How to develop leadership skills

When your organisation is growing, you need to find leaders and managers who can take over your responsibilities. You will wonder how to develop leadership skills, how to spot leadership potential and what type of people have the best leadership qualities. To nurture leaders in your team you will need to learn how to develop their leadership skills. 

Developing leaders in the workplace

How to spot leadership potential?

When searching for a person with leadership potential you will be looking for people with specific traits and behaviour. Here are some tips on what to look for. Here are a few things that characterise people who have leadership talent and can become good leaders:

• Get things done
• Are focused on others
• Care
• Are humble
• Have high social intelligence 
• Get noticed by being active
• Are hungry for success
• Are smart 

The most important thing to remember when picking candidates to develop them into leaders, is that you are looking for people of action and people who care. Once you’ve identified those for leadership training, you need to nurture them. 

How do you nurture leadership potential?

The growth of leadership potential and skills doesn’t happen organically. Potential leaders show up organically, but then you need to nurture them. 

There are 3 things to remember about when developing leaders:

• Content
  Define what skills they need training on.
• Conversations
  Allocate time in your calendar to have weekly one-on-ones with them
• Constructs
  Measure their development – define the KPIs and assessment process. You need to measure their progress to keep them focused on the right things. 

And last but not least, leaders are readers. Pay attention if they are learning new things, if they read and develop their knowledge. Offer them books to help them develop the necessary skills. Here are a few good books for leaders: