Editorial
Welcome to Courage Coach, where expert columnist Karin Hurt answers readers' tough leadership challenges with practical tools and techniques you can use right away. Have a question for her? Drop her a line!
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Dear Courage Coach,
I asked my team how I can better support them in the new year. Several of my managers asked me to help them to become a better leader. I'd love to do that, but here's the thing: There's not a lot of budget or time for formal leadership development. How do I invest in my team's development with limited resources?
Signed,
Budget Bound
Dear Budget Bound,
I'm so glad that you asked your team that courageous question!
You've clearly created a safe environment for your managers to speak up and ask for what they need. That's a great start. You've built trust that will make any leadership development efforts you take easier.
How to Develop Your Managers with Limited Budget
Here are a few ways to help your managers grow without a lot of dough.
1. Help Them Create a Leadership Development Plan
The new year is the perfect time to talk about the future. And yet, it's easy to become so overwhelmed with performance feedback and goal setting that many managers shy away from these conversations. They’re concerned that the conversations will take too long — or that employees will have unreasonable demands.
Here's how to make it easier.
Ask each of your managers to reflect on what they need to be successful in their current role (e.g. strengths to build on, opportunities to grow, relationships to build) as well as what might be necessary for any desired future roles.
This puts the heavy lifting on the employee to own their career development and puts you in the position of a mentor and guide. Then you can work together to come up with two or three specific, high ROI actions that they can take to develop in that arena.
This FREE development discussion planner is an easy tool to get you started.
Related Article: Courage Coach: How to Reset Performance Expectations for Your Team
2. Conduct a Listening Tour
Formal 360 degree feedback assessments are a GREAT way to get structured, anonymous feedback. These are written surveys where you invite your direct reports, peers and managers to share thoughts on a series of competencies. The anonymous responses are aggregated, and you receive a comparison report that identifies perceived strengths and development opportunities.
However, not everyone has the budget for that. If a formal 360 feedback tool is not available, practical or in your budget, you can achieve similar results by helping managers conduct a listening tour, which is essentially a Do-It-Yourself 360.
Here's how it works.
You ask your managers to pick a specific area where they really want to improve, such as running meetings, leadership presence or making timely decisions. Then you invite them to craft one or two open-ended questions about that topic and identify people with diverse perspectives to answer those questions in voice-to-voice conversations (not email).
In addition to getting important insights for immediate action, your managers will grow as leaders as they ask these courageous questions and practice responding well.
3. Cross Training
Once your managers have gotten specific about where they'd like to grow and asked for specific feedback, you have a lot of useful information that can be used to build a cross-training plan.
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For example, suppose one of your managers, Joe, is great at running efficient and effective meetings, but wrestles with employee engagement. Another manager, Jill, needs to get better at holding meetings that people want to attend and get results, but is a rock star at explaining the why behind key decisions and tapping into the strengths of every team member. You might pair them up to shadow one another for targeted peer mentoring.
4. Field Trips
There’s a reason every elementary school takes a trip to the zoo. You can read about giraffes all you want, but until you have one bend down and lick your face, it’s hard to understand just how hard it is to go through life with a neck like that.
Help your managers arrange a visit to meet with their peers in other departments or shadow them to learn more about their roles. It’s always amazing to see how quickly such visits increase understanding and enhance critical thinking and problem solving by providing more context.
5. “Bring a Friend” Staff Meetings
Pick a staff meeting where your direct reports can bring one of their high-potential employees. Ensure they prepare their guest to understand the topics on the agenda, and coach them to show up strong. Run the meeting as you normally would so they can see behind the curtain and learn what your team talks about and how you make decisions.
Bring-a-friend staff meetings are a great way to help employees see how their work fits into the bigger picture, and they give your managers opportunities to coach and develop their direct reports in critical thinking and problem-solving.
6. Mini-Masterminds
Here’s another high ROI development activity, where the only cost is time, and your team is working on real business challenges while they are learning.
Set up a meeting where you invite your managers to each bring a strategic business challenge they’re wrestling with. Every manager gets five minutes to explain their challenge, what they’ve tried and where they’re stuck.
Once they’ve explained the challenge, other members of the team ask additional probing questions and share their best ideas. Your managers will learn to reframe problems, ask strategic questions and gain insights into challenges others are facing.
The skills your managers will develop and practice in these mini-masterminds are also skills they can apply with their own teams. And as a bonus, you’re getting problems solved along the way.
Related Article: Courage Coach: 6 Ways to Get Your Ideas More Attention
7. Book Groups
Read a leadership book as a team. Many leadership authors offer free resources and tools to make it easier to discuss and apply what you're learning. You can read a book together as a team or have each of your managers pick a book they'd like to read and start your staff meetings with a manager sharing a practical takeaway or tool.
The important part is to plan and follow through. Let your managers know you've heard them, and that you're eager to invest in their development. Pick one or two ideas to start with and invite them to share their high ROI ideas as well.
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