Use a blog to build leaders!  Really?  My answer is yes.  Leaders need simple, actionable tools for leadership development.  How does a leader find time to build leaders when there are so many other tasks that demand a leader’s time and energy?

Blogs are a great resource, and they are not labor or time intensive.  

Develop You & Develop Your Team

Leaders at all levels of an organization are valuable.  A leader who is not developing leaders is short sighted and forgetting one his most important roles- developing the future leaders of his team.

4 Steps To Building Leaders With This Blog (or any blog)

1.  Subscribe

When I subscribe to a blog, it arrives in my inbox without me having to surf the web.  By finding a writer who consistently covers leadership topics, I have access to content that will help me in developing the leaders around me and in developing myself.

The 4 Steps to Building Leaders With A Blog will work with any good leadership content. I highly recommend the leadership blogs of Michael Hyatt.

2.  Open

It doesn’t do any good to subscribe to a blog if I never open it.  I have subscribed to great blogs and never opened them.   I slide them into a file folder that fills up but goes unread.

That is why I try to keep my blogs to between 500-1000 words.  To read what I write, it will truly only take a leader 5 minutes a day.  But, even the most talented writers are worthless if their content goes unopened.

3.  Share

Once I find a blog that I like, I need to email it to my team.  When I begin a habit of sending the best stuff to my team, the process of building other leaders has really begun.

I write 2 blogs a week on most weeks.  I suggest you share one of them with your team via email.  Forward the blog with your own comments attached.  It lets your team know the type of things you feel are important.

4.  Discuss

Once they have the blog in their inbox, they need to read it.  The best way to do that is to begin a habit of discussing those weekly blogs at the beginning of a meeting or a conference call.

Anyone can read these blogs just prior to the start of a meeting and participate.  I always took a few minutes to think through a few open-ended questions to help move the discussion along.

  • “How does this article challenge us as a team to do things differently?”
  • “What does this look like for us?”
  • “Who on this team does this best?”
  • “What are you going to do as an individual to become a better leader as a result of this article?”

The Bottom Line:

Time is valuable.  But developing the leaders around you is a top priority as a leader.  I write about leadership so anyone can use the content of my blogs to help them become a better leader or help them build better leaders in their organization.

Here are some links to some past blogs of mine that anyone can use to begin the process.

By subscribing, opening, sharing and discussing good leadership blogs, you can begin to build a culture of leadership on your team.

As people begin to think about leadership, they begin to speak like leaders and act like leaders.  A once a year leadership retreat will do less for developing leaders than these 4 Easy Steps.

Try this these steps for 60 days and watch your team grow.

Question:

What is your plan to become a better leader this year?