5 Ways to Inject Personal Development Into Your Company

If you own a business, are in charge of a team, or have a role of leadership in your company, then injecting personal development into the workplace is important. I believe that leaders should invest in their team because it helps them become stronger individuals and have a more fulfilling life. 

Another benefit to offering personal development opportunities to your team is that it gives you a chance to build a better relationship with them. It makes it easier to be their leader, offer them critical feedback, and push them to the next level. 

Make Personal Development Part of Your Company’s Culture

If you are going to inject personal development into the workplace, you will have to make it part of your company’s culture. You will want to offer a variety of ways your team members can get plugged in. The more things you offer…the more personal development will be on their mind. The first step is to build awareness and encourage people to engage. 

Not everyone is going to take advantage of what you offer, but some will. Even though you won’t get 100% cooperation, it’s still worth it for those that do want to get involved. 

Start By Building Awareness 

If you aren’t ingrained in the personal development culture like I am, then you are not going to be aware of the many ways you can invest in yourself. That is why it’s important to start by building awareness of personal development skills, routines, and resources. 

What I like most about talking about my morning routine is that it gets people to think differently about things. I remember when I was first introduced to morning routines when I read the book, Miracle Morning. Because someone else shared their experience, it caused me to create my own routines, and now I share them with others. Simply talking about my morning routine piques the interest of others that are looking for ways to grow themselves.  

Ways to Inject Personal Development Into The Workplace

I’m always looking for new ways to give my team opportunities to grow (personally and professionally). To help them with personal growth, here are 5 things we’ve done that I hope will provide inspiration:

1. Send Regular Email Communication

Every Sunday, I send a simple, plain text email to everyone in the company. I share company wins, news, personal development advice, decision-making tips, or resources that can help them work on themselves. Where do I get the info I share with my team? I get it from the content I absurd in my own learning (DarrenDaily, courses, podcasts, books, etc.) 

I highly encourage you to make regular email communication a priority. It’s best to do it every week, but bi-weekly should be the bare minimum. Your emails don’t have to be long…maybe 300-400 words. It’s a great way to consistently feed your team and introduce them to new things, and encourage self-development. 

2. Host a Weekly Book Club 

Every Friday, we meet and discuss a book that we are reading. I usually choose books that help with life lessons like the Compound Effect…or even un-traditional books like the children’s book, Little Prince. Reading makes your brain think differently, so it helps with growing your mind.

The book club itself is a great way for the people in your company to get together and have shared experiences. Jumping on a call and collaborating with other people on the team will help them build relationships and professional growth, and learn more about each other. 

My top tip for leading a book club is to get the conversation going by sharing your thoughts and ideas. Then, you can call on people in the group to share what they think. Ask open-ended questions to get them talking and then genuinely listen to what they have to say. Sharing various points of view can enhance your professional relationships.

3. Create Content That You Can Share With Your Team 

Find ways to create content around personal development that you can share with your team. It doesn’t have to be a blog post like what I write here on the Morning Upgrade. You could do videos, a podcast, graphics, or some other form of content that is valuable to your team. 

Personal development doesn’t have to be just about making yourself better. It can be about anything your team will benefit from. Maybe you can create content about marketing, how to develop better relationships, business optimization, etc. Life and business are so intertwined, that addressing professional topics can be beneficial to your team. 

The main idea here is that you will create content devoted to personal development and professional growth that your team and workplace will benefit from. This will also help you to develop because you learn more when you teach others. 

4. Encourage and Help Your Team to Set Goals

We create goals for our business, but also, encourage our team to come up with personal goals. Then, we do quarterly reviews with them to go over their progress. The idea behind this is to help our team develop a growth mindset. It also provides accountability and motivation to reach the goals, because they know we are going to review it with them. 

In the review, we ask them what they want to achieve. Yes, the company does benefit from the reviews, but even more so, it is about the person and helping them to feel fulfilled. You spend most of your life doing work at work, so why not try to do it and be your best? Why not try to be more fulfilled and proud of your progress in your personal life?

5. Offer Professional Training and Invest in Your Team

Quarterly training is another thing that we offer our team. Investing in the career development of our team members shows that we’re interested in helping to enhance their personal development skills. We do this in several ways: 

• In-person training – we bring people into the office that can speak on something that we want our team to learn. I have relied on finding experts from my Mastermind, clarity.fm, and local networks. 
• Zoom training – in the post-COVID world, we’ve started offering more virtual training. It’s harder to pay attention in this type of environment, but it is still beneficial to offer these types of meetings to our team. 
• Create lessons – sometimes we put together lessons from courses that we take, in order to boost personal development skills. For example, there’s a Darren Hardy course I plan to take, and then I’ll put together a training for my team. 

Some of what we talk about are business-related, but we have also done a variety of topics that include happiness, mindset, communication, time management, and specific marketing skills. 

These are a few of the ways that I have tried to bring personal development opportunities to my team. I hope you will feel inspired to try some of these ideas in your workplace. 

Key Take Aways to Inject Personal Development into the Workplace

• Personal and professional growth starts with awareness. 
• Give the people in your workplace an opportunity to grow. 
• Make regular communication a top priority. 
• Offer training, book clubs, and other activities that will bring your team together.