How can you use recognition to encourage team members to take on leadership roles?

When recognising people, ensure to use specific examples. Use various data points as well to validate the examples. The richness of the feedback is essential and focus on strengths. Emphasise on what impact they have created and reassure of ongoing support

Potential Leaders need the confidence of their mentors/managers. Highlighting the team members’ niche and unique skills will give the team member the confidence to “test” the waters and lead into a successful career in a leadership role.

Providing feedback can be a tricky task. My goal is to always be sensitive and tactful, yet truthful in constructive feedback. Team members that accept the feedback in the same positive fashion is truly interested in advancing their career opportunities. Team members that are “set” in their own ways, unwilling to welcome feedback will be sitting in the same “chair” indefinitely.

Not everyone will admit to failures and will even go to great lengths to hide their failures. We all know no one is perfect! The first step of having a successful failure is to admit it openly and discuss the learnings and how to learn from it. This is the PERFECT opportunity to recognize the team member for their efforts and the learnings from the experience can be beneficial for a lifetime. Celebrating success is most effective if you know your team members’ motivational preferences and reward/recognize accordingly.

Our team has implemented ways of cheering each other on with a variety of techniques. A couple of examples: 1). During weekly team meetings, each member will communicate their biggest win of the week - which encourages all kinds of applauds, hats offs, cheers, etc. 2). Ring the bell!!! The sound of a bell ringing for a new contract, new customer, cost savings, etc is highly contagious and most importantly highly motivating. I mean, who wouldn’t want in on ringing the bell? It gets the entire office’s attention!

Opportunities, Resources, and Networking go hand-in-hand. Opening up the opportunities for team members to broaden their knowledge, skills, and connections will lead to both growth opportunity for the team member AND the Company’s benefit of having employees ready and willing to step into Leadership roles.

In my experience offering potential opportunities to allow individuals to develop their leadership is an effective strategy. Depending on their confidence/experience it can be a small or big opportunity and you can provide maximum or minimum guidance depending on their need for support. Adapt the opportunity, support and resources to the individual in question.