How to Grow Your Team’s Rising Stars

To grow your team’s rising stars, make sure you step back, give them room to grow, and reward their performance accordingly. 

Your rising stars are in that upper right quadrant of the leadership matrix. You don’t put in a lot of time and energy, but you get great results out of them. The issue with rising stars is they want to advance and they can get bored along the way if they don’t have opportunities to grow.

Growing rising stars means promoting them internally. Keep them in your organization, even if it means losing them as a member of your team to go work for another team in your company. Give your rising stars increasing levels of responsibility. Provide them visibility opportunities across the organization and be sure to reward their outstanding performance accordingly.

I was managing a rising star a while back and it was very clear that he was going to do great work. From day one I gave him full responsibility for the profit and loss of his organization. I got him publicity across the entire organization for some great work he did on an internal audit. I also made sure he got the highest rating possible at the end of the year and a raise and a bonus to go along with it. I wanted to keep him in the organization really badly and I made sure that he knew how valuable he was.

Some of the benefits of effectively leading a rising star include getting credit for retaining those people in your organization and building your reputation as someone who develops their people. You have an easier time attracting other rising stars to your team to develop them because people know you’re going to give them the room to grow. And, your rising stars who leave your team can become valuable connections down the road elsewhere in the organization.

The bottom line with developing a rising star is to step back, give them the room to grow, and reward their performance accordingly.

Want to learn more about developing your team? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to assess and improve your strategic plans. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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