A Free 10-Minute Plan to Include Leadership Development in Team Meetings
Successful leaders develop leaders. High performing team members crave development. But your hair’s on fire.
What if you don’t have time to plan leadership development?
Leadership development in team meetings:
#1. Identify:
Identify the top two or three strengths of everyone on the team. Display your team’s strengths on the wall or create a slide in your meeting deck. It might look something like…
Mary:
- Relationship building.
- Encouraging.
- Communication.
Bob:
- Constructive feedback.
- Listening.
- Kindness.
Sue:
- Persistence.
- Energizing people.
- Asking great questions.
#2. Schedule:
Schedule each team member to discuss one of their strengths. Mary might kick off the next team meeting with a three minute discussion on how to encourage people.
Possible topics:
- What makes encouraging so important to you?
- What is the mindset of an encourager?
- When did encouraging become important to you?
- Who helped you learn how to encourage people? What specifically did they do?
- What are some simple steps to becoming a leader who encourages people?
You can’t answer all the above questions in three minutes. Choose one or two.
#3. Behaviors:
Ask Mary to suggest three behaviors that express encouragement.
Allow time for questions.
#4. Commitment:
Ask each team member to choose one behavior they will intentionally practice before the next team meeting.
#5. Accountability:
Ask one or two team members to report on their experience at the next team meeting.
Final thoughts:
- Limit the time for leadership development in team meetings to 10 minutes.
- Schedule the entire team in one sitting. Get it done or you will forget it.
- Record the names of the people who are giving reports in your notes.
- Set small goals.
- Honor progress.
- Participate with everyone.
- Use an assessment like StrengthsFinders or VIA Character Strengths to identify strengths. (VIA has a free version.)
How could you modify or improve the above plan?
These are great ideas for a busy workplace. I have been trying to get all of my leaders out to a training, but breaking it down and letting each person teach a bit makes great sense. I may even have each leader write down the strengths of his and her peers to help create the list of strengths!
Thanks Terri. In my experience having people talk about each other’s strengths and weakness builds stronger connections on teams. Of course, when vulnerability is punished, things get worse.
Excellent plan with a practical approach of not only developing team leaders, but molding a supportive culture and allowing staff to build relationships. If we know our team strengths we can lean on one another and start to build trust.
Thanks Laura. Thinking about culture building in this context is very helpful. Environments matter. Setting the tone is setting direction. I wish you well.
Thank you for bringing the leadership focus to strengths. Unfortunately it’s still too common for leadership to focus only on weaknesses, ignoring strengths or taking them for granted.
Another thought — Add to the possible topics “You’re good at X. How might we put that skill to better use in our work?” (assuming it’s a skill the person wants to amplify). I find that many underlings already have leadership characteristics or leadership experience from other positions, so sometimes it’s less a question of those people “becoming” leaders and more of a question of how the organization allows them to use (or prevents them from using) their leadership skills.
Thanks… It’s a tragic loss of talent when untapped talent goes to waste. To add to what you said, sometimes leaders and managers are in the way of talent. They won’t let go of power or control. This is another reason talent goes to waste.
You suggest a wonderful question.
Nice, Dan. Keeping things simple and straightforward — and taking HR / Training out of the picture — is what will make this approach work pretty seamlessly. People DO want to grow and they DO want to participat4.
Thanks, Dr. Scott. Glad to see your smiling face here today. Yes, people do want to grow. Organizations that commit to helping people grow will do better than those who don’t. I suppose the exception to this is employees who are close to retirement. Many of them aren’t interested in growth and development.
Very practical. I am going to try this approach. How to do leadership development consistently has been a major issue to tackle.
Thanks, Chey. Glad this approach seems useful to you. I wish you well.
This is really a great idea – and doesn’t take too much time out of a busy day. It is simple to include in a team meeting agenda and will ensure that everyone will participate in discussion during the meeting.
Thanks Matt. Short, inclusive, useful, and free. It doesn’t get much better.