 How much time and effort do you spend developing the future leaders on your team? It's probably not enough. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. One of our most important responsibilities as leaders is to develop the skills, talents and abilities of everyone on our team. Companies and organizations that have a strong culture of great leadership place a lot of emphasis on developing everyone in the organization to become a leader. Now you may be asking yourself what's in this for me? Developing new leaders takes significant time, energy and resources when there's already a lot to get done. But developing leadership skills on our team can help our team members lead each other through day to day tasks which frees us up to focus on more strategic areas that are beneficial to the team. Additionally, having some depth and key leadership skills on our team can help us avoid a crisis or help empower our team members to respond to a crisis while we provide overall guidance. Like anything associated with leadership, there are challenges and hurdles to developing new leaders on our team. The first challenge is often a financial one. Many companies and organizations have scaled back significantly on the amount of money they have available for training and most of that is dedicated to the technical skills they need to keep their mission running. The second challenge is time and how we often don't even seem to have enough time to complete our basic mission let alone take time to train and develop new leaders. Finally, sometimes there are people on our team who just aren't interested in doing any personal or professional development let alone developing themselves and becoming strong leaders. Fortunately, there's ways that we can overcome these hurdles. If cash is an issue for you, one of the things we can do is to select an article from online about a leadership topic or issue and have our team read that article. Bringing our team together for a guided discussion on this topic is a free and easy way to show our team the types of leadership skills we'd like them to have. Pulling our team together on a regular basis to have this kind of discussion is one way we can also overcome the time hurdle associated with leadership training. Dedicating an hour of everyone's time even just once a month and putting it on everyone's calendar is a great way to use a little bit of time to do some leadership development. An activity like this one can even generate a desire for learning and a passion for leadership among the members of our teams. If we are genuinely interested in the development of leadership skills in the members of our team, they'll pick up on that enthusiasm and embrace it. We can show how actively dedicated we are to our team members' personal and professional development by actively listening, providing constructive feedback and letting them openly to air their views about leadership without any personal judgment. It can be tempting to spend all of our leadership development efforts on one star performer, but this can lead to a single point of failure on our team. Finding ways to include everyone in our leadership development efforts provides more flexibility for our team and helps them solve problems better on their own. The most important thing to take away from all of this is that one of our most important responsibilities as leaders is to develop the leaders that are coming up behind us on our team. How we approach that responsibility will affect the performance of our organization for years to come. If you found this useful follow us on Twitter and Facebook and check out our website. Click off on the globe to the right and that'll get you subscribed to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. You can also join us for an interactive discussion every Friday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Blab. Thanks for watching everybody. I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.