Leadership educational company Empowered Conversations is excited to announce that their founder was recently mentioned in a blog post from Saberr, another leadership training company. This article discusses how companies and organizations can develop their next generation of leaders, in order to ensure businesses can keep going in the future. According to this article, the aging “baby boomer” generation currently accounts for a third of the workforce, with over half of them in leadership positions. When they retire, they’ll need to be replaced with fresh leadership, which means it’s important for companies to have younger emerging leaders ready to take their place.
The blog post from Saberr claims that one of the most effective ways to prepare people for future leadership is to give them leadership coaching. This can start by creating a coaching culture, where managers and other leaders are coaching their reports, rather than just telling them what to do. The blog post especially encourages providing regular feedback, and encouraging managers to have continuous performance discussions with their reports so any potential issues can be addressed immediately instead of becoming habits and only being mentioned at annual reviews, making things much harder to fix or change. The blog then suggests asking good questions, citing Empowered Conversations founder Lindsay Tighe as saying, “I have been teaching leadership Skills for 20 years and the skill most needed to create an empowered, engaged and motivated workforce is that of being a Better Questioner.” This is the idea behind Lindsay’s book, Better Leaders Ask Better Questions, and the services offered by her business, Empowered Conversations.
Empowered Conversations offers leadership and communications training designed to empower everyone they work with to thrive. Whether instructing parents, managers, or healthcare professionals, Empowered Conversations can help people ask better questions leading to better conversations that can help them and those around them feel respected, trusted, and valued, and establish an organization culture where people can realize their potential and be empowered to have a voice. Through a collection of workshops, books, online courses, executive coaching, and a calendar of events, the team at Empowered Conversations use their skills at asking better questions to help their clients find their innate wisdom, so they themselves can ask better questions and become more effective leaders.
In the Saberr article Leader in the Making: How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders [2022], Lindsay’s advice is for managers and company leaders to learn to ask better questions, as a way of encouraging the next generation of leaders and training them to also be able to facilitate empowered conversations. Other tips offered by the article include enabling on-the-job training, because studies show that people who attend training courses are far more likely to retain information when they are able to put learning to use on the job immediately than if they get no chance to apply the information at all. Investing in team development is a great way to help team members form the right habits to become future leaders, and staying on top of team health, to keep teams functioning at top performance, can also help a management team find out what skills their teams and managers need to continue to develop.
Empowered Conversations can help potential leaders gain, build, and polish skills that could be useful to their future careers as leaders, as well as helping existing leaders and managers hone their skills for future success. Some of the skills that can help leaders be more successful include showing empathy, being influential, and being effective. Effective leaders are open to suggestions and to taking risks, and are willing to work collaboratively with their peers towards achieving shared goals, which goes a long way to reducing resistance to leadership. Finally, actively listening, having a growth mindset, and being inclusive, to not just foster diversity but make sure everyone on a team, regardless of their background, feels safe to share and do their best work, are also great skills for business leaders of today and the future.