Collaborative post – may contain affiliate links

Not everybody who deserves to be in a leadership role, is a natural leader. What this means is, someone who is really good at their job, can manage their time well, get their tasks done quickly and effectively, may not be someone who leads from the front. You as a business owner have probably come across someone who is so talented yet, they aren’t in a role that helps them to make key decisions and help others. Many managers are like this. They are in a leadership role, they are great at managing their responsibilities, except when it comes to leading the team.

Should we give up on them?

You might be thinking that, if someone isn’t a natural leader then they should not be a manager. However, if you took this approach with every role in your business, you would run out of managers. No, we should not give up on people who don’t seem to be natural leaders. What we should do is to bring their leadership qualities out. If they already have great skills in time management, attention to detail in projects, great communication skills, but they can’t energize and motivate their team as well, then let’s not shy away from this task.

How to help them

The best way to help a manager become more assertive and be able to read his team better is to give him leading training. If you don’t have an in-house training program, then seek to put your managers through a leadership empowerment program like that on the Learning Bank – digital learning. They will learn how to properly delegate tasks, motivate their employees to take on tough challenges and also improve each employee’s productivity. Developing employees for the future is a task that managers have to pick up with gusto. Making employees more resilient to sudden changes to tasks, and having quick recovery processes in place to prevent projects from slipping behind schedule, will all be taught to your managers in the program.

Give them time

Philosophers often say you should give power to the person who says or acts like they don’t want the power. This is what makes them a good leader because they’re not in it for the power, or the pay, they know the seriousness of leadership and so they want to get it right. They also don’t have an ego, so they’re much more likely to grow over time instead of hitting a wall of personal growth and then decline. So, give your managers time to become used to their role. Give managers encouragement in areas of their people skills that need to become better, etc. Check up on them every week to see how they are doing and get updates of how they are improving in their role, after their leadership training.

Not everyone is going to be a great leader naturally, but that does not mean that you cannot bring out the true leadership qualities in them. So if your managers do everything well except motivating and leading their teams, you can fix this issue with a leadership program.