Leadership Development

A great leader can motivate and inspire employees by making them feel as though they are working alongside management and not for them. Poor leadership can have as great an impact on the organization’s success or failure as a recession.

Ongoing development for leaders helps companies. Businesses that invest in leadership development enjoy distinct advantages. These advantages include:

• Improved bench strength
• Improved employee retention
• Improved bottom-line performance
• Improved ability to attract talent
• Solving problems earlier and at lower levels
• Increased organizational agility
• Improved business sustainability
• Greater market value over time
• Development of leader, team, and organization competencies
• Ability to outperform the competition with increased market share, revenue, profitability, and rising stock prices
• Sustained performance
• Distributed leadership at all levels

While it is common for companies to measure engagement levels within employees, top companies are now paying particular attention to engaging leaders and employees with strong leadership potential. They are starting to look at what actions and behaviours demonstrated by leaders create engagement within their workplace. The idea being to then replicate it and drive engagement in their company.

In top companies leaders are being tasked with fostering organisational talent within their company, this contradicts the attitude of many other organisations. Effective leadership development produces leaders who can coach, mentor, and develop other leaders in the organization, providing a steady stream of leaders at all levels.

Leadership development can no longer focus solely on the senior team. Leaders must be developed at all levels throughout the organization to ensure an organization’s
success.

Although it’s typical to evaluate leaders on their past performance, top companies are assessing leaders on their potential more frequently and thoroughly. These companies are using personality profiling to ensure a perfect fit for an organisation instead of simply assessing their skills.

One of the greatest benefits of training employees and leadership development is that it can discover diamonds in the rough among your workforce. Often some of the best leaders are in fact already working for you bur have not had the opportunity to develop or display their skills.


Regular leadership development can create a culture of lifelong learning among your employees. No matter what business you are in there is always something your employees can learn that will benefit your business.


When employees and management obtain significant and effective relevant training and work together with mutual respect, everybody benefits from it the end result is increased productivity.

By developing leaders in this way, the main measure of success is organisational performance as opposed to divisional performance.


New Year’s Resolutions to make your Workplace Happier

It is the beginning of a new year and generally the time you start making a list of resolutions.

Essentially most resolutions revolve around living a happier life and having more success in the workplace.

This year instead of making the same negative resolutions about taming bad habits, this year simply make your resolution to obtain workplace happiness by trying to focus on the positives.

1. Be mindful. There is significant evidence that a few minutes of mindfulness, or simple meditation, throughout the work day can give you substantial health and happiness benefits.
2. Use your strengths. It makes sense that your happiest when you align your work with your strengths and personality. 
3. Learn to be optimistic. Optimism is actually something that can be learned if you’re not a naturally optimistic person. Start by challenging your own negative thoughts. When a setback occurs try to look at it in perspective and see that it is not the end of the world. Essentially optimists see every setback as temporary.
4. Have a little fun. It is totally acceptable to have a bit of fun and a laugh at work. It will make your work life more enjoyable and even encourages team building and promotes healthy work relationships.
5. Get on the move. If you work behind a computer or in an office where you are mostly sitting down all day, take the time to have a walk around the office every few hours. Eat your lunch in the sunshine when possible. It will help you concentrate better and help you to feel refreshed.
6. Be your own cheerleader. If your boss doesn’t praise your work every day, don’t take it personally, it’s very likely they have other things on their mind. Try and take satisfaction from knowing that you have done a job well.
7. Be nice. Talk to the people you work with about things other than work.  It doesn’t cost you anything to be pleasant and you will find your work life more meaningful if you can build relationships with your colleagues.
8. Be resilient. Learn to bounce back from a setback. As with resolution number 3 , being able to see a setback as temporary will be an invaluable quality and you will be able to handle just about anything.
9. Be Grateful. People who show thankfulness and express gratitude to others often have a higher appreciation for the good things in life and experience higher levels of wellbeing than those who do not.
10. Avoid gossip. Avoid workplace gossip at all costs. If someone in your workplace try’s to engage in gossip with you, make an excuse and walk away. Gossip is negative and harmful and does not truly make anyone feel good about themselves.