Extracting Leadership Gold

Developing your top 10% of your team (you know the ones I am talking about already that always seem to be the armor bearers for you, the ones getting the results and helping the rest of team members in making forward progress, encouraging everyone and finding 3 solutions to every potential obstacle). Developing this team is not always done the same way as developing other parts of your team. I don’t want to spend a ton of time in this post focusing on all the reasons and factors that make the 10% your top results people. Instead I am just recognizing that we may have this kind of group and suggesting how to help bring the best out from them.

1. Start first with give them trust: Give them a lot of trust, let them see that you believe in them, don’t micromanage any project for them. Let them help you develop the large picture and claim some part of it and l then let them know that you are there and just periodically check in to show you are there, otherwise stay out of the way and see what they can produce.

2. Delegate to them: Once you’ve identified that they are committed as you think they are, delegate some task that has more importance than just everyday type task. Let them run with a task that may take a couple weeks or a month or so but remember that you still maintain responsibility for it, but you are giving them the reins to let them run with it. Giving them empowerment. Make sure you are delegating and not dumping on them. Delegating is giving out some responsibilities but still staying plugged in and following up etc. where as dumping is giving those same responsibilities out and cutting the strings.

3. Continually raise your bar of expectations and responsibilities. As their successful, keep adding slowly, this is key or you could push them right out of their success area. I have seen numerous times when people get promoted because the do great and then in the next spot they fail because their skill set is not what the new area needs. Keep them in their success areas. Keep them hungry and reward their efforts whenever possible. Challenging them will get them to push harder and extract their leadership gold by proper pressure. In the process it will open doors for a great mentoring relationship to be built.

4. Point them out: Let everyone else see and know that what they stand for is what you are looking for. Let them be a role model and/or mentor of other team members. They are not your favorites; but acknowledge their abilities to step-up and go above their ministry description.

This is not an exhaustive list, I know there are those of you who have things to add to this list. So, please do.