Employee development isn’t just reliant on employees’ ability to exert themselves to be better. It’s also the responsibility of their employers. Good managers must strive to continuously groom their employees for leadership roles in the future. Doing so boosts not only the employees’ engagement but productivity as well, making their life easier.

Looking to transform your employees into leaders? Here are a couple of tips you can use:

Create avenues for growth. To ensure employees aren’t stagnant in their positions (or worse, leaving those positions), provide them with opportunities to grow so that they can one day pursue leadership roles within the company. Employees are an organisation’s central asset, so invest your resources in them.

These opportunities for growth may include giving formal education, bringing in industry professionals for leadership skills training programs, and internal or external training – the options are limitless. Supply your employees with a calendar or list of meetings with professional groups or associations, future professional development events, and work-related events that they can attend. If there are any training requirements, make sure that they get the essential resources. Training needs can differ according to the industry, maybe with the help of a virtual training room or similar VR tech, you can equip your employees with the beneficial skills.

Encourage your employees to communicate. Communication aka networking is not only entertaining but vital to any business development and individual growth. Begin by inspiring networking within the workplace during lunch time or after-work events. Sooner or later, you can have employees branch out and network with industry professionals outside your company.

Networking will allow them to create good connections, start conversations with people and act with the confidence of a leader. Plus, it can provide business opportunities and occasions to share knowledge and ideas. Finally, networking can help turn good employees into leaders by raising their status within the industry.

Lead by example. The skills that employees must adopt so they can become good leaders are confidence, professionalism, transparency, respect, and commitment. Employees innately look to their employers for these qualities, so leaders must aim to endlessly model what it is to be effective, the positive model in the workplace. It won’t cost a single dime and the results are invaluable.

Act as their mentor or assign one. A mentor and the mentee relationship happens naturally when employers grow with those they mentor. In any case, there’s no one better to learn leadership skills other than the employer. Of course, you can always teach them leadership skills through a mentorship program where employees can sharpen their skills with the help of more seasoned consultants. If you’re thinking of starting up a program, Together looks at some of the most successful mentoring programs and gives you some advice as to what should feature in yours to ensure maximum potential.

Mentorship programs are not only beneficial for training new hires, but they also serve as an effective cross-training tool for existing employees. You can try executing a mentorship or job shadow program department or between team members. This can improve both organizational accomplishment and team production by refining employees’ skill levels in roles outside of their own. The mentors could make use of a Workplace Skills Software to gather all the necessary information about the employees and assign tasks accordingly.

There you have it! These are only some of the strategies you can use if you’re looking to transform your employees into leaders that will work not only to boost your businesses’ bottom line, but also make your workplace a more exciting place to be in.

How about you, are you currently developing employees for leadership roles? Share it with us!