Great visionary leaders know that a company’s greatest asset is its employees. But having skilled employees is not enough. Successful leaders understand that building a powerful company means elevating employees from corporate workers to corporate leaders. How? By training them in specific leadership skills, nurturing the seed of entrepreneurial spirit, and mentoring them to develop their own visionary leadership.
As meritorious as this may sound, transforming employees into high-performing corporate leaders is tedious. No one can become a corporate leader in a day. It is a time-consuming process. Most industry leaders are unaware of how to teach visionary leadership to the company’s work culture. This is where following in the footsteps of some of the best financial advisors and corporate leaders in India can help. Here are five proven strategies to transform employees into high-performing corporate leaders:
- Create an Ownership Mentality
Your employees should always feel that it is their company. Until there’s no feeling of ownership, hard work, or responsibility, they may not show continuous zeal and enthusiasm in their work every day. Your employees shouldn’t feel they’re working “for” you. The feeling of ownership helps them claim their work and how far the company has come because of their contribution.
Creating an ownership mentality is also a great way to foster creativity and an appetite for taking risks. Sanjiv Bajaj, one of the best corporate leaders in India, is an excellent example of how to hand over the reins to employees and give them the freedom to think for the company on their own. By doing so, the Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Finserv have created nuclear teams and centers of excellence that handle various business lines independently, thus having skin in the game and driving relentless fintech innovation.
- Networking is for Leaders
Your network is your net worth; no matter how much you dread the fact, it is true! As someone aspiring to have visionary leadership, you should be known to get along with people and make them work on your terms. These are the qualities you need to nurture in your employees as well. Work becomes more manageable and less burdensome for them as well.
So the next time you see your employees gel up, let them be. Networking starts within the company, and you can enable a friendly and warm environment in the company by hosting parties and get-togethers. Do not let work become boring, and workmates remain acquaintances.
- Nurture their Skills
You might know your employees’ strengths and weaknesses as a corporate leader. Let them know their strengths too! Motivate them to climb the corporate ladder by giving them the right projects that nurture their skills and enrich their work portfolio. Train them to acquire skills and help them adapt to new technologies to remain future-ready.
Always boost your employees’ confidence while also challenging their abilities. This will help them grow and flourish as individuals. Therefore, upskilling is crucial if you wish to transform the leadership potential of your employees. Reputed industry leaders like Narayan Murthy, the Co-Founder of Infosys, have said: “For talents, learnability is the most important quality to have to adapt to the fast-changing business and technology environment.” Infosys takes upskilling very seriously and has a training center with the capacity to upskill 14,000 people every day!
- Put the onus to Become Better on Them
As mentioned earlier, let them face challenges. Identify their weaknesses and help turn them into their strengths. Avoid doing the job yourself – instead, guide them perfectly and precisely. If you wish to make leaders out of your employees, they must face ups and downs. Remember, independence is the work culture you want to foster in your company. So when things go adrift, move forward with rejuvenation and help your employees move forward.
- Mentorship all the Way Through
Before being their boss, you need to be their mentor. You need to build a relationship with every one of your employees. This enables them to confide in you when they’re in trouble. You need to understand their problems first-hand, from their perspective.
Empathy can take a long way toward building a mentor-mentee bond and helping your company grow. Remember, the work environment is the first thing that makes employees turn to other companies. Ensure your company’s work environment is safe, warm, and conducive to growth. Great visionary leaders like Ratan Tata have always believed in mentorship, emphasizing training employees to be innovative, collaborative, and communicative at a personal level.
Conclusion
To build an organization, you need to have a work culture that nurtures 21st-century corporate leaders; visionaries who can handle challenges. Using the power of transformational leadership, one can provide the existing employees with the right tools to empower themselves through encouragement, a sense of ownership, or upskilling.
Visionary leaders like Sanjiv Bajaj, Ratan Tata, and Narayan Murthy have often attributed their success to their leadership teams – ordinary employees did extraordinary things by seizing every opportunity to level up their leadership skills. Now, it is your turn to follow suit and script your own success story – as well as the story of hundreds of leaders working with you.
To be a visionary leader is to understand that each of your employees has a leadership quality that you must be able to bring out. It is rightly said that employees are a company’s biggest asset. But when these employees transform into high-performing leaders, it is impossible to stop any organization’s growth. Prominent industry leaders like Ratan Tata, Sanjiv Bajaj, and Narayan Murthy have shown that you can achieve anything if you focus on leveling up your employees and turning them into corporate leaders. In this blog, we will look at some of the strategies they employed to achieve the same.
