How DO You Develop Employees?

Podcast: Download (Duration: 5:00 — 4.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

We get promoted and then are put in charge of leading other people, yet often the directions on how to actually lead or develop those employees is nebulous at best. In your tenure as a leader, or even in your journey toward successful Contagious Leadership, you may have utilized more trial and error tactics to achieve employee development. If that is the case, here is the short cut or steps you may have desired when you got the leadership role, or better yet, that you can now share with those you promote.

It’s simple really to develop others, that is when you have a plan. So, here’s the plan and steps to follow:

Assess What They Do Well and Where They Struggle.

Obviously this is going to initially be from your vantage point as their boss, but you may also find value in having them create or draft a similar assessment of their skills and talents.

Determine if They are Engaged in Developing Better Skills

Believe it or not, not all are interested in being better or learning more. Some suffer from merely not thinking they can do it, in which a good dose of Contagious Confidence™ training might be in order, and some struggle with not knowing how, which is where you can come in and immediately help.

Provide Resources that Directly Address their Learning Needs

When we design training curriculum, it originates from a collection of data on what those in the courses will need. It isn’t a guess or a suspicion, but based on hard data, analysis and facts. Once you have assessed those you lead and the areas in which they struggle, find the resources they need to learn from. For example, if attitude is an issue, they might need individual guidance from a coach, or you, on how to produce more effective results that THEY are looking for. Ask them what they are looking for and speak to that. If communication is a problem with those they lead, perhaps they need a class or a book or a mentor. What resources can you provide for the specific areas of need you’ve identified?

Install Incentives for Improvement and Timelines for Development

Someday soon doesn’t exist on my calendar. Does it on yours? If you establish a timeline for an employee to follow, they have an incentive or at least a heads up of what will happen if they ignore it. However, employees will run from pain and toward pleasure, as will all human beings in most cases, so you must also determine what is the pleasurable part they’ll experience once they complete the learning or development. In other words, what is the incentive for going through the effort?

The most effective leaders follow this or similar course of action in developing the employees they lead. When was the last time you followed this plan? Would you like to see visual examples of it put into action? We are collecting a series of videos from successful leaders and are thinking of converting the Monday Moments to a video format. Would you share your opinion about this? Tweet us www.MonicaOnTwitter.com, follow or share your thoughts on Facebook at www.MonicaOnFacebook.com

Stay tuned for more “How Do you Do it?” Posts this month and feel free to forward valuable info to your friends or invite them to receive their own Monday Moments at www.MondayMoment.com.