Leadership development - 8 good tips for how your employees can become better leaders

Leadership development

The leadership task can be a big challenge, especially if your employees have never tried to lead before. Therefore, it is crucial that you equip your managers to lead their department.

In this article, we will give you 8 good tips on how you can help your employees to become better managers.

1. Teach your employees to take responsibility

Untrained managers can easily hide behind a spreadsheet and numbers, which they continuously follow up with their employees. In addition, a number of newly appointed managers tend to delegate tasks they may find boring and thus push on to their employees, even if their employees are under pressure or do not have the necessary resources to solve the work task.

The reverse can also be the case, namely that your managers believe that the task is too important to delegate, which is why they end up building up a workload that is prohibitive.

Therefore, it is essential that you teach your managers to take responsibility, take the lead, and understand when they should – and should not – delegate tasks.

2. Train your managers to be present

It is crucial that your managers can be present with their employees. This includes, among other things, a good listening skill. In this way, the employees experience that they are valued, which can have a positive influence on employee motivation. In addition, more presence can also result in decisive observations that can contribute well to, for example, workplace productivity.

3. Offer your managers professional debate and supervision

The leadership task is not easy, on the contrary. It takes hard work and diligence to be a good leader. Therefore, it is not unnatural that your managers can lose sight of the overview.

In this connection, it can be an advantage if your company regularly offers professional debate and supervision to your managers.

In this way, they can strengthen their toolbox, and thus get ideas on how they can tackle difficult situations.

It is also worth mentioning that the leadership task can be emotionally demanding, which is why it can also be a good idea to offer supervision. In addition, there are also many workplaces that offer managers different types of management courses and management training.

4. Teach your managers how to motivate their employees

Motivation plays an important role in relation to performance. Therefore, it is important that your managers understand how to motivate their employees. It can be a challenge, as employees are motivated by various factors, e.g. salary or a healthy working environment. If you would like to learn more about employee motivation, you might want to read this article.

5. Give your managers the tools to lead change

The many working days contain large and small changes, which is why it is necessary for your managers to get their employees to settle if strategies are adjusted or if hierarchical changes occur.

In addition, it is crucial that the managers themselves have a good understanding of why, for example, strategies are changed. It is your responsibility to prepare the managers for these type of tasks.

6. Teach your managers to create well-being and prevent stress

In continuation of the first and second pieces of advice, it is central that your managers listen and do not make unreasonable demands on the employees. Indicative studies show that many employees feel pressured on the job, which goes beyond their mental health. It can, among other things, result in burnout and stress, which can have major consequences for the individual employee, but also for the company.

It is therefore advantageous to teach your managers to understand signs of stress or poor wellbeing. We have prepared an article that goes into depth about wellbeing in the workplace, you can read it by clicking here.

7. Your managers must be able to accommodate all employees

A solid, competitive organisation is made up of different types of people with different skill sets. It can be a big challenge as a manager to value all employees to the same extent, and perhaps a number of managers are more inclined to like the employees who are most similar to themselves.

However, this can lead to problems, for example, some employees may find that they are listened to less than others. In the end, it can be difficult to establish mutual trust and respect, which is why it is important that you teach your managers to accommodate all employees.

Here you can for example remind the employee that it is healthy to have conflicting attitudes that challenge the person concerned 'own perspectives and the importance that it is the best ideas that win so that the company can strengthen its competitiveness.

8. Resilience makes your leaders prepared for crises

Are your managers resilient in relation to crisis management?

Resilience is about how the managers at your workplace meet and handle challenges.

With the following four approaches, your managers can increase your company's resilience:

Agility (Agile Project Management)

• What is the status? What obstacles are there that might impede progress?
• Priority: What should we do now?
• Coordination: Who does what?

Positivitet

It is about creating a safe working environment, even in a time of crisis:

• Find what works
• Understand why it works
• Reinforce what works

Self management

A Teal organisation is an organisation based on worker self management (Frederic Laloux, 2014, "Reinventing Organisations").

In a time of crisis, there is a tendency for managers to act by taking:

• More management
• More decisions
• More power to you

The result is that the company becomes more:

• Rigid
• Slow
• Action paralysed
• Inflexible
• Bad at handling complex situations

Managers must therefore learn to act in a resilient manner, including creating selfmanagement in the organisation.

Paradox handling

When dealing with paradoxes, it is important to enable managers to avoid taking one consideration at the expense of another consideration.

The leaders must therefore be able to find the balance in the paradoxes that seem most important right now.

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