How to Grow Effective Leaders Within Your Team: Developing leadership skills is the key to a successful team

Once you become a leader, your job switches from doing well to empowering your team to shine.

Later, when you move up the career ladder, and your direct reports include supervisors, team leaders, and managers with their teams, it’s up to you to ensure the leaders reporting to you empower their team members to excel.

Liz Wiseman & Greg McKeown write about this in their book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.

“Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius — innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.” — Liz Wiseman, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Growing excellent leaders will not only increase the well-being and engagement of your wider team, but it will also increase your reputation as a senior leader and the productivity of the wider team.

Leadership skills are crucial to success; you must ensure your future managers have them.

“The day-to-day interactions employees have with management strongly impact their employee experience, which shapes a worker’s perception of their job over the course of their tenure with a company and builds engagement. This not only affects engagement and performance, but it can also determine the likelihood a worker will stay in that position.” — Matt Tenney, How a Leader Impacts the Team They Lead, businessleadershiptoday.com

Ask yourself if you would instead work for a senior leader who:

a)

• Hire leaders who can learn to lead a team
• Holds leaders accountable for managing their teams
• Ensures their leaders are trained

or b)

• A leader that washes the hands of their newly hired managers and leaves them to sink or swim?

I chose a), did you? You can bet your bottom dollar that any candidates for your leadership vacancies will, too.

The good news is that anyone can learn to be a leader and grow leaders within their teams. Like anything else, it’s easy when you know how!

If you adhere to the following three practices, it will help you grow productive and effective leaders and attract quality candidates for your leadership roles:

Step One — Hire new leaders who can learn to lead a team

When recruiting supervisors, team leaders, or managers within your department, include people leadership tasks in the position description.

Many position descriptions cover the responsibilities and KPIs of the role but not tasks relating to people leadership, such as holding one-to-ones and team meetings, developing the team, giving constructive feedback, and delivering meaningful performance reviews.

If you include these tasks in the position description, candidates will know they will be expected to carry out people-centric activities. Less inclined people will realize that the role could be a better fit.

Next, ensure that you screen for leadership capability in the interview.

“The good news is, anyone can learn to be a leader themselves and grow leaders within their teams. Like anything else, it’s easy when you know how!”

If the role is the first step on the leadership ladder, the applicants will likely have no leadership experience, but you can still include some leadership questions, such as:

• How do you motivate and inspire others to do their best work?
• Have you ever had to give constructive criticism to a peer or colleague? How did you go about it, and what was the result?
• Tell me about a time when you led a project or a group, even if you didn’t have a formal leadership position.
• How would you ensure everyone in a team feels valued and included, considering they have different skill sets and personalities?

If your candidates haven’t any formal leadership experience, they may have some leadership skills they’ve gained outside of work, via project work, or as a senior member of the team.

Takeaway — Putting leadership responsibilities into the position description and screening for leadership capability in the interview will ensure your successful new hires know the required leadership tasks and have the appetite and ability to do them.

Step Two — Put Leadership Capability into Performance Reviews

One surefire way to ensure that the leaders who report to you carry out the required leadership activities is to include leadership tasks in performance reviews, especially if their reviews are linked to pay increases.

“What gets measured, gets done.” — derived from a quote from Peter Drucker.

The gist of the above quote derived from Peter Drucker is that they get forgotten unless we track and measure goals.

Therefore, if you ask your supervisors to do leadership activities but never check whether those activities have been done, it’s more likely that they won’t be.

Put a goal in your leader’s performance reviews and call it something like ‘leading the team’ and include some of the leadership activities below:

• Holding regular one-to-ones and team meetings
• Developing the team
• Including development and career discussions in team performance reviews
• Setting and monitoring SMART goals
• Giving constructive feedback promptly
• Giving positive feedback
• Rewarding the team
• Conducting team-building activities
• Leave management
• Understanding and acting on different personality styles of the team
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion

This list isn’t exhaustive; you can mix and match as necessary for each individual. If the leaders reporting to you aren’t doing the above tasks already, start small in terms of what you put in the performance review, with only two or three leadership tasks.

Next year, add more.

Checking leadership activities takes place simply if your leaders keep good records. Including leadership activities in performance, appraisals ensure your team knows you put a value on these activities.

Takeaway — What gets measured gets done, so measure leadership activities in your team by including team leadership as a goal in your direct report’s performance reviews.

Step Three — Ensure your new leaders are trained

A typical scenario is sending an employee home on Friday and expecting leadership capability to appear magically on Monday morning — the first day of a new leadership role. I’ve seen it in the UK and NZ; from what I’ve read online, it’s common worldwide.

There are many leadership courses and methods of leadership development available to you.

The simplest is to explain to your new hire what leadership tasks you expect them to complete and show them how. If you included these tasks in the position description and discussed them in the interview, there should be no surprises.

It will help your new leader if you go through what they need to STOP doing because they are no longer in their old role and what they need to START doing as a new leader.

If your new hire is external, this will be easier.

There are plenty of in-person and online courses for formal leadership training, both with and without a certification.

If you have a team of several leaders reporting to you, think about going through one leadership skill with them every month. If you need help with how to go about this, ask your HR team or your L&D professional.

Encourage your leaders to read leadership books, listen to podcasts and TED talks, and, of course, subscribe to my leadership and training newsletter ;-)

Takeaway — If you want your leaders to do well, they need leadership training. The training mode doesn’t matter; getting your leaders to understand and carry out leadership tasks does.

Summary

Remember, growing influential leaders in your team is, like anything else, accessible if you know how. It’s not rocket science!

Having leaders reporting to you is a big responsibility. The leadership capability of your direct reports dictates the wellness, engagement, productivity, and effectiveness within their teams.

Takeaways

1. Putting leadership responsibilities into the position description and screening for leadership capability in the interview will ensure your successful new hires know the required leadership tasks and have the appetite and ability to do them.
2. What gets measured gets done, so measure leadership activities in your team by including leading the team as a goal in performance reviews.
3. If you want your leaders to do well, they need leadership training. The training mode doesn’t matter; getting your leaders to understand and carry out leadership tasks does.

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Previously published on Medium.com on 22nd February 2024