role modelling

Before promoting an employee into a leadership role, it is important to see how they might cope with the day-to-day responsibilities of being a manager. Give them some 1-to-1 mentoring tasks with junior/newer employees to see how they handle delegating tasks, give  feedback and act as a mentor and role model. Get feedback from those they are mentoring so you can understand how they are responding to their leadership and delegation style.

This will not only help to practice and perfect their management skills, it also allows you to see how others within your organisation respond to them.

Leadership development programs

High potential employees that you want to develop as managers will still require training and development to hone their soft skills and prepare them to tackle the many challenges of leadership. Even the social skills associated with effective leaders, such as empathy, can be trained like any other skill. Prioritising and investing in a leadership development program shows your employees you see them as a long-term commitment and care about their growth.

Coaching from other leaders

Personal coaching and mentoring is another effective way to develop high potential employees into leaders. This should preferably be given from a more experienced leader within your organisation who understands the challenges and objectives of the business, and who can give them feedback and direction as they start to take on a leadership role within their team.

Mentoring programmes can also create great job satisfaction for the mentor, allowing them to reflect on their own leadership style and ways to maintain the culture of the business whilst leading from the front.

Sharing organisational goals

Potential leaders should understand the top level organisational mission, goals and values, and how they and their teams can play their role in the company’s success. Having 1-to-1s with others team leaders in the company will help them see the bigger picture and enable them to share ideas on how best they can make an impact.

Set key milestones and goals

One of the best ways to develop your future leaders and keep them engaged is by setting KPIs and goals. Set some clear targets, based on measuring their soft leadership skills, personal KPIs, as well as collective team targets. Meet with them regularly to talk through the challenges they are facing, celebrate their successes and find out how you can best support them.

Are you looking to recruit future leaders?

Our team at 1850 has years’ of experience when it comes to recruiting leaders and helping you implement a robust training and development programme to develop your existing employees to lead and manage teams. Contact us for a free consultation to find out more.