Four Skills That Turn Employees Into Future Leaders

When it comes to developing leaders, many companies across a variety of industries miss the mark. Instead of focusing on teaching company policies, and career pathways, look at the skills that you’re helping them develop. You want your employees to turn into future leaders at work, home, and in their daily life. 

1. Emotional Intelligence

Looking inward and having that ability to be constructively self-critical is something that has driven many leaders toward success. Emotional intelligence is the ability to control your emotions while expressing them clearly and handling interpersonal relationships judiciously.  

Implement these elements into your leadership training to foster the growth of emotional intelligence:

• Self-assessment followed by comparison to a standardized evaluation.
• Recreate emotionally charged situations that require decision making. 
• Employ active listening training daily or as often as possible.
• Practice critique and criticism, how to give it and how to receive it.

2. Results Focused

The best leaders know that efficiency and productivity will get you far. But they won’t necessarily get you results. Most people in recruiting have seen resumes that are full of impressive accomplishments. Still, short stints with companies, and often the explanation, is that they may be very productive but not results-focused.

Training a person to become results focused does need to follow steps in a particular order:

1. The person needs to learn to understand and identify the desired result
2. They must learn to identify the steps required to achieve the desired result.
3. The trainee must understand how the people involved can contribute to the process and how to use each person to their strengths.
4. They must learn to continuously reevaluate, and course-correct process goals to achieve outcome goals. 

Being results focused requires that new managers adopt a big picture perspective where they can manage the process without getting lost in it. 

3. Empathetic 

You can teach people to use empathy through exercises, training, and, eventually, hands-on experiences. Empathy is a core competency for effective leaders. Explore how you can help people understand and employ empathy:

• Have a “no interruptions” rule in your training, meetings, and everyday conversations
• Encourage leaders or leaders in training to use people’s names when they address them.
• Ask that new leaders never partake in distractions when talking to staff (phones, email, to-do lists)
• Urge new leaders to get to know their employees and show genuine interest that will eventually feed into meaningful recognition or praise. 

Cultivating empathy within your employees can help them build empathy right into your company culture. People want to work in companies and with other empathetic people. Developing leaders that understand their staff’s needs begins with teaching empathy to your teams.

4. Problem Solvers

Usually, the people that end up in leadership or leadership training are “fixers.” They want to go out and fix the broken things, to inspire productivity, and promote efficiency. That’s great, but you can help them develop their desire to fix things into a real skill. 

To develop problem-solving skills, you need to ensure that your employees can access the information necessary to solve an issue correctly. Help them go beyond primary job and process training. Then train them to identify root causes, test potential solutions, and determine how to move forward.