5 Proven Ways To Develop Great Leaders. Are You Using Them?

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By Carina Biddle

4 MIN read

The success of any great venture is only as good as the success of its people. People are the drivers of a business, and without them, startups wouldn’t exist. So the saying goes, “Take care of your people, and they will take care of you.” So how do you keep your teams fresh and develop the kind of leaders you need to scale while still maintaining a lean strategy and a lean budget? You start by taking a deep breath, diving in, and one-by-one, tackling these five keys to developing strong and effective leaders. Before you know it, you'll be wondering why you didn’t start these sooner.

1. Encourage networking and relationship building

Here’s your first, and highly cost-effective strategy. Networking allows employees to develop further the essential skills they need to succeed in your organization. Encouraging employees to meet new people and forge partnerships will help build their reputation as approachable individuals and will create more potential opportunities for your organization. Networking within and without your organization, both have unique benefits to your employees and you. Encouraging networking to take place between teams and department within your organization can pave the way for innovative and creative ideas that might not have been thought of before while networking outside your organization can create the path for furthering the awareness of your brand and building new and valuable partnerships. Networking also provides employees with unique opportunities for practicing the people skills needed to excel as a leader. Without the chance to practice, learning can only go so far. 

2. Get them a coach

Next up, get a coach. Every athlete who trains to win hires a coach, and every musician who wants to perform, regardless of his/her professional status, hires a teacher. If you want to get the best you can out of your employees, you have to be willing to give the best you can. When you have a tight budget, it can be tempting to double up on your employee’s roles and make your managers your coaches too. Unfortunately, and all too often, using managers to coach employees results in a convoluted dual relationship that causes more harm than good, costing you dearly in the long run. Any startup that’s on a budget and trying to run lean can still hire coaches for their team without breaking the bank.

“If you want to get the best you can out of your employees, you have to be willing to give the best you can.”

3. Collect well-rounded feedback

Don’t forget that your employees are humans. Complicated, dynamic, and even contradictory. When relying on gathering information and feedback on their behaviors and attitudes, make sure you’re getting information from multiple angles. Focusing solely on the perspective of one person will only give you a narrow and myopic view of that individual, and that narrow mindedness can encourage an ugly self-fulfilling prophecy. Collecting feedback that gives you a 360-degree picture of your employee’s skills, motivations, relationship styles, etc. will help you both know what that individual needs to thrive in your organization.

  “Focusing solely on the perspective of one person will only give you a narrow and myopic view of that individual…”

4. Provide support & reinforced learning programs

We live in an information-rich, and data-hungry world. With the plethora of media and information in circulation, you would think that personal growth and development is accelerating, yet, many people report feeling more overwhelmed at the information and unsure of where to even start. Although it’s possible to learn from unfocused material you’ve haphazardly found, it’s often a laborious and time-consuming process. Even worse, you might be learning the wrong lessons.

Technology makes it easier than ever to access information, and that’s a good thing, but information geared toward personal growth needs to be grounded in evidence, and learning programs must be built with the tools for reinforcing that material. Not every year, or even four times a year, but at every chance possible. Meaningful and lasting learning comes from the opportunity to review, review, review and practice, practice, practice. Providing your employees with the tools to learn and grow demonstrates that you are supportive of them and when people feel supported, they perform better. 

5. Pay for Workshops & Conferences

Conferences and workshops are an excellent way for your employees to practice their people skills and to learn new skills that they can introduce to the whole organization. If you encourage your employees to find new learning opportunities in areas that interest them, you can use their newly gained knowledge and valuable connections to further a culture of growth and appreciation of learning from each other. Creating a work environment where colleagues learn from and with each other will strengthen your teams bond and create more opportunities and value for your organization. Be careful not to make attending workshops and conference a requirement, and make sure you’re sending them to ones that are focused on their needs and interest, or you might find yourself creating an entirely different environment than the one you had in mind. Lastly, remember that while they can be highly useful for the growth and learning of your team, without a plan in place for your employees to reinforce or practice what they’ve learned, you won’t be able to maximize what you've spent.

“Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.” —Confucius

Remember that implementing a leadership development plan for your team does not have to be overly time consuming or expensive, but it should always be grounded in research and data, and it should for sure be reinforced. As the great Confucius once said; “Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.”

If you’ve found this to be useful, please let us know and share it with someone who might also benefit from it. And if there’s something specific you would like to read about, we’d love to know! Just send an email to [email protected].

You can read more about what it takes to be an effective leader here, or learn here about the five personal development skills every founder needs to succeed.

Carina Biddle, M.S., is a Founder and Co-CEO of Upward AI. Upward AI develops innovative and forward-thinking solutions for helping companies reach all of their people development goals. Upward AI relies on science-driven information in Organizational Behavior, Neuroscience, and Psychology and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help people do better, feel better and be better. More information can be found here.


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