Improving leadership in your business is about more than being a good leader yourself. Other members of your leadership team, management, and even general employees can all learn good leadership skills. The state of your leadership should be part of the business’s culture and something that you think about when you’re considering how to make your company better.
Even when your leadership is highly regarded, there are still ways that you can improve it. Making an effort to improve your leadership will help you to futureproof your business and attract the best talent. Here are some of the things you can do to make improvements to your leadership.
Be More Available
Availability is one of the key traits that employees look for in leadership teams. They want leaders to be there for them when necessary, providing guidance and accountability. One of the ways many employees praise the leadership of Chris Ovitz and his co-founder at Workpop is by complimenting the availability and presence of leaders.
There are multiple ways you can make your leadership more available without being so present that it’s restricting for employees. When leaders have open office hours, it can allow employees to talk to them whenever they need to.
Ask Your Team
If you want to know if your leadership is effective, you need to ask the people you’re leading. You wouldn’t keep doing the wrong thing and losing all of your staff if your turnover was high, right? You’d want to find out where you’re going wrong and where you can make improvements.
The very best thing that you can do is look at companies that can help you to ascertain your leadership skills, like Board Effectiveness. Surveys can help you to determine whether you are doing the right thing and that means that you actually have to pay attention. Leaders are only as good as the people they lead, and if your staff aren’t happy, you’re going to know it.
Start Developing Leaders Early
The best leaders are often developed within the company. If you train your leaders, you can teach them to be exactly the kind of leaders you want them to be. However, if you simply wait until employees have reached a certain level of experience, you could find they are lacking the kind of leadership skills you want them to have.
You don’t need to wait until they’re promoted into leadership roles to train them in these skills. You can start recognizing potential leaders early and give them opportunities to develop the right skills.
Encourage Feedback
A culture of open feedback is important for any business. It’s necessary to be able to provide leaders with feedback and tips on improving, and your leaders should also solicit feedback from employees. Open communication with leaders should provide opportunities for giving advice and suggesting ways they can improve.
Leaders should also be able to provide feedback, suggest ideas, and participate in discussions so that they know they are part of a team. They might want to ask for the opportunity to take a course or develop their skills so they can continue to be a good leader.
Create Opportunities to Lead
If you want to develop better leaders even before they become leaders, make sure you’re creating opportunities for people to lead. There can be many projects or tasks where there are opportunities for people to take the lead, guide other people, develop their organizational skills, and more. Give people some more freedom and responsibility so that they have time to work on their leadership skills and will be better prepared if they want to step into a leadership role later.
You can improve the leadership of your business by working on the development of good leaders and encouraging support for employees.
