HR managers face a major challenge when it comes to promoting leaders in the workforce. Leadership development comes with acknowledgement of contributions from the talented team and to ensure that they get recognised and rewarded for their efforts.

Only those managers can encourage leadership, who believe in themselves and the tremendous potential of their team to nurture, train and create a breeding ground for leaders of tomorrow.

Here are top five key secrets for HR managers to recognise talent and allow room for leadership growth in an organisation:

1. Do not take yourself too seriously. More often leaders portray a much serious demeanour and tend to believe that being childish or funny at work with sense of humour can diminish their power of authority. However in contrarily, this works just the opposite. Carrying yourself with ease at work and exuding some sense of witty humour helps connect with employees better and speaks leadership.

2. Encourage imaginative capabilities of future leaders. Leaders tend to follow the imaginative path to wisdom and hence it is always better to allow leaders to perform activities that they could begin implementing in their own teams and gauge the success quotient. Be it building team activities or running series of emails with silly questions, as a means to connect and know the team better, thinking out of the box always works.

See: Leadership Development Shouldn’t be at the cost of ROI

3. Prevent teams from the danger of self destruction. Even the most powerful teams built through years of efforts fall apart, and are prone to the dangers of self destruction. Since teams are built on who’s available at a particular time instead of focusing on the skills they contribute, such teams generally end up not functioning optimally for best performance.To promote leadership growth, HR managers should have a team charter, implement governance and conduct regular team meetings to monitor activities and provide valuable feedback for constant improvements. This will help the team align their individual vision with long-term business objectives and work collaboratively towards achieving a common goal.

4. Focus on the importance of networking. Encourage participation of leaders in networking events, which is often ignored due to hectic working schedules. To encourage leadership in your team, managers should organise networking opportunities that are lucrative and attractive to forge new business connections. This can be in the form of roundtable industry conferences or cross-industrial leadership outbreaks. However, as a HR manager, it is your responsibility to push your leadership team to actively participate in such events of business interests.

5. Communication is the key to effective leadership. Leaders should be effective communicators. They should be able to transmit knowledge, communicate ideas and facilitate sharing of information within the team for overall growth. Clarity of thought, purpose and action to make critical decisions are some of the key traits of successful leaders.

Parting you with some queries for thoughts to prod on: As a leader, what is the business story you share with the team for strong understanding of the company vision and need for leadership in overall long-term growth strategy? How do you communicate with customers, clients and competitors about your company’s business value? Please share.

Also read: How Can HR Managers Promote Women Leadership in an Organisation?

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