How to Build a Leadership Mindset: 5 Actionable Steps
Leaders own initiatives and drive growth, and the goal of most management is to get employees doing the same. Research shows that employee motivation and energy have taken a dive in the past few years. The exception is when employees feel engaged and valued by their company.
The secret sauce for getting your employees to adopt a leader mindset is to provide a transparent career path to leadership. Below, we offer a few tips:
1. Offer Leadership Training to All
While it may seem counterintuitive to offer leadership training to an entry-level employee, it helps to establish core skills that are useful for your business. Good leadership training courses will teach the basics of what leadership means in an organization, the traits of good and bad leaders, and provide a template for building the employee’s own success. When everyone at a company knows how to lead, they will feel more empowered to take ownership.
If you have a larger organization, you can offer online courses to everyone and reserve more intensive leadership/management training programs for people who are on a short-term track to becoming managers.
2. Develop Clear Career Paths for All Roles
Every role at your company should have an opportunity for advancement, whether horizontal or vertical. While this is primarily a job for HR, each employee should be asked about their long-term goals, and then their managers and HR can work together to design a path to get them there.
Performance plans can be designed to ensure they hit the targets they need to if a leadership position opens up.
3. Design Strong Mentorship Programs
Leaders at your business should be participating in a strong mentorship program. It doesn’t have to be complicated; mentors can be matched with mentees they meet regularly.
Having a formal mentor/mentee relationship means your employees always have someone they can rely on for guidance. Staff new to the business or who are in entry-level positions will breathe a sigh of relief when they know there’s someone they can always go to for help.
Typically, the mentor is not someone that the mentee directly reports to, but someone who holds a significant executive role at the organization. In a smaller organization, the mentor can be the employee’s boss, but having someone else to call on besides a boss makes for a more authentic relationship and mentoring experience.
4. Give Staff Opportunities to Represent the Company at Events
In a world where inbox spam is routinely ignored, the best connections are made at conferences and other in-person networking events. If your leaders are routinely attending, some staff should be sent along to see how a leader represents the business and learn from their example. This will help keep them engaged and form strong connections in the industry that they can use to help your business grow.
In-person events also serve as a way to build confidence. When staff have a chance to interact with the public and potential clients and showcase their skills and company knowledge, it boosts their self-esteem and makes them feel like a more cohesive part of your business. The more in-person events you can send them to, the better.
5. Encourage Ownership and Initiative-Taking
When the buck gets passed repeatedly, people who own projects and initiatives should receive positive feedback and more opportunities. Fear of punishment generally holds people back from taking ownership, particularly if a project is large or unpopular.
You can get people to start taking these critical steps by arming them with leadership training, making sure they have strong mentorship, and not punishing anyone who dares to step forward and take the reins if a project falls flat.
If you can’t make the budget work for some of these suggested steps, such as in-depth leadership training, focus on clear career paths and mentorship. A well-supported employee with a visible path to promotion will be higher-performing and more engaged.
A workforce analytics solution like Prodoscore can help visualize and measure these key connections between mentors and mentees, or managers and subordinates. The Organizational Network Analysis data measures relationships, connections, and productivity, helping to visualize the internal connections that would otherwise go unnoticed.
