We all want to grow. Whether in our personal lives or within the scope of our work, growth is essential to staying effective, efficient, and relevant. Without continuous improvement in our skills and knowledge, we tend to fall into a state of stagnancy and apathy that can be extremely detrimental to our overall life and career goals.
As leaders, it is our responsibility not only to grow our own individual skills and knowledge but also to provide a system for those who report to us to grow as well. Our organizations thrive and remain competitive in the market through the growth of the overall team. Plus, as an extra bonus, this type of culture helps us to remain desirable for highly talented, prospective job candidates, which in turn helps us to grow even quicker.
So how do we create a culture of growth?
We need to begin by identifying the right stuff... the areas of growth that truly matter. Connecting to a specific purpose, goal, or expectation aligns the emotions with the intellect of our teams and ourselves.
Then we need to focus on ourselves as leaders and the areas of our own personal and professional growth.
Then we must turn the focus to our team. Our own improvement will help us to effectively set expectations and create methods, programs, and tools that encourage, support, recognize, and course-correct our team members to grow as well.
Below are some tips using Gapology that you can begin applying today:
Close the Knowledge Gaps: Define your expected growth. Define your team’s expected growth. Define the methods to create the growth.
Close the Importance Gaps: Determine why you want to grow. Tell your team why their growth is important. Align the purpose of the desired growth with your team members, their customers, and the overall organization.
Close the Action Gaps: Build growth activities into your leadership rhythm. Build growth activities into the rhythm of the team. Provide regular recognition and coaching to support the growth activities.
As always, begin with yourself as the leader. Set an example for the rest of the team and learn what methods or tools best work for your organization. Then set growth as an expectation for each individual on the team. Help them to construct their own methods for growth and support them along the way by establishing milestones for checking in to celebrate or course-correct and establishing specific outcome goals they can shoot for while they pursue personal and professional growth.