When hiring your next employee, you’ll undoubtedly be looking for someone who shows the potential to lead and motivate others in the long term. No matter what role someone is hired for, they’ll be a better contribution to the team if they show a lot of leadership potential. If you’re curious about how to identify potential leaders, check out these great leadership qualities that you should keep an eye out for.
Look for Active Engagement
Good leaders care about their work on a personal level, and a high level of active engagement can be a great indicator of leadership potential. Does your candidate seem highly attentive and thoughtful during the interviewing process? Careful consideration and a genuine interest in what’s going on are indicators of ambition and personal engagement.
Taking initiative is also a good sign: If a potential employee actively asks questions and offers up useful information rather than simply waiting to respond to the actions of others, then they show leadership potential.
Consider Emotional Intelligence
Another key indicator of potential leadership is a high level of emotional intelligence. According to The Hire Talent, emotional intelligence plays a role in a leader’s ability to effectively understand and influence those around them. Furthermore, a high level of skill in this area will prevent miscommunication and dissatisfaction in the workplace.
A good leader will need to be able to appeal to their team members and motivate them to strive for success. Since a lack of interpersonal skills runs the risk of leaving employees feeling underappreciated or even manipulated, successful leadership requires emotional intelligence. People with higher levels of emotional intelligence are better at “playing well in the sandbox” so to speak, collaborating with others and working well on teams. As we move into the future with technology becoming more important, teamwork will play a much larger role in the workplace than ever before.
Look for Multitasking and Delegation Abilities
People with a high amount of leadership potential are often alsogood at multitasking. Effective leadership requires a strong ability to organize multiple tasks and advance several projects simultaneously without compromising the results.
According to Orange Blogs, along with the ability to multitask on an individual level, a solid ability to delegate is a similar indicator of a potential leader. Look for signs that the candidate is familiar with their limitations and knows how best to allocate the responsibility for tasks to others.
You might think it’s tricky to recognize a likely leader during the early interactions of the hiring process, but there are a number of signs that can give you a clue about their potential. People who show a lot of promise as potential leaders often exhibit signs of active engagement, high emotional intelligence and a strong ability to multitask and delegate.
Though good leaders are vital within the workplace, they tend to suffer from a lot of stress. Here are ways to help your leaders limit stress so they can more fully thrive.
Building a great company culture means incorporating and valuing many viewpoints. Your newest employees grew up in a world where limited diversity meant stagnation. If you want your company to grow and build a diverse customer base, you must put in place an inclusive employee culture.
Incorporate Diversity into the Company’s Values
Zero-tolerance policies are often the butt of jokes, but in terms of discriminatory acts, they can save you a lot of headaches. If you, as a leader, believe that discrimination is wrong and want to promote that in your company culture, then be sure to do that. Are there facets of your company that exclude others? This is a subtle form of discrimination. For example, some of your employees speak other languages. Do you allow them to or does your culture make them feel uncomfortable speaking something other than English?
Give Equal Opportunities
Make the steps to promotion and advancement clear to all employees. When an employee reaches an employment milestone, let them know what their chances for advancement are. Having open and honest career development conversations are necessary. For leaders, make sure that you are not being discriminatory when having these conversations. You have to have them with everyone, not the people who look like you. If you have leaders who are not giving equal opportunity, that can be discriminatory. You don’t want to create a culture that allows for discriminatory actions. Make it clear what qualifies as a terminable offense if you find that someone has taken discriminatory actions. On the flip side, if you have to terminate an employee, be sure you have clear legal grounds and that there’s no appearance of discrimination.
Check Your Personal Privilege
Culturally, in the United States, white male power is normalized. White men have had the reins of leadership for a long time. Does this mean that all white men are discriminatory against those of other colors or genders? Of course not. What it does mean is that white men are a privileged class. This form of privilege has nothing to do with wealth, and that can be a point of confusion for some. Instead, this form of privilege is about perception. Media, historical depictions and even religious iconography remind us that, supposedly, professionals, leaders and even God himself are all white men. It’s easy to see white men in positions of power because people have become accustomed to it. Society simply needs to expand its cultural understanding of what a leader is to include those who are not white or male. Privilege in this way simply means that you have had the privilege of not letting the color or your skin stop any opportunities from being open and available to you. Understanding that not everyone has that privilege is a great first step. Discrimination truly serves nobody, but calling it out can be challenging for protected classes. If you, as a leader, are not part of a protected class, put your power to work to expand diversity in your business. Your customer base and workforce will reflect this to your benefit. Diverse organizations are better organizations. If you feel like you need some help here, please let me know.
The perfect business model can’t be obtained by standing still. This is an error that has forced many businesses to close their doors over the years. To truly reach a point where a business is efficient, there must be an urge for constant improvement. This can be accomplished through the act of implementing value stream mapping. The following entails some of the ways that this type of strategy can improve the way your business functions today and in the future.
Value Stream Mapping
To understand how value stream mapping can help business, you must first understand what it is. This concept came from the philosophy that doing more with less can improve business over the long-term. Through this strategy, companies can get a better understanding of the state of a business in terms of its current design. Through simple design, you can outline the current value chain of the company with the addition of your ideal ‘future state’. Depending on your industry, your map might look a little different. A company that handles many products could find themselves developing a map based on only a handful of their top products.
How It Helps Your Business
A good value stream map is formatted like a flow chart that helps you see where value needs to be eliminated or modified so everything can function more efficiently. This visual representation of your company allows you to see areas of non-value adding activities or waste. Understanding the areas of your company in which waste is an issue can greatly improve not only the day to day production of the business but the experience your customers get as well.
Improved Business
Although value stream mapping can help a business see a quick overview of their company and help them adjust non-value activities, it is only when you evaluate the process that true improvement is manifested. After all, your changes are an estimation of the improvements needed, not a guaranteed outcome. Therefore, one of the best ways you can improve on your map and the business as a whole is to survey the changes made. This can be accomplished through both employee and customer anonymous based surveys.
Implementing a value stream map into your business is a powerful technique that can really create positive change. Simply adhere to the topics listed above for a more detailed and accurate outcome.
If you are ready to take the next step in your business but you aren’t sure how to get there, check out our coaching options!
A well-trained staff is essential to anything you do with your business. Employees who have proper training will have all the right skills and understanding to make your business a success. However, the traditional one-size-fits-all method tends to really diminish the true abilities of those employees. Want some of the best tips to provide your employees with better training tools? Then read on!
Make a Plan and Set Goals
One of the most common mistakes made during the training process is the belief that since you know everything you don’t have to plan ahead. You may know every aspect of your business, but it may not come out as clear to a person just being introduced to your company for the first time. Getting results means you have to implement your training plan successfully. This means preparing ahead of time on what you will need to teach them now so they can get to work and what can be held off till later. In addition, small goals must be in place to not only encourage the trainee but allow you to know where you stand in the training process. This is extremely important during any new employee onboarding process. You may not remember what it was like to be new, what information you needed. Go to the source and ask some of your newer hires what their ideal learning plan would look like.
Ditch the One-Size-Fits-All Approach
One-size-fits-all training was created to save money and make things as simple as possible. What companies forget is that employees are people too, and people are different. You don’t have to customize a program for each and every person, but you do need to understand that your preferred training method must be flexible. Straight verbal explanations might work for some people, while others might prefer a visual demonstration. Online learning may work for many, but certainly not for everyone.
Look at New Technologies
Even the best training programs cannot predict how an employee will react once they are dealing with actual customers or products. Therefore, many companies are now considering implementing various technologies into their programs. One of the ways employers can train their staff to understand various aspects of the business is through VR or virtual reality. Allowing them to see the process with all its challenges and unpredictability can really improve their performance even before they interact with a customer. This will no doubt increase confidence in the employee and provide better results for the company. Bring on the fourth revolution! As you set your goals for your new employees, it is necessary to provide them with the tools to reach those goals. The list above provides you with some of the best options to begin this process the right way.
I’m always yelling about self-care and I stumbled across something the other day that made me want to yell about it even more. It said that modern life overuses the stress response. Back in the day, our body’s stress response system was used for thing like avoiding being eaten by a tiger. As stressful as situations like that they occurred in short bursts. In today’s society, stress can be constant, so the body responds as if it’s always going to be eaten by the tiger. All. The. Time. There is almost no downtime from stress unless you make an effort to reduce it. The effects of stress go far beyond just having tense shoulders or a stress headache. Here’s a look at three of the most significant effects that stress has on the body.
Improving Mental Health
Stress can have a negative impact on your mental health. Chronic stress changes your body chemistry. It affects mood, attention, and memory. Excess stress has also been found to increase the risk of anxiety and depression. Because the brain’s neurotransmitters are being overused, repeated stress changes the way they perform. Eventually, repeated exposure to excess stress causes these bodily systems to malfunction, making it more difficult for a person to control their response. On the flip side, reducing stress can gradually improve mental health.
Improving Physical Health
Chronic stress eventually causes inflammation that affects the body’s immune system. This is why you tend to get sick when you’re under too much stress. It makes the body release large amounts of cortisol. According to ASEA, stress is often an underlying cause of chronic inflammation, which in turn, is linked to most major disease-related causes of death in the United States. For myself, inflammation is a big, painful problem that I have had to learn how to manage without medication. Learning to lower your stress levels through self-care routines like yoga and meditation can have long-term positive effects on your physical condition.
Stress Can Lead to Burnout
Too much stress eventually creates burnout. This is a situation in which a person has been under pressure for so long that they finally cannot function effectively anymore. All physical, mental and emotional resources have been tapped out. This kind of condition leads to a destructive chain reaction in thinking that’s hard to turn away from. Picture in your mind someone smashing their monitor and jumping up and down on their laptop. Yep, that’s severe burnout. If you feel that you’re in danger of burning out, seek the help of supportive friends or a counselor. Lessen the time you spend at work, or if that’s not possible due to the constraints of your job, think about finding a new job altogether.
Stress turns on the body’s fight-or-flight response, a system that was once used only to keep humans safe from the occasional dangers in their environment. Even though most people don’t have to run from tigers anymore, their chronically high-stress levels cause their bodies to react as if they do. Learning how to manage stress keeps the body and the brain healthier, which leads to better cognitive functioning and productivity.
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