It is imperative that companies work towards the creation of upwardly mobile workforces. Employees should be given the opportunity to work on leadership skills and knowledge so that they can one day take responsibility for the management of other people and projects. Here are five ways that organizations can help their employees develop managerial and leadership skills.
Mentoring
A mentorship program can help transfer some of the important leadership acumen from current leaders to future senior figures. Regular shadowing sessions and mentorship meetings between pairs of people working in similar fields but at different levels can help to create an upwardly mobile workforce. Mentoring has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of passing on knowledge and skills.
Leveraging Technology
Recent years have seen the development of some great technologies to develop leadership. Educational platforms enable leadership learning to be distributed remotely and customized to the exact needs of the student employee.
Video conferencing tools enable employee students to tap into conversations and seminars that they would otherwise have no access to. Project management tools help budding leaders and managers to understand the structural planning that goes into the successful running of a project.
Encouraging Responsibility
Businesses can encourage the development of leadership and management skills in their employees by relinquishing some of their micro-managerial control and encouraging responsibility and independent thinking at every level.
When people are given the power to shape the success of their own efforts, they naturally strive to develop a more comprehensive knowledge of how this may be done. The less top heavy a business is, the more agile it can be in the development of solutions and the more varied the leadership perspectives it can collectively have will be.
Regular Training
Leadership training should not be offered in a piecemeal fashion. It should be regularly given to interested staff members. Furthermore, leadership values should be incorporated into all internal communications within a company. Constant exposure to and challenges related to leadership expertise can help develop a robust vocational knowledge.
Allow staff members to have insights into the strategic planning that lies behind many of the decisions that impact their work. If they become more aware of the structures underpinning their work, they can take more responsibility for improving their ability to make informed decisions.
Internal Hiring
If you want to encourage the learning of leadership skills within an organization, you need to cultivate a workplace culture of internal promotion to leadership positions. By letting employees know that they can earn the right to work in more senior positions, you place a high value on the development of managerial skills. Even with hiring internally, the need for a test assessment is still there to see if the current employee is ready to take up this new position. Care and attention should always be essential when moving anyone into a new area.
Internal hiring is useful for more reasons than just the provocation of employee improvement. Hiring internally is more financially efficient and also enables a company to maintain a workplace culture and workplace relationships. Hiring internally is a great idea and will drive your employees to be more upwardly mobile and ambitious.
