Effective Leaders Develop Their People

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” — Former CEO of GE, Jack Welch In my last blog, I talked about the importance of your continuing to grow and develop as a leader. Now let’s talk about the importance of growing and developing your people. Both are essential if you want to prepare your organization to succeed today and into the future. Employees need to feel valued, connected, challenged and recognized. Providing them with opportunities to build on their strengths, learn new skills and prepare for the future needs of the company demonstrates in a very real way that they are integral to the organization and its success. And when employees feel that kind of connection they will be more engaged and loyal. Employee development can happen in many different forms: on-the-job training, personal development, cross-functional projects, coach and/or mentor, special projects, stretch assignments, training courses, reading and personal study, online courses, peer coaching, job shadowing, etc. The important thing is that it is available and encouraged. Too often development opportunities are limited to “fixing” an employee’s weaknesses rather than leveraging and developing their strengths. Yet, according to <a href="https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/167462/employees-strengths-company-stronger.aspx" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Gallup</a>, organizations that focus on employee strengths have higher engagement, less turnover and a better bottom line. <a href="https://medium.com/@karencolligan/effective-leaders-develop-their-people-81e2db705206">Visit Now</a>