
*Business Bytes: Challenge Employees To Develop Leadership Skills*	Print

Providing high-potential employees with challenges that help them develop and grow will benefit everyone—you, your organization, and the employees themselves. Here are some worthwhile tasks to offer:

Startups. Give an assignment that requires your employee to start from scratch—designing and selling a new product, for example. Stand ready to offer advice when asked, but otherwise give the employee a chance to make decisions and take action on his or her own.
Fix-ups. Charge your employee with turning around a troubled team. Or solving a tough problem. This will call upon his or her creativity and knowledge, and it will force him or her to listen and learn from others.
Increased responsibility. Expand the scope of an employee’s duties. If he or she supervises just a handful of people, for example, try placing the person in charge of a larger department. You may have to provide training and coaching, or course, but you’ll stretch the person’s ability to delegate, make high-level decisions, and see the big picture.
Team projects. A short-term stint with a team working under a tight deadline can bring an employee’s unseen strengths to the forefront. Such an assignment may test your employee’s ability to get up to speed and work smoothly with new people, as well as his or her ability to seek and accept advice from different sources.