Growing Leaders

You may have discovered that your leadership skills take on new heights when you are not the only leader on a team. When your team can solve problems, meet customer needs and effectively and efficiently improve the work environment you have demonstrated your effectiveness as a leader. Leaders do not only direct, they inspire and motivate others to lead as well. The resources you devote to developing this type of team will repay you many times over.

Demonstrate trust in your team members. Recognize, acknowledge and reward ethical behavior on your team. Express your confidence in your teams demonstrated record of actions that bring credit to your program. Do not neglect this characteristic, lest is atrophy for lack of recognition.

Encourage honest input. Feedback is useless unless your team feels empowered to speak their minds. Demonstrate your appreciation for constructive feedback and it will increase.

Be hardy in your approbation and lavish in your praise. Publicly recognize your team and their performance. Make their work known. This builds their reputation, confidence and performance.

Encourage your team members to build up and acknowledge the contributions of each other.

Put the ideas of your team into practice. Little is so affirming as seeing your ideas come to successful fruition. And little is more effective at seeding more ideas and greater growth.

Give your team problems to overcome. Avoid pushing for the solution you want. When a team members comes up with a possible solution encourage him to develop it.

Do what you can to build the spirit of the team. Encourage them to communicate and work as a group. Often a dynamic individual member of a team can skew until it becomes little more than a foil for their agenda.