3 Tips and Strategies to Inspire Workplace Leadership

Mentorship, leadership, and empowerment can trickle down a company’s ranks, like the roots of a tree feeding its farthest branches, sprouting fruitful returns in due time. If you can build a strong enough foundation of leadership and initiative within the workplace, your team will start inspiring themselves and each other organically.

Like dominos, all it takes is the first one to tip over for the rest to fall into place.

It’s your job to be the first domino, the roots of the tree. Follow these three strategies to inspire leadership in your workplace.

#1 Encourage Brainstorming

The creativity and leadership of your employees will shine when you take a step back and encourage them to speak their minds:

• Show your team you care by opening up the floor to new ideas.

• Reinforce their trust by actually sponsoring and implementing the ideas you like the most.

• Hold brainstorming sessions to discuss your next product or marketing campaign—let everyone participate.

• Put employees in charge of teams to give them a chance to show their stuff.

Once you get some momentum going, your employees will start coming into their own and growing into bona fide leaders and achievers.

#2 Constantly Grow and Nurture Your Team

Cultivating a team of strong leaders goes beyond any system or app. After you’ve gone through the important steps of completing an online background check and automated resume scan, building the right team boils down to traits that are fundamentally human. You can’t empower a team that you only know on paper.

To build a team you can truly inspire, watch out for these valuable soft skills:

• Collaboration
• Initiative
• Active listening
• Creative problem-solving
• Adaptability
• Conflict resolution
• Dependability
• Empathy
• And, of course, leadership

The beautiful part about effective hiring is that it’s a self-perpetuating system—when you recruit excellent, driven, empowering leaders to your business, they uplift and inspire the people around them. The more you scale your business, the more of these gems you’ll be able to attract to your team, and the greater your team will become as a whole.

#3 Show Your Team You Care About Them

Leaders will only rise in a company where they feel seen, heard, and cared for. That’s why the best businesses will invest in each employee’s well-being. Once you’ve met the basic needs of your employees, you’ll be able to fully unleash their creative spirit.

Here are just some of the ways you can ignite your workforce’s self-starting engine:

• Organizing a wellness incentives program to reward healthy habits and a good work-life balance.

• Offering paid time off for rest and relaxation to all employees—giving them time to reset may actually make them more productive and enthusiastic.

• Shouting out their accomplishments on your company’s social media profile.

• Providing them with childcare services at the workplace.

• Including health insurance and retirement plans in your benefits package.

• Serving free meals every week or on special occasions from a healthy caterer.

• Placing nap pods in the office that encourage employees to take refreshing breaks throughout the day.

• Supplement these practices by organizing mentorship programs between veteran staff and new hires.

Lead by Example

Workplace leadership starts with you—with your attitude, your enthusiasm, your work ethic, and your positivity. Before you lament about the shortcomings of your team, look at what you are bringing to the table, and challenge yourself to do better. You have the power to invigorate your workforce and inspire them to reach new heights.

After all, if you can start a business from the ground up, you can certainly uplift your team.