5 Ways To Ensure That Team Members Develop Into Great Leaders

A stellar performer is promoted from team member or individual contributor to manager of a team. And nearly every day, that new manager struggles. They struggle because the job they are now doing is vastly different from the job they were doing, even though they stayed on the same team.

From finance, to IT, to sales and marketing, it is a phenomenon that repeats itself over and over again. The reason for this is simple in theory and hard in practice. That is, the job is different. There, simple in theory. But who else in an organization would be appropriate to step up and lead a team in a function? Certainly, people who are top performers in that function make ideal candidates. Right, hard in practice.

So to make that practice easier to implement,  follow these five keys to ensuring that your top individual contributors develop into great leaders.

1.     Recognize that leadership and individual contributor expertise require different and often mutually exclusive skills. While success in the “player” role comes from deep expertise in a specific area and from independent performance, the “coach” or leader role is quite different. Success in this role involves a great deal of interdependence. It is predicated on making sure that members of a team work well together and that all members of a team perform to their greatest potential. It is the job of the leader to bring out optimal performance of each individual, and leverage the talents of the group to achieve results greater than each could on their own. That is quite different than one person doing an incredible job on the assignments they are solely responsible for.
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