Focusing on the long-term growth horizon means building your company for the future. That takes leaders. To achieve sustained success, you need your employees to step up and develop the kind of skills that will drive your business forward in the 2020s and beyond.
How do you encourage this? How do you ensure that you have the leaders you need as you plan for the long haul? Here are some steps you can take to identify the next leaders in your organization, so you can keep growth going into the foreseeable future:
Hire for Tomorrow
Don’t wait until an employee has been with you for a few years before thinking about their potential as a leader. Make those considerations part of your hiring process. Even if the position at hand represents an entry-level situation, take a broad view during recruitment. Consider an applicant’s leadership potential as you make your decision.
Look Beyond the Resume
Leadership isn’t just about experience. People can have hidden potential. To get the most out of your team, you want to find these hidden gems. As such, don’t become obsessed with line items on a resume. Look at each worker’s performance and the soft skills they display daily. This will give you a better idea of their potential.
Get to Know Them Personally
To evaluate potentially subtle leadership traits, you need to interact with each worker on an individual basis. You have to get to know them as people. These personal connections will help you gauge aspects like drive, loyalty, and ethics.
Give Leadership Opportunities
You’ll never know someone’s potential unless you test them. For leadership positions, this means giving them the opportunity to lead. Find small, relatively inconsequential projects to test out your young talent. By giving them this responsibility, you can see whether they can thrive in more substantial endeavors.
Provide Ongoing Training
Make learning a career-long pursuit for your employees. The more skills they have, and the more experiences, they acquire, the more prepared they will be when leadership opportunities arise. To encourage this, give your workers a chance to take add-on training courses. They will expand their knowledge base, and you can get a sense of their ambition and drive.
Praise Strong Performances
You don’t have to wait for leadership to emerge. You can nurture it. By encouraging positive performances, you will increase your employees’ confidence levels, and stimulate their desire to take on a more substantial role
Offer Advancement Opportunities
Once you find leaders in your organization, don’t let them take those skills to another company. Instead, create an environment where those top performers can rise. Provide advancement opportunities and commit to promoting from within. This will allow you to keep your best talent and leverage their leadership skills to drive growth for your company.
Before you can develop your leaders of the future, you have to find people with the right skills and personalities. A top-ranked recruiting firm, like Qualified Staffing, lets you find the perfect team members.
Search for Your Future Leaders
Contact Qualified Staffing today to start the search for your next crop of future leaders.