Everywhere I look, I see restructuring and streamlining—even in companies where growth is strong. In the current business climate, many companies are playing it safe. This may mean freezing budgets or deferring spending by a quarter or two to see how things play out.
If you’re a leader working with a lean team, you know that you can’t afford to wait to develop your team, especially if you have recently lost more experienced members or if some are close to retirement.
During the pandemic, we saw the impact of pressing pause on training. It affected employee engagement and retention and slowed their readiness for bigger roles. The Great Resignation may be over, but its aftermath isn’t. Leaders (and employees) still haven’t recovered from the fatigue.
So, what can you do on a tight budget? Here are four key strategies to develop your team.
Leverage Existing Resources
This strategy is always a powerful one because it leverages the talent already available in your company. One option is to do strengths-based peer-to-peer cross training. Start by identifying the strengths of each of your team members (and perhaps for some of the direct reports of your peers).
Once you’ve done this, what valuable experiences or expertise should be shared across the group, whether that’s one-on-one or in an informal virtual or in-person lunch and learn? Think about technical knowledge and leadership skills. The key is to make it relevant to the audience and as easy as possible for people to teach what they know.
Another option is to invite business leaders to speak to your team, even if it’s for just 15 to 30 minutes. This is far less about doing a formal PowerPoint presentation and more about arming the group with critical lessons learned or providing valuable business perspectives.
Give People Experience
People don’t learn by just reading, listening, or observing. They need opportunities to practice by applying what they are getting exposed to. For example, if you’re already using job shadowing as a strategy, take it one step further. Don’t just have people attend and observe in meetings they wouldn’t normally get to participate in. Have them play a role, whether that’s doing the preparation (defining the objectives and how to meet them), presenting content to the audience, and/or debriefing what worked well and what they would do differently.
You can also hold problem-solving sessions where you bring a business issue to the group and facilitate a conversation around it. The goal is to get people to think critically.
Coach Your Team
As leaders, sometimes we get too focused on problem solving for our teams, especially when we have deep expertise. The next time an employee escalates an issue to you, pause. Is this a situation where you should coach or provide a solution?
Remember that you can empower your direct reports to think through the issues themselves. This means asking thought-provoking open-ended questions, not leading them down a path of yes-or-no questions to your preferred solution. If you do this consistently, you will quickly learn more about your team’s critical-thinking skills and you will accelerate their development.
Use Tech
The pandemic did wonders to accelerate the advancement of technology, especially as employees worked remotely. However, far too many companies continue to rely on approaches that either overwhelm their employees with content or don’t make it easy to apply the learning.
There are new breeds of learning platforms that integrate the power of the other approaches outlined in this article. As we developed ours, New Lens, we knew it would be critical to combine individual and collaborative learning and make it as easy as possible for participants to gain insight and take action.
Regardless of the approach you take, remember that there are always opportunities to maximize learning in the context of what you are already doing. Look for that low-hanging fruit.
This article was originally published by Fast Company.