3 Ways to Ensure Your Leaders are Leading and Building Strong Teams

Human resources leaders are the connective tissue between employees and leadership. By seeing both sides of the coin, HR professionals are well-positioned to see employee needs and wins and leadership’s success at leading and building strong teams. To help your organization continue its growth and success, HR professionals are the perfect lynchpin to ensure that leaders provide the support their teams need.

Let’s look at three ways that HR leaders can assess the strength of their teams and leadership. 

1. Start at the beginning: Hire quality candidates

Like many business issues, it’s better if you can get in front of them. The same is true with building strong teams. Employers can build strong teams at the outset by hiring quality candidates with robust hard and soft skills, including leadership potential. 

For example, when hiring employees, focus on identifying candidates that will succeed and stay. You can do this by implementing pre-hire assessments into your recruitment process. Through these assessments, HR professionals can objectively narrow down your applicant pool, identifying promising candidates specific to your job and organization.

Also, create an employee value proposition (EVP), where company leaders measure the employer’s value to the employees in return for the value that the employee brings to the company. EVPs must “orient toward employees as people, not workers; provide an exceptional life, not work experience; and focus on the feelings, not just the features that match employee needs,” according to Gartner. 

By modernizing the EVP, leaders can attract and retain top talent geared toward the future of work. 

2. Assess your team with strength-based management approaches

Another way to build strong teams is to assess your employees and leaders with strength-based management approaches continually. Here, focus on the positives as opposed to the perceived negatives. For example, instead of identifying and fixing weaknesses, uncover your teams’ strengths, allowing you and your employees to cultivate these skills. 

When you focus on your employees’ strengths, you encourage your team to become experts in an area they already know, helping them to increase their performance. Additionally, you help them feel appreciated and recognized, increasing retention, loyalty, and employee satisfaction.

Strength-based management approaches create a positive workplace culture while maximizing productivity. However, don’t overlook learning and development. Through L&D, employees can further bolster their strengths through upskilling, helping you to fill in skills gaps as your employees continue to learn.

Not only will you uncover and promote your employees’ strengths, but you’ll maximize productivity and boost a positive workplace culture, all while building a stronger team.

3. Equip your future leaders with skills to lead now

Investment in human capital is critical to an organization’s current and future success. So why not equip your future leaders now with the skills they’ll need for building strong teams?

Encourage your team to take ownership by delegating tasks and allowing them to make decisions. By doing this, you’re promoting their leadership potential by letting them succeed and fail. How will they deal with success? And perhaps, more importantly, how will they rebound from failure? 

And when building strong teams and future leaders, don’t forget about the advancement of underrepresented employees. What barriers exist in your leadership pipeline? Do underrepresented employees get exposure to mid-level or senior leadership? Are there gaps in your mentoring or networking programs? 

When building strong teams, HR leaders must continue to foster diverse leadership talent by providing their teams with the support they need. Want to learn more about building strong teams through hiring quality candidates and developing your workforce? Contact Cangrade today to learn how we can help.