How to Develop Leadership Skills in the Workplace: As part of their growth stories within your organization, executives should always look for ways to train and inspire their core team members in the areas of leadership. Developing these essential skills in the workplace requires keeping the opportunity for them open.
Read on to learn the steps that you and your company can take to facilitate leadership growth below.
Step 1: Promote a Leadership Line of Thinking
One of the simplest ways to develop leadership skills among your internal team is to make it a topic of discussion 
during your routine meetings. The next time you talk with your staff as a team or one-on-one, ask them to identify a leadership-specific area where they could use improvement. Next, ask them to think about what they can do to develop these areas, whether they’ve listed public speaking, emotional intelligence, etc.
It only takes a few minutes to get your top performers tuned in to the importance of these skills and where they could personally improve.
Step 2: Provide Leadership Development Resources
You can’t tell your team to get after leadership without providing them with the development resources they need to make it happen. These may be supporting them with a learning budget that they can use to attend a course or seminar in an area where they identified they need improvement. You could bring in guest speakers throughout the year to increase your team’s exposure to leadership best practices. Or you can provide a training session for your managers that has both group and individual applications.
Any of these options give your team the ability to develop their leadership sense, both personally and professionally.
Step 3: Start a Leadership Interest Group
Facilitate interest in leadership development at your company by starting a club or group centered on the topic that meets every other week. This group could take on the format of a book club or a master mind group. Better yet, task one of your rising leaders with leading the group’s initiatives and meetings.
A leadership interest group gives people an outlet for talking about these skills among themselves, it helps them discuss personal challenges as they tackle the leadership journey altogether.
Step 4: Encourage a Coaching Culture
Making development and growth part of the office culture can instantly put employees into a personal development mindset. Do this by encouraging team members to coach one another, promoting open communication between departments, and sharing successes across the organization. Together HR and your company’s executives play a big role in making this initiative a reality.
Encouraging a coaching culture can make personal development and a helping-hand approach contagious at your company.
A leadership team will take an organization’s initiatives much further than a single leader can. To find out how an executive coaching partnership can help your executives and their teams grow their leadership skills, check out Arden Coaching’s free eBook Leadership Down the Line: How Executive Coaching Can Help You Inspire Your Executives and Their Leadership Teams.
