Developing Talent In Your Team – 4 Clever Actions To Boost Your Success
Developing talent in your team is one of the best ways to boost your own personal success as a manager. I was promoted 13 times in 13 years – all the way up to board level of large companies. When you get the best from others, you bosses would be mad not to give you more people to lead. You can make promoting you 100% in their best interests.
I will explain exactly how to boost your personal promotability and then share 4 clever ways to boost your success by developing talent in your team without needing a big budget. The fourth action I talk about brings together the other three and is a big driver of the rewards and recognition you will personally get.
Developing Talent In Your Team – 4 Clever Actions To Boost Your Success
- Why Developing Talent Significantly Boosts Your Career
- HOW to develop talent in your team
- Develop talent in your team – First Action
- Develop talent in your team – Second Action
- Develop talent in your team – Third Action
- Develop talent in your team – Fourth Action
- In Summary
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Why developing talent in your team develops your career prospects
Managing teams is a highly complex job. Every day brings new challenges, new decisions to make and new problems to solve. On top of this, every person is different. To get the most out of them, learning their quirks is a must. Even for managers of small teams, problems, decisions and people take up a lot of your time and energy. When you manage big teams, it can feel like problems, decisions and people are all of your job.
To be successful, you must understand this vital fact. All the problems you face are not equal. When leading others, you should be dividing up the problems and decisions you face into different categories and doing different things with each. This maximises the value you personally can create directly and through your team. The more value you can create, the more successful you will be.
Split Problems into Categories
For example problems can be split into these 4 categories
- High and low impact problems WITH effective and known solutions and
- High and low impact problems WITHOUT known solutions
Problems WITH effective and known solutions are ones that you solve regularly, and you get good results each time. i.e. when you come up against x problem, you know from experience that y set of actions solves the problem
When you are really good at implementing a variety of solutions to a set of known low and high impact problems you could either:
- Carry on solving these known problems personally or
- Delegate these known problems to your best team members for them to solve
Delegation
If you delegate, you have a lot more time to devote to solving the problems WITHOUT known solutions – say a problem with a potential 100k profit impact on the business. More of your time – using your expertise – means better solutions. Better solutions means higher profits for the company AND you become a lot more valuable to the company.
The more value you create the more likely you will get promoted and be given personal rewards such as bonuses and pay rises, not to mention the status, recognition and appreciation that will come from bosses.
If you don’t delegate the known problems and keep doing them yourself, you have an easier life, less stress, less challenge, less personal development, less pay, less chance of getting promoted etc. You don’t increase the value or profit you create for the company personally AND you don’t increase the value your team members are creating for the company.
Developing talent in your team frees you up to develop your own skills. Make yourself and your team members more valuable to any company and you will get the recognition and rewards that come from creating more profits for the company through developing talent in your team.
HOW to develop talent in your team
There are a ton of skills that you could focus your time on to develop in your team. In my experience, the highest value skills to develop in team members with ambitions of heading into management are:
- Planning
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- People management
These are all core skills of managers and by developing these skills in your higher potential team members, you will be able to delegate increasing amounts of your job to them. This gives you more time and energy to focus on increasing the value you add to the company in which you work. One of the best ways to get rewarded and earn promotion.
Put In The Time To Create Opportunities – The First Action For How To Develop Talent In Your Team
You have a ton of opportunities to do this without needing a penny in budget. For example, when a team member comes to you with a problem, don’t provide them a solution. Instead, ask them questions so they produce a solution. What are your ideas on solving this? What would you put in place? How would you implement that solution? What other options might work?
Stop delegating tasks and start delegating problems is another great approach. Define the problem carefully, explain the resources they can work with and then ask them to come back to you with their best solution.
Another option is to hold team problem solving workshops. Delegate problems to small group and be on hand to facilitate and support. Again if you provide solutions, make sure you do this last.
You can take the same approach with planning and decision making. With people skills, discuss scenarios and then get them to take the actions agreed. Then review how it went with them and ask what they would do differently next time.
Also think how you can delegate tasks, activities and projects to build skills within your team for planning, solution building, decision making and people management skills.
Keep your eyes open and proactively look to create opportunities for team members to put their skills into practice.
2 – Use Weekly One-On-One Meeting To Develop Your Team Members
If you are not booking in weekly one-on-one meetings, book them in right now. If you are NOT using one-on-one meetings to develop skills in your team members, then start in your next meeting.
Use your meetings to provide lots of useful specific feedback – praise and corrective – to your team members. Feedback is invaluable to communicate to team members what is going well and how to improve what is not. Make sure your feedback is specific.
Next, use your one-on-one meetings to create solutions to real problems they or you are facing. Jointly create and discuss options or ask your team member to create a solution first and then input second. Use lots of scenarios – technical, situational, and people based – to build knowledge, skills and experience.
Lastly, get your team member to make decisions in one-on-one meetings. You can then approve those decisions or explain why you disagree. You can also take you team members through your thinking process for the decisions you have made.
The stronger you can build skills in team members, the wider you can spread the burden of increasing the performance of the team you lead. More people with better skills often speeds up implementation of solutions and projects. This in turn increases the performance of the team which is only going to be good for you personally.
The Third Action To Develop Talent In Your Team Is To Ask Your Best Performers To Teach
Teaching is a really good way to learn. I have taught others all the way through my career and learnt a lot from teaching others. Teaching others is one of the big factors for my success as a manager. Since starting a training and coaching business, I feel the amount I am learning has doubled at least. Teaching is a great way to learn.
So ask your best performers to teach what they know to other team members. Focus on the skills they are best placed to pass on AND what makes sense for the success of the team. Ask them to prepare the training programme and review it. The more your best performers do, the more they will learn. Explain why you are asking them to teach.
There are lots of different formats to enable teaching. Three good options include:
- One-on-one meetings focused on development.
- Buddy systems where the more experienced person teaches and supports a less experienced person
- Lunchtime training sessions where the team member teaches a group in a more formal setting
In addition, each of these options also helps build people management skills. The person doing the training will gain greater depth of understanding in what they are teaching and the people being taught increase their skills and knowledge. A double benefit.
After the initial setup time, you won’t need to be very involved in this process, which is another benefit. Ask your team members to teach.
The Fourth Action Is Communicate What You Are Doing, Why And The Results To Your Bosses
Communication of what you are doing and why to your bosses is perhaps the most important of these actions for your success. If your bosses don’t clearly link the improved performance from the team directly to your efforts, then you will lose out on some of the rewards. You won’t get as much appreciation, recognition or praise. You won’t build a really strong reputation nearly as quickly. The pay, bonuses and promotions will also take longer to come.
Regularly educate your bosses about what you are doing and why. Give them updates on progress. Create KPIs for your team’s performance, including some financial ones. These will make it easier for you to communicate the true value you are creating.
Start with your line manager. Talk about what you are doing in your one-on-one meetings and share your KPIs. Then you can start updating other bosses you have relationships with. You might start with something like
“Jane, I have been focusing on development in my team which is producing really good measurable performance improvements. Would you be interested in hearing a little about what I have been doing to see if it is something you want to replicate in your teams?”
If they are interested, you go into the detail.
The most important action is for you to educate your bosses on what you are doing, how it is improving performance and why it is working. With better understanding, you will get a lot more credit a lot quicker.
Always communicate the good work that you are doing to your bosses.
in summary
In my experience, teaching and developing talent in your team is a very valuable route to increasing team performance and brings a ton of other benefits such as greater trust and appreciation from your team. I coach a lot of leaders and train a lot of managers. The ones that put in the effort and proactively develop their teams are nearly always the ones being promoted and being given more people or teams to manage. Developing others is very literally a very successful way to develop your own management career.
As a reminder, 4 actions to boost your own success through developing others are:
- Create opportunities to develop your better team members each week and month
- Use weekly one-on-one meetings to develop 4 key management skills
- Ask your better team members to teach others
- Communicate, communicate, communicate to your bosses all the great results you deliver
If you have any questions on “Developing Talent In Your Team – 4 Clever Ways To Boost Your Success”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I view developing talent in your team as an essential management activity to get the best from your team. Developing others creates benefits way beyond the obvious upskilling of team members. You get a ton of additional psychological benefits:
- Enables you to ask more from your team (drive higher team performance) because you are giving first
- Increases your credibility and demonstrates your teamwork (developing others positions you as a confident expert)
- Improves team loyalty and retention
- Makes your team a desirable place to work (increase team attraction while reducing team costs)
- Increases resilience and confidence across the team
For all these reasons and more, actively and publicly developing your team is a core strategy to building high performing teams in my view.
Enjoy developing your team!
Jess
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