Growing Your Team

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As I mentioned above, growing your teams = developing your future leaders.

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Before we dive deeper, we need to talk about the future of leadership.

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Check out this video to see how work demands have changed and what managers can do to keep up. 👇

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Everyone wants a company of great growth and revenue, but you must grow your leadership to grow your company.

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What many don’t realize is that the success, growth, and development of their company hinges on the development of their people.

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But in today’s business landscape, employees aren’t developing.

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Growing and developing your future leaders can provide a cushion for team challenges.

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Your emerging leaders can alleviate your current workload as a manager. They are a great vessel to move team projects, ignite motivation among team members, accelerate idea generation, and even solve problems.

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While you might have your own definition of who the great potential leaders are on your team, we want to simplify the lookout process.

Why Developing Leaders is Important

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Leadership is a verb, not a noun.

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Your team probably already has people exhibiting leadership signs — these will be your “emerging leaders,” as Northhouse calls them.

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Emerging leaders take the initiative without being assigned a leadership title. They voluntarily take on responsibilities and strive to bring value to the team. Usually, these are the most motivated people on a team.

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Developing these people is beneficial for a multitude of reasons, such as:

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1. Emergent leaders rise from the team.

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They are not hired from other departments or even from an outside culture.

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This can increase the chances for empathy amongst the team and reinforce the development and growth culture in the organization.

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2. Emergent leaders know the team, organization and work at hand.

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This can help have a smoother transition from team members into leadership roles.

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Helping maintain team cohesion as the team will already be familiar with the person.

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And most importantly, this will bring the most value to the team.

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3. “Emergent leaders are most respected and most followed,” according to Northouse.

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You can support emergent leaders in your team in multiple ways; accelerating their growth, encouraging their behaviour, recognizing their leadership qualities during your one-on-ones, etc.

How To Recognize Emergent Leaders

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To recognize emergent leaders, follow the steps below.

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Step 1: Get rid of your own bias.

When identifying your emergent leaders, you first need to bring some self-awareness to the table.

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Bias is rooted deep in us as human beings, so it’s essential to identify them before fairly recognizing emergent leaders in our team.

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There are five types of bias when reviewing employees:

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1️⃣ Personal or idiosyncratic: Managers are more likely to see the good in employees who they like and do things the way the manager would.

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2️⃣ Halo effect: When employees usually perform well in one area the manager values, the manager may also rate substandard aspects of their performance favourably.

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3️⃣ The middle default: Managers have a natural tendency to give most people a "satisfactory" rating because they struggle to distinguish performance among workers. It requires more effort to justify why someone is performing substantially better or worse than other employees.

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4️⃣ Leniency and strictness biases: Though most managers tend to rate most people as at least satisfactory, some have a bias toward the extremes.

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Leniency bias is giving favourable ratings even though employees have notable room for improvement.

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On the other hand, strictness bias is when a manager believes that "nobody is perfect" and tends to be overly critical of most employees.

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5️⃣ Spillover effect: As with the halo effect, managers are more likely to rate employees who were good performers in the past favourably in the future.

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Once managers set the bar for an employee and make up their mind, they need a compelling reason to modify their prior judgment.

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Some teams have all high performers, while others have mostly low performers. For example, a high-performing team's lowest-rated performer may be more productive than the lowest-performing team's highest-rated performer. Who wants to punish a high performer or give too much credit to a slacker?

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Here are two ways to improve the reliability of a performance metric:

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1. Have more frequent discussions with your employees.

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Include information from multiple sources, such as coworkers, customers and as much performance data as possible.

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2. Have coaching conversations.

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No manager can know the full impact, day in and day out, of their employees without ongoing coaching conversations.

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Narrow metrics, especially without ongoing conversations, lead to narrow behaviour and pressure people to do whatever is necessary to improve the metric instead of contributing to the organization’s big-picture goals.

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Step 2: List the actions and traits emergent leaders display.

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Now that we have covered biases and how to reduce them, here are some samples of actions or leadership traits they display

• They take the initiative to lead others.
• They encourage agreement among coworkers.
• They know how to solicit other people’s opinions, disagree, and encourage others in conversations.
• They strive to develop ways for the team to work more efficiently.
• They volunteer to take on responsibilities.

It is essential to focus on actions that aren’t limited to doing more work.

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👉 Read this blog to know the Important Leadership Skills for Workplace Success

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When looking for emergent leaders, look for people who strive to lead others and handle that task well.

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Step 3: Identify team members who display the qualities you listed in Step 2.

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For this exercise to be effective, try to be objective: we all have biases, and it’s easy to focus on people you already single out in your mind. Refer back to step 1.

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A simple way to avoid bringing bias into your analysis is to write things down as soon as you notice a leadership trait.

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This will help to be more accurate when recognizing emerging leaders.

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It won’t be about “a feeling” but a fact or action that actually happened because you wrote it down, thus remembering it more accurately.

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Step 4: Identify 3 actions you can do to support your emergent leaders.

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Developing your employees is about identifying strengths, but also about providing support and opportunities for growth.

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Some ideas are:

• Have a conversation with them about their long-term goals and ask them if they are interested in leadership positions in the future.
• Ask what responsibilities or projects they enjoy the most.
• Consider where you could delegate tasks or responsibilities to them to grow qualities they seek to develop and your team will benefit from.

Parting Thoughts

Recognizing your emerging leaders is a crucial part of being a manager.

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And it doesn’t have to be a demanding role or additional responsibility.

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As we mentioned above, developing your employees and offering growth opportunities is a big part of employee retention — especially amidst The Great Resignation.

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Consider mentoring your emergent leaders through coaching conversations or finding someone in the company who could.

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The following blogs will help you expand your insights into this topic and further your skillset to complete this important part of your management role.

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👉 The Coach Approach: How to go from Boss to Leader

👉 How to Help your Managers Have Insightful Career Developments Conversations With Employees

👉 Leaders are Made, Not Born: How to Select a Leadership Training Program for Your Startup