If you want to be a mentor this is the main step you need to take for a wonderful productive and stimulating experience.

1. Identify leadership

Initial identification of leadership talent begins with the knowledge that leadership potential is easy to spot. You recognize it in your most proactive, reliable, accurate and thoughtful employees / collaborators in their work, and who take to heart what they do as if it were their company and somehow take control actions when necessary.

Do not just look at the members with more experience or with the highest career level, look at the entire organization, often it is those who start from the bottom who want to show how much they are really worth.
Your future leaders are the ones who are sought by others for help and whom they trust and entrust for certain tasks or solutions. They have somehow demonstrated their authority even in just a few small niches of expertise within your business.
Do not limit yourself, for example, to saying that the last one hired in administration shows precision and a good ability with numbers, but only has an accounting degree. someday, maybe even the finance director?

2. Establish a dialogue

Once you have identified an employee / co-worker who shows an interesting potential that you have identified, the next step requires establishing a dialogue.

Start your conversation with the person concerned by explaining why in him / her, for example, you see an interesting potential to grow together with the company, satisfying the future needs of the company. Ask him what he sees for him / her in his future within this company. Estimate your ambition.

Here you will collect key data to understand if you can actively bet on that person by investing your time or if you want to move on ... Faced with an opportunity for growth and an enlargement of their comfort zone, not everyone will react in the same way. Some will avidly react aloof and indifferent to the possibility of learning new things, others may feel a little uncomfortable, show fear and concern (they simply need your support and help in recognizing their abilities), still others will be excited by the challenges, the dynamism and the career they can achieve.

You therefore need all this information to know how to exploit everyone's skills and build a development plan that benefits you and your business.
At this stage, therefore, you will have to ask yourself if the growth and development plan needs additional external training (personal and professional), how you intend to finance this path and what new tasks and activities you envisage could be useful for this person to speed up. the business growth process.

3. Develop growth through experiential learning (this is one of the most powerful strategies you need to use)

One of the activities that gave me the most satisfaction in business consulting and which also had the greatest growth impact for those companies was using the human capital development process through experiential learning. What do I mean by this? Give the opportunity for some people to rotate in the various departments of the company for a period. For example: I take the one who works in administration and I put him 2 weeks a month to support a colleague in the marketing department, then two more in the sales department, then two more in logistics and so on .. He will grow so much by building a business puzzle within himself with enormous potential, as well as forging cooperative relationships with various departmental colleagues that will bring enormous long-term benefits to the entire company. This process is a real Stretching for his mind and geared towards his growth. Always keep the conversation going, explain why you want him to take on this unfamiliar role, what you want him to learn, and what are the personalities of the department you're temporarily transferring him to.