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When you are strategically developing others, be sure to include specific job competencies, plus generally useful skills like public speaking. Certain personality traits are key when you are looking to develop others, such as assertiveness. You can check out a blog post on assertiveness if you are looking to apply this characteristic to your own work. Increasing people’s value to the organization is always a smart choice. Create a plan in consultation with each individual. Find out what they are interested in learning. Challenge them with goals that stretch them as people. I’ve seen amazing results from this type of process. For example, if someone has great leadership potential but struggles with being shy, make overcoming that a goal. For example, give them opportunities to help you lead meetings with a small number of people. Then have them work in a group to deliver training to a small number of people. Then have them work in pairs to deliver training to a significantly larger group. Then finally, have them deliver training to a large group on their own. This process will help them incrementally build a new level of confidence, and shyness will no longer hold them back from pursuing or landing new opportunities. Once your people experience success with this process, your team will be invested in continually learning, growing, and improving.

Make this fun! You and your team can have a lot of fun together setting, working towards, and attaining new goals in a variety of areas. You know you’ve gelled as a team when everyone is all-in and working towards the best possible results for themselves and each other. That’s what it’s really all about. Business, sports, academics, family life, whatever sector you’re in is just a vehicle for learning how to accomplish something great by working together with a team of people for the common good. This is one of life’s most valuable lessons.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to have fun while deciding what is a strategic development plan for each individual on your team.

Healthy Relationship with Family of Origin

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Healthy Relationship with Yourself

Welcome back! By far, strategically developing others is the best part of leadership. You’re not there just to help people meet production goals like robots on an assembly line. You’re there to help people grow. The best leaders I have ever known are as passionate about helping people evolve to the next level as they are about achieving results for the organization. Whether I know someone personally or professionally, it has always been one of my greatest joys to watch people grow into more of who God called them to be. That’s a critically important part of my purpose on this earth, and an area of enormous stewardship that God has entrusted to me. It is a sacred responsibility that I take extremely seriously.

When you’re a leader, you don’t want some haphazard plan for helping people develop skills. You want to be strategic about it. Keep the main thing you are there for the main thing you focus on. Never compromise meeting goals and fulfilling the mission for developmental activities. Use skills building opportunities as a supplement to what people are already doing, in a way that’s appropriate for each one of them. Match people’s skills and needs with the organization’s operational and cultural needs/gaps. This is a great way to shore up skills for those who are struggling, and is highly motivating for your high performers. It also breaks up the monotony for middle-of-the-pack workers, and might just throw struggling workers a lifeline that reengages them.

Make developmental activities a fun diversion from the norm for everyone. This is a wonderful way to help prepare people for promotion or greater opportunities in their outside lives. It is a highly strategic way to position people for success. It is a win-win for everyone. The organization and the employee both benefit from enhanced skills that add value in real time and in the future.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for you as you start thinking through how to strategically develop each member of your team, whether they are in your living room or the board room. 🙂

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Your direct reports will represent a bell curve. At one tail end of the curve are the people who struggle. Your job is to help them improve. It’s up to you to figure out what is wrong and help them fix it. The solution will be dependent on that individual and their specific needs. Remember that the process of how you try to solve the problem is as important as the work you’re trying to produce. People have to feel good about both, or your plan will fail. The majority of your people will rest under the apex of the bell curve. They will form the backbone of your team. They won’t struggle, but they aren’t superstars either. These folks needs to be treated well with minimal intervention from you. Let them work. They are a self-motivated lot with a good work ethic and you can count on them for the long haul. You rarely see behavior problems in this subset of people, because they are simply too busy doing the job to be bothered with much nonsense.

As the other tail end of the curve are the high performers. These people are a gem and need to be managed differently than any other group. They approach work as a collaborative venture. They take tremendous ownership of their job and their contribution to accomplishing the mission. They generally have a lot of executive level skills, although their actual position in the company may be at a different level. They will treat you more as a business partner than a traditional boss. Cherish that. They are your quintessential team players, who make up for the deficits of the low performers, help stabilize the middle of the pack, and attend to culture just as much as they do to productivity. They are thoughtful observers of people and processes. When they think something can be improved, they will let you know. Cherish that too. Their ability to speak truth to power is invaluable to you. They need you to support what they are trying to accomplish, and then they need you to get out of their way and let them shine. Don’t ever suppress the talents of a high performer. Doing so would be like benching the star quarterback on a football team so that the backup doesn’t feel bad. Do you want to win the game or not? Let people excel when, where, and how they can. You want to keep your high performers happy. Without these people, your personal results will tank. Your middle-of-the-pack performers will not be able to raise the low performer’s results enough to prevent a lot of negative attention from being directed your way for failing to meet organizational objectives.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for your insight as you study your people to determine where they fall under the bell curve. I believe in you!

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As a leader, your goal is to treat people equitably, not equally. For example, if someone is able to produce 20 widgets a day, and someone else is only able to produce 10, and your company’s minimum per day is 10, then both of your workers are meeting the goal. And that’s good enough. If you try to force the 10 widget person to do 20, you’ll overwhelm them to the point of non-functioning. If you restrict the 20 widget person to only 10, you will frustrate and demotivate them. The point is to maximize the abilities of each individual person, while still holding them accountable to minimally acceptable productivity standards. Not everyone can be a superstar. There is no one size fits all approach to people. Every person is unique. One of the most refreshing and endlessly fascinating aspects of leadership is that it doesn’t matter what has worked with anyone else in the past. Each time you gain a new direct report, you have to start all over again and learn how to lead that particular person. That’s why leadership can never truly be mastered. It can definitely be made easier with some of the software that’s out there, like the OKR software you can get from Profit.co, but on a general level leadership is an interpersonal skill.

This is a good time to pause and reflect on why you became a leader. Was it because you have a heart to lead people, teams, and organizations? Or was it just for a bigger paycheck, more prestigious title, and a fancier office? These trappings of leadership are just that: traps. Keep your ego in check and realize that awesome leaders do their best work alongside their team, not perched on some lofty pedestal above them. This can never be said enough: you are not God. So don’t allow the seductive siren call of “having arrived” lead you down a path where as the Bible says, pride indeed goeth before your fall. Even if you got in the leadership business for the wrong reasons, it’s never too late to start a fresh new chapter filled with health, joy, peace, and great results. The choice is entirely up to you.

Until next time, I’ll be praying that you’ll candidly examine your own heart and if necessary, do what’s necessary to clean it up and move forward in a positive direction. You got this!

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As a leader you can make a tremendous impact in a way that no one else can. Bear this responsibility wisely! The joy of leadership is learning about your people, what matters to them, what upsets them, what motivates them, what optimizes their abilities, where their growth needs are, and then guiding them accordingly. You should know those basics about every single one of your direct reports. Every. Single. One. Yep, it’s a lot. That’s the job. Make it fun. Talk to your people and learn what their personal and professional dreams are, and what their life outside the office is like. You’re not looking to pry, you just want to know enough to understand where they are coming from, and why they do (or don’t!) show up for work on a daily basis. You want to know what struggles they may be facing, and what they hope to accomplish with their life as a whole. Remember, you hold the privileged position as one leader, at one point in time, in one chapter in their life. Never hold anyone back. Help them look towards the future, make a plan, and then set them free to run towards it with your support.

Each day you need to recalibrate expectations and interactions with each person. No one gives exactly the same level of performance 100% of the time. You will maximize each person’s contribution to the organization when you help them deliver their best on any given day. If they’re going through a rough time, show some mercy. If they’re on fire with enthusiasm, give them the ball and let them run with it. Most days will be ordinary and in between, so help them establish a steady baseline of performance that allows them to be and give their best.

As the leader, it is part of your job to help your people grow personally and professionally. You are there to serve them, they are not there to serve you. Together, all of you are in the service of the mission of the organization, regardless of whether or not the bottom line is about profits, service, or good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. To serve together effectively, it’s the leader’s responsibility to help people develop lifeskills that are crucial to have in the work environment, if they missed out on learning those skills as a kid or at anytime before they land on your team. For example, if someone didn’t learn how to handle their emotions well in childhood for whatever reason, it is now your job to help them learn how to handle emotions in the work environment. Holding people accountable for making healthy choices at work is a big part of the job. Make it a challenging game rather than an indictment that diminishes them as a person. Growth can be fun, so strive to make it so as much as possible.

It is your responsibility to care enough about the team and protect the work environment by holding people accountable to acceptable standards of behavior. Don’t make or accept excuses. Most people are capable of change. If they don’t have organic issues interfering with their ability to understand and choose new behavior, then they will almost certainly be highly motivated to make the required adjustments in order to keep their job. Leaders do a massive disservice to people when they allow bad behavior to continue. What is unacceptable now will only get worse as it goes uncorrected, and the consequences will get increasingly severe. You never, ever want to be the leader who condoned, facilitated, or allowed wrongdoing that later costs that person their job or worse. When a leader allows someone to think acting up is ok, funny, or cool, they are actually harming that person’s future. As they get away with their nonsense, that person will continue acting up in increasingly emboldened ways, until one day they are out of control and someone else steps in and takes control of the situation. The errant leader will be corrected at that point too, for letting the situation gain a foothold and flourish. Ultimately however, in addition to the professional consequences wayward leaders set their employees up to face, they are also spiritually responsible for the years they delay or hinder someone’s growth as a person by allowing bad behavior to go unchecked. You really don’t want to be the leader sowing those seeds that you will reap later as a harvest of massive regret.

Until next time, I’m praying you’ll examine your own backbone and make the life-changing decision to strengthen it in a healthy way. Love you guys and believe in you!