5 PROVEN Strategies to Develop Leaders In Your Business In 2024!

In this video, I'm going to break down for you what are the methods you can use as a micro, small or medium enterprise business owner to develop the capabilities of your team members and build them as future leaders so that you are not running every single activity in your business by yourself and you are identifying high potential people, improving their capabilities and getting out of the way so that they can take the activities of your business forward. So make sure you have a notebook and a pen because I'm going to break down for you five different methods you can use to build leaders. The first method you can use when it comes to developing high potential team members into leaders is to follow a mentoring framework with them. Now, what do I mean by a mentoring framework? Mentoring is an activity where regularly, ideally on a monthly basis, you spend one to one time with that high potential team member and you teach them something and give them feedback on what they are doing well, what they are not doing well, and give them specific solutions on what they need to do differently. Just this mechanism of a regular intervention on a monthly basis to sit down with them on a one to one basis and track the progress of their capabilities by how they are working on the feedback that you're giving them will indicate to you whether that person is ready or not to take up the next level of responsibility and become a leader in your organization. So a monthly mentoring meeting can do a world of good for you to accelerate the learning process and increase your conviction to know whether you're betting on the right individual or not. Now, beyond mentoring, there's another deeper mechanism that you can use to build leaders, and that is shadowing. Now, what do I mean by shadowing? Shadowing is a much more deeper engagement with your high potential team member who you see as a future leader. This is where you make sure that that team member is with you like your shadow and they are seeing and observing every single thing that you are doing. Now, in this process, what's happening is they are getting a view of how you are thinking, how you are making decisions, how you are communicating on the job in a particular activity. And they are getting a firsthand live experience of it, which is becoming a very rich learning experience for them. Now, when it comes to shadowing, there are three phases of shadowing before you delegate leadership to an individual. The first phase is you do and they watch. Then the second phase is you both do the activities together. Part of it you do, part of it they do. So you can start giving them feedback. And the third phase of shadowing is they do and you watch them. Now, imagine for a particular role, if you're looking at building a leader and you take them through these three phases of I do, you watch, we do together and then you do, I watch, then it becomes a very, very deep way of developing the capabilities of that individual. This is where you have the opportunity to give those one degree shifts of feedback, which will change the trajectory of the capability of the individual. So shadowing is having the person with you live in action throughout the process, like your shadow, so that they get to learn firsthand from real world working experiences, which brings me to the third method of developing people beyond mentoring, beyond shadowing. Another approach anyone can use is role plays. Now, what do I mean by role plays? This is where you are putting that individual in certain situations and asking them to demonstrate how would they think, how would they decide and how would they communicate in that situation? Now, this is a very, very effective way to prepare an individual before you actually give them the responsibility of leadership. So give them a scenario saying, hey, tomorrow, if you're managing a team and a team member does not do the work and let's just say, I am that team member. How will you hold me accountable? How will you hold me responsible? Communicate to me like you are having an accountability meeting with me right now. And you put that person in the spot to play the role of a leader or a manager and see what is the level of their communication, their capability, their emotional intelligence, their empathy and their inspiration quotient as a leader. And you can give them feedback, putting people in different situations, scenarios and getting them to enact how would they respond to that situation and scenario is a great way of simulated based learning where that person is playing the role that you are preparing them for. And you can give them feedback if they are in alignment with the capabilities required or not. Which brings me to the fourth method of building leaders that you can use and the fourth method of building leaders that you can use is what I call teach to learn. Now, what do I mean by teach to learn? A lot of times I see business owners and management team members who are looking at building potential leaders from the existing set of team members, giving those team members certain resources to learn from. They ask those team members to either read certain books or attend certain courses and programs. And that is considered as a learning experience for that individual. But let me tell you something. Sometimes people read books, but they don't really register the learning. Sometimes people attend programs and courses, but they don't really absorb the learning. The best way to get people to absorb skills, knowledge and capabilities that you are exposing them to through different resources is once you are asking them to read a book, once you are asking them to attend a course, ask them to then teach what they learned to the rest of the team members. When you put an individual through the responsibility of teaching something that they have learned to others, that's when they truly integrate the lessons. Think about it. If ever in your academic life, any teacher came to your class and said, you will teach chapter one, you will teach chapter two and you will teach chapter three to three groups of students, then it's sure that the students who had the responsibility of teaching a particular chapter actually learned that chapter the best. That's the best way to get people to integrate new knowledge, new skills and new capabilities by putting them under the spotlight of teaching what they are learning to somebody else. Because when you get into the role of teaching, that's when you learn in the most deepest manner. So put your team members through a teach to learn methodology. Now, before I give you the fifth method of building leaders for your business, I have a special gift for you. In the description of this video, you will find a link to a 40 minute exclusive training which I have designed to help micro, small and medium enterprise business owners to build a scalable and a profitable business. I have shared this program with more than 35,000 business owners till date and they have followed the lessons, the strategies and the systems that I teach in this 40 minute program to be able to structure their business in a manner where it is growing without them and they are not stuck in day to day firefighting. Now, this gift I am giving only to those who are genuinely committed to building their business. So make sure you click on that link and watch that training today itself because that link gets deactivated after a couple of days of us posting this video. So make sure you take action, bite into that opportunity and make a lot of notes from that 40 minute high intense training and do the required action steps that I've shared with you in that training. The fifth method of you building leaders in your business is something that is a high skill method and that high skill method is coaching. Now, a lot of people perceive mentoring and coaching as the same thing. So let me differentiate the two for you. Mentoring is giving people solutions out of your own past experience. It is pouring your wisdom into somebody else's cup. However, coaching is not giving people solutions. Coaching is the skill of asking questions that will get your team members to reflect, to think, to exhaust their own intelligence and come up with solutions. And coaching is a high value skill that if you develop as a leader, then you can build many more leaders. In coaching, it's all about asking questions rather than giving solutions. So asking questions around vision, asking questions around strategies, asking questions around plans, asking questions around details of how they will accomplish a certain goal and accomplish a certain vision gives you the opportunity to deep dive into the intelligence of that prospect team member who you are looking at as a potential leader. So remember this, while you may mentor and give knowledge, also coach by asking questions to exhaust the intelligence of the individual so that you can see whether this person has the ability to think or not. Coaching is the only way you can figure out whether this person has the capacity and the intellect to create in a situation where there are challenges, to explore ideas and alternatives when there are limited resources, to think ideas when there are roadblocks. So learn the craft of asking questions so that you can see whether this person is ready for the next level of leadership or not. These are the five methods anybody can use to build leaders in their organization. I hope you found value in this video. And if you did, then make sure you continue the learning journey by clicking on the link given to you of the 40 minute high intense training on how to build a scalable, profitable business. I will see you in my next video.