Talent is inborn, but one can always nurture this talent to make it grow and develop into bigger skills.
As an employer, it is important for you to nurture talent within your employees, helping them develop into natural leaders. This exercise creates a good bond between an employer and an employee and allows the employees to feel valued.
Employees need to feel validated about their work and their opinions, boosting their morale and thus increasing overall productivity.
In a workplace situation where employees do not feel valued or respected, the employee morale shoots down, consequently bringing down levels of productivity in the organisation as well.
Here are a few simple ways in which you can nurture talent at the workplace.
How To Nurture Talent:
1. Exploring new ideas:
Every individual has their own set of skills and talents. Many a times, an individual is not even aware of his own natural talents and abilities. This can simply be because he has not got the opportunity to learn and explore new things and has always been stuck in a rut.
The best way to nurture talent in others is to give them the space to explore new ideas. What may strike you, may not strike someone else, and vice versa.
It is important to develop a workplace culture revolving around learning. This learning-oriented workplace culture helps breed creativity, cultivates leadership and produces high performance.
2. Identify the talent:
As discussed, many people are not even aware of their own talents. As an employer, if you are looking to nurture talents at your workplace, it is important to first be able to identify the talent.
You need to keep a keen lookout on not only the obvious, visible skills of an employee, but also observe other hidden skills.
This way, you will be able to bring out the inner, hidden talents of an individual and help them develop into something more productive.
3. Reward and engage:
Many people might even be aware of their talents but must be apprehensive about applying these talents in real life.
As a superior, you must engage and reward these behaviours so that the individual feels validated and appreciated.
Recognition is an important part of developing and nurturing a person’s talents. Engage the employee in making use of his talents parallel to the organizations goals, values and vision.
4. Be a supportive leader:
As a manager, it is important to act as a cushion between your employees and the management.
An employee might not necessarily shine where he is expected to, or might falter. While it is important to maintain your professionalism and stay strict, it is also important to nurture the employee, never making them feel devalued or disrespected.
This way, the employee has the motivation to stand up and start again, even though he might have faltered earlier.
5. Equip all other managers:
Training is not only important at the employee level but also at a managerial level.
In order to nurture the inner talent in your employees, it is important to equip all managers with management and leadership skills that teach them how to identify the talents in their employees.
They need to be trained to be effective in their individual roles, thus being good managers to other employees in need of guidance and direction in the organisation.
6. Become a role model:
No person is perfectly equipped, not even the leader.
As the leader of your team, it is important that you let your employees know that you too are vulnerable. Show your team that just like them; you are also constantly learning new things, trying to update your skills and talents.
This is a positive image that employees need to get accustomed to seeing, which will make them feel more comfortable about learning and developing their own talents and skills.
7. Create programs for mentoring:
Your employees should have a chance to learn from other team leaders and managers. You can create this opportunity by holding mentoring programs at the workplace.
This gives your employees a chance to work with senior employees and mentors from their own firm or other firms. This time utilized to discuss the organizations goals, different working styles, learning about each other’s backgrounds and personalities can pay off in the long run for the organization.
This helps in creating a deeper bond and increasing employee morale and levels of productivity.
8. Shuffle them up:
Create an equal opportunity for all your employees by shuffling them in rotational jobs. This gives them a chance to tap into other skills, and out of these, certain employees can stand out and shine in a different field.
In order to identify the different skills and talents of employees, you need to create an opportunity for your employees to hone these talents.
9. Challenge them:
By allowing employees to stay within their comfort zones, a kind of stagnation begins to erupt. Employees who are overly comfortable with their job roles and positions tend to get lazy, decreasing their productivity levels.
However, facing new challenges at work can be a great motivating factor for employees. It pushes them to go beyond their comfort levels, reaching new heights of success.
It is important to let your employees know that it is okay if they failed, as reprimanding them will simply discourage them from facing new challenges again.
10. Take help from veterans, or hire professional:
Old employees retiring from your organisation does not always have to be a waste of good talent. Set up mentoring or tutoring programs where veterans can share their knowledge, experience and skills with newer employees.
You can even hire professional consultants who know exactly how to tap into the inner, hidden talents of employees and use the right tools and techniques to bring out these talents.
Once these talents are recognized, they can be put to good use in the organisation.
How to Develop Leaders:
Not every employee has what it takes inside them to become a leader. As the common phrase rings, “leaders are born, not created”.
As a leader yourself, you will have that natural intuition to be able to spot another leader in the making.
Now that you have successfully tapped into the resources and inner talents of your employees, you must know how to use their inborn talents to shape your employee into a leader.
- Don’t ignore losses and low performance
Every person can have a dry phase, even the best leaders. As a superior, it is important for you to never neglect low performance from your employees.
Stagnation and lack of new challenges can be a big cause for low performance. This is when it is important to use other techniques to engage your employee and inculcate a habit of learning and being curious to try new things.
Introduce new challenges at the workplace, or rotate employees to try out other types of jobs in the organisation. You might just be able to see a raw diamond in the making.
Take time to know about their personal goals:
While it is your top priority to keep the organisations goals in mind when moving forward, taking a little time to get to know your employees might actually be a good exercise.
Learn about your employee’s history, background, and personal goals. This way it will be easier for you to align the employee’s personal goals with that of the organisation.
Create a positive reinforcement:
When facing new challenges successfully, make it a point to reward good behaviour and good outcomes. Your employee is learning a new skill or using their talents to complete each challenging task, and this is a behaviour which should be reinforced in order to be repeated.
Even if the assignment was not completed with the finesse that you would have liked, it is still important to reward the employee for this positive outcome.
Teach employees about shared values:
Once you have taken the time out to learn about the personal goals and achievements of your employees, take the time and additional effort to explain the concept of shared values.
Shared values are when you positively align the goals and value of an employee with the goals and values of the organisation. This will remind them that working for the benefit of the organisation will, in turn, work out in their own favour as well.
If an employee does not have a personal motivation to work for the good of the organisation, levels of productivity will decrease.
Time management:
One of the most important skills that a leader must know how to manage is Time. Time is scarce, and it runs even faster when there are urgent tasks to be completed in hand.
Share personal experiences and tools and tactics on how your employees can learn, how to manage time well and complete whatever it is that needs to be done.
A good leader is one who knows how to practice good time management, and this is one skill that you can pass on as a leader down to the next leader in the making.
Focus on leadership skills:
As an employee is being moulded to become a leader, he will start prioritising other skills which equate to being a good leader.
These are skills such as good communication skills, good PR skills, strong business acumen, good HR management skills, etc.
While innate talent is something that takes more time to nurture and develop, these visible skills are much easier to develop into a growing leader.
Why is it Important to Nurture Talent?
Nurturing the talents of your employees will proportionally help your organisation. This is because employees feel valued, validated and respected when their talents are recognised. By giving your employees the right avenues to develop their talents, their overall productivity is boosted. This, in turn, boosts your organisations productivity.
Evaluate your employees regularly and flag the top talents of your organisation. Once you have identified the top talents, you can concentrate on crafting a leader from these employees.
Employees are most engaged and perform best when their own personal values and goals are aligned with those of their organisation. Reward and reinforce positive outcomes, whereas nurture those employees who face the occasional bad outcomes as well.
Provide your top performers with the right tools, opportunities and working conditions that allow them to really perform their best. This will also act as a motivation to other employees to get out of their comfort zone and stretch out their capabilities.
It is important to equally support the career progression of each and every employee of the organisation. However, you should pay special attention to the top performers, as these are the individuals who will develop into leaders.
It is important for you to constantly learn and do your own part of research in order to nurture the talent of your organisation. Read about other companies and adopt the top talent management practices into your own organisation.
Most of the time, employees need the right opportunities to really bring out their talents. It is your job as a leader to create these opportunities for your employees, specially for the top performers. It is also important to let your employees know that their weaker areas must not be ignored, but worked on. Creating a balance in all aspects of an employee’s life and career growth is important.
Lastly, be the role model that your employees need to see in the organisation to really grow and outshine. Just as you would nurture the talents of your employees, nurture your own talents as a leader as well. By having a strong influence at the work place, employee morale is boosted, their talents are developed and leaders are allowed to rise.
