Developing team leadership skills in your business

The first thing you’ll need to do is identify who you think might be best suited to a leadership role. You’ll want to look out for someone who: communicates well; is highly organised; confident but respectful of others; is fair in the workplace; and ensures projects are always successfully completed.

Create a leadership culture in your business

Creating a culture in your business where leadership skills are acknowledged and rewarded will be incredibly helpful when it becomes time to promote. Recognise specific people for their work if they’ve displayed key leadership skills in a piece of work.

It doesn’t have to be monetary-based; simply saying well done or sending a congratulatory email will show your employee that their actions aren’t going unnoticed. It’s important to reward the team for a job well done, but if you’re looking to create great team leaders, you’ll need to single them out and acknowledge their work.

Offer support

If you know you’ve got a great candidate for leading your team and your business takes on bigger challenges, offer them your support. Speak with them and let them know that you think they could progress through your business and see whether or not they’d be interested in the position.

If they are, you can offer them support to develop any team leader skills they might be missing. This support comes in a wide variety of different forms, including mentoring and shadowing through to formal training.

Test their abilities

You can’t expect any of your employees to be a great team leader straight away. It takes time and experience to fully develop the skills they need to be able to lead effectively. Test these abilities before fully assigning them the role by allowing them to manage small projects. As your business develops, you don’t want to find that your team leaders crumble at their first big hurdle.

Formal training

There are lots of options available to you if you’re interested in developing team leader skills in your employees using formal training. A quick search will bring up various training businesses willing and able to transform your employee into a fantastic leader, so much so that it can be difficult to choose, especially with a limited budget for training.

With fully funded training supplied through Skills Support for the Workforce, you could get your team the skills they need without it costing you a penny. You can contact them directly or get in touch with our support team to find out more.

Let them grow into their new role

Very few team leaders have all the skills they need straight away. Give them a month or two to settle into their new role and to improve on the skills you’ve already identified and nurtured in them. However, try not to be too hands-off as they settle in, let them know you’re there to offer advice and guidance if they need it.

When you’re looking to develop team leader skills, nurture the abilities you’ve spotted in your employees. Let your employees test their skills with small projects, and offer your support and guidance as they develop. You can’t expect perfection from the word go, so allow time for your new team leader to settle in and continuously improve their abilities.