Whether it’s politics, sports, or business, leadership comes with a simple rule: the buck stops with those at the top of the chain.
It’s why a poor performance of a scandalous news story often ends with a groveling apology and resignation from someone high up.
Leadership matters; if you want to grow your business, you need exceptional people steering the ship. Read on to discover more about six of the most important ways you can support leadership development goals in your business.
1. Communication Skills
Influential leaders know that communication skills are at the heart of everything they do.
However, communication means more than standing in a room of people and making an announcement. It’s also about effective listening, skilled writing, and building relationships through dialogue. If you have leaders in the business, the development goals should reflect this more holistic approach.
Start with listening skills. Challenge your leaders to focus on active listening and shape training around this. Ensure this includes non-verbal communication.
Positive body language, for example, is essential when talking to others. Make sure development goals are measurable via a leadership action plan. You should also work to get detailed insights from that manager’s team.
You can use a 360-style feedback loop to do that. This will ensure teams benefit from a manager who can communicate with ease. This will help you spot further signs of improvement.
2. Time Management
Productive leaders need to know how to manage their time effectively.
More importantly, they also need to be able to apply these time-management techniques to their team. That’s how you get teams who perform exceptionally well.
Ensure you set clear and measurable time management goals for your leadership development plan.
You can use techniques like the Eisenhower Matrix or the Pareto Principle. More formal leadership training NZ, is also worthwhile. It will help your leaders manage their demanding schedules.
This will reduce stress levels and ensure the most important things get done. You should also set development goals focused on delegation. It’s an essential skill set for any leader to manage their time effectively.
The other way to support your leaders is by giving them deep work time blocks in their weekly schedules. Allow them time away from demands like meetings to focus on the more challenging aspects of their work. And make sure they have an optimum work environment to get that deep work done.
3. Team Building Skills
A leader has to foster an environment of teamwork and ensure excellent collaboration between every staff member. The key to developing this skill set is to build trust between the leader and the rest of the team.
The culture must feel open to all so that any team member feels comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. So, focus on development goals where you can measure this.
Feedback questionnaires from teams are a helpful approach. In addition, get your leaders to create tangible goals for their team and measure their performance over time. Examples of tangible goals are revenue generation for a sales team or warehouse output for a manufacturing team.
Encourage leaders to celebrate achievements with their team and use incentives to push through team-based goals. Incentives can be monetary, or you can offer team-based rewards like an away day.
4. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is an important skill to monitor for your leadership development goals. Emotional intelligence, or EI, means the ability to control your emotions and recognize the feelings of others.
This is essential for leadership as it helps managers get the most out of their team and form strong relationships.
You can set competencies in business that help measure emotional intelligence and drive improvements over time. For example, you can measure your leaders for qualities such as self-awareness and social skills.
Assessing this as part of an ongoing job appraisal is the easiest way.
It’s also helpful to get feedback from peers and team members. They will often give you the best indication of whether a leader demonstrates excellent emotional intelligence.
This skill set is closely aligned with other development goals, such as team building and communication. So, when setting these goals, you often find cross-overs between them.
5. Innovation
Creative thinking skills and an innovative mindset are an asset to any business. When you have a leadership team that excels in this respect, it can positively impact the rest of the team.
So, it’s something to focus on when putting together development goals. Focus on giving your leaders some objectives that will help stretch their creative skills.
This could be an internal project to improve processes or a new product design. But you can combine this with some creative thinking training.
To develop these skills, it’s vital that you reward innovation so that a risk-taking mindset is part of your company’s culture. When you put together these development goals, consider some ways you can incentivize leaders to take calculated risks.
6. Strategic Thinking
Leaders must be able to think at a strategic level and make sound decisions under challenging circumstances. So, you should set goals for your management team to help strengthen this skill set.
Create objectives around how your leaders make decisions and the results they bring to their departments. Use KPIs so that you can measure their progress in these areas.
Check whether your leaders are also thinking about your business in a broader context, such as how your company performs versus the rest of your industry. It’s important to help you stay competitive.
Each time you run a performance review with your leadership team, track how they are performing in decision-making. Are their decisions aligned with the high-level strategy of your business?
Leadership Development Goals: Helping to Support Your Business Growth
Companies depend on leaders to propel their business forward. But this doesn’t happen by chance. You must set leadership development goals and support your team through training and appraisals.
We have other articles on our website to help you grow your business. Browse our latest posts now to get the tips you need to support your company.
