Develop Your Team in the New Year

Developing your team to be stronger, wiser, and ready for future opportunities is one of the most important responsibilities you have as a leader. Ensuring you have a plan for how you can continue to develop your immediate team and those they support for the new year is a big part of preparing for success. There are many different ways leaders prepare and develop their team for new opportunities as well as becoming stronger within their current role. Here are a few ideas on what you might do in the new year to help develop your team.

One on One Goal Setting Calls

This can serve both for business planning as well as personal development. In order to make this a more developmental session, plan to ask more questions than provide answers. Explore what each individual wants to accomplish in the new year. Follow up by asking what makes that important to them. Explore further by asking what difference they believe accomplishing the goal will make for the team collectively. This should be a thinking session as much as a goal-setting session. The key ingredient for you is listening - use questions to help steer them when needed. The other role you play is ensuring they do not try to set too many goals or are looking to achieve something that you know would not be possible. If you use the SMART goal framework, think about what questions you could ask to fit into each component versus giving them the answers to each step.

Small Group Strategy Session

Looking ahead to the new year and all the possibilities can be an exciting and rewarding experience for those involved in setting the path that will be used. Select a few of your top performing leaders from the team and create small strategy group to plan for the new year. What do they think should be the priorities for the coming twelve months? What ways do they believe would be best to achieve the outcomes? What obstacles need to be considered? What are possible solutions to those? You could use this process in one of two ways - one could be a small group of your high potential leaders working together. Or the other would be to divide your full team into 2 or 3 smaller teams to work together. In either case, allow the teams to drive the thinking and processes forward. You could establish a process where you set up the framework of what they will work on and then have them present back to you after a couple of hours of working together. This could easily be a half to full day exercise at a meeting you have to plan for the new year. This is an excellent way to develop skills in building strategies, planning communications, and anticipating needs or challenges. Plus, you will get the added benefit of creating buy-in right away since your team (or a portion of your team) was largely responsible for building it.

Book Club

This one also appears as a similar idea on the Inspire Your Team List. Using the book club idea for development can take on a slightly different feel. This may be smaller groups to allow for deeper discussion about how the principles discussed in the book can be used for their personal development in their environment.

Leadership Topic Videos

Also mentioned on the Inspire list, the idea here is to be more specific in finding videos that teach or introduce leadership skills to your team. These may be longer videos that provide more details instead of just inspiration. Plan to have discussion time after you have shared the video with everyone. The discussions that accompany the video will be more powerful than the videos themselves as you get the team more and more engaged.

Share Articles on Leadership Topics

Much like the video idea above, selecting reading topics is another great way to support your team’s development. By utilizing different media forms, you can ensure that there is something for every type of learning style. Select a group of topics that you believe would be beneficial for your team to learn more about. From your list, begin to search for articles that match the topic. A simple google search will yield an endless list of possibilities. Skim the articles looking for headlines and descriptions that you feel will match your teams needs the most. Plan to share these articles with your team on a regular basis. It could be weekly, every other week, or monthly. Choose what will make the most sense for your team. It can then serve as an excellent discussion topic during one on one time with each team member throughout week or month or as a group discussion on a conference call. You will find that it is an easy way to expose your team to new ideas and different ways of thinking without taking excessive amounts of time.

BONUS - Create a High Potential Development Program

Build high potential talent groups to expose them to other top performers outside their day to day work areas. Create an environment for these groups to share ideas, their learning, and successes. Implementing these types of groups is an excellent way to show that you see them as different from other associates. Establish 6 to 12-month development programs that hit on key leadership or competency topics. Tailor the groups and programs based on development need and current level. Create a system that allows for on-going growth and graduation to higher courses of learning.These are some ideas that can help you grow the talent on your team as well as deepen the level of everyday engagement from your team. These will take some investment of time on your part, but that is a responsibility you take on as a leader of others. In time you will see tremendous benefits from this investment of time and effort. It will be something you can take pride in for the new year and many more to come.What are some other ideas you have used to develop your team in the past? Share your ideas in comments.Up Next…Personal Development…Make ME Better in the New Year.