How To Develop Your Team’s Leadership Ability

Your team will not just get better. They will only get better by intentional efforts that develop them. Growth is not an automatic process. Too many organizations hope their team will rise to the next level. Hope is a great thing, but it is not a strategy designed to develop us. Hope may get us started, but it is discipline that keeps us going.

As a leader, you have to create opportunities for your team to grow.

Failing to create an environment where people are growing will slowly erode morale and stifle progress. As a leader, it is your responsibility to build a developmental greenhouse for your people to become everything they’re capable of. When leaders water the seeds of potential in others, productivity increases. Your organization will only be as good as the people running it. If you want your organization to be great, you have to equip your people to be even greater.

Too many companies spend all of their time using internal procedures and rules of operations to orient people rather than developing them into self-thinking leaders. They expend exorbitant amounts of energy training people in job descriptions rather than mindsets. If your team isn’t being developed to step out further, think out of the box, and learn new skills, they will be limited to stay exactly the same. Who they are now will be the person they’ll remain, never growing to greater heights.

The lack of growth environments is a systemic issue that began when organizations started placing production over people. With the boom of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s into the 1800s, institutions started training children in a way to prepare them for routine factory work. Students were no longer challenged to be leaders with unique skill sets. They were trained to be cookie-cutter workers who follow orders, keep production up, and maintain the flow. Generations have since been conditioned to work like this. You’ll see this type of supervising in the way many businesses are run today. Follow the manual, uphold the routines, do your job as it’s written, and don’t ask questions. There is not much emphasis on recognizing a person for who they are and developing the unique strengths that person brings to the table.

The organizations breaking away from this mentality are the ones seeing breakthroughs in innovation and achieving staggering results. They are refusing to be limited by the dogmas that have been imposed upon them. They are committed to developing their people to be thinkers, pioneers, and leaders. High-quality workers are being drawn to these organizations because of the engaging culture they provide. Benjamin Franklin said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

Creating a growth environment takes three areas of commitment:

Check out my book Leadology: 12 Ideas To Level Up Your Leadership to learn more…