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.


Only one in 10 have innate management talent

From HR Daily:

Good managers are born, not made, but when people without this ability are promoted into management roles they use manipulation and politics to get by, often with devastating effects on employee engagement, says the CEO of global research company Gallup Consulting.

Gallup's ongoing workplace studies in more than 140 countries have found that just 13 per cent of employees globally are engaged with their jobs. In Australia and New Zealand, the proportion of engaged employees is higher, at 24 per cent, however 60 per cent are still not engaged and 16 per cent are actively disengaged, which some estimate is costing Australian employers $54.8 billion each year.

One of the keys to building an engaged workforce is hiring the right managers, because how employees feel about their job begins and ends with their direct supervisor. If employees feel, among other things, that their supervisor takes a real interest in their development, or offers frequent praise and recognition, they are very likely to be engaged.

Research has found, however, that just one in 10 people have the innate ability to lead and manage others, which assists them to become good managers with the right development.

A small number of employees without an inborn ability can manage people if they have the right support, but seven in 10 people should not be placed in leadership or management roles - regardless of the development they've received.  Employers should create alternative career paths for these "individual achievers" to avoid progressing them into management roles.

To ensure engagement across all levels, organisations need to reach a point where individual achievers are as highly esteemed as managers. One obvious mistake that many organisations continue to make is promoting employees to management based on their performance in their current role. The classic example of this is  the great sales person who is promoted to sales manager and flounders.

How else can we create engagement?

Gallup Australia senior client service manager Allan Watkinson outlined three other areas HR professionals can focus on to improve engagement:

-Don't leave selection to chance - Employee selection at all levels is the most important element to get right in order to improve engagement, you can never invest too much in that recruitment process.

-Lead with clarity - One of the biggest demotivators is a lack of clarity about expectations. Every employee should be able to answer two important questions: what do I get paid to do and what does success look like.  If you can get every employee in your company to answer those two questions, people will be much clearer and much more motivated

- Focus on what's strong, not what's wrong - Gallup's research shows that employees are happier, more engaged, develop faster and perform better when managers focus on their strengths.


from the article  "Only one in 10 have innate management talent" at HR Daily

Hiring Wisdom: Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Your Best People Will Quit

Do you have an up to date Retention Program for you staff? 
What about your staff induction program - is it conveying the right message to your new staff members? 
If you want to retain your best staff, these are things to consider. 
For more, read this article from TLNT :
http://www.tlnt.com/2013/04/08/hiring-wisdom-top-10-ways-to-guarantee-your-best-people-will-quit/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tlnt+%28TLNT%3A+The+Business+of+HR%29

Looking beyond the Performance Review for your next leaders

A mistake that many businesses make is to ignore or dismiss an employee’s leadership potential based on their current job performance, and focus instead on the perceived highest performers who may not actually have the ability to manage and lead a team or implement and deliver on strategy. Employees with skills such as the ability to work well under pressure, great communications skills, motivation and a real passion to progress further should be identified as they may be the future leaders of your organization.

To identify employees with genuine leadership potential, managers will need to look beyond what their current results may indicate, and assess their real performance potential in a future role. Some important factors to consider are:

• Assessing the employee’s motivation– a simple but often overlooked measure is to ask if the individual is actually interested in moving into a leadership role. Does the employee want career progression and leadership development – if they don’t actually want it, and would rather be comfortable and high performing in their current role, then there is no point in promoting them. Sometimes they may be best left in their current role.
• Behaviour– exhibiting the desired corporate behaviours for your industry/business, having good communication skills, maturity and an ability to motivate others are all important.
• Potential– not all high performers have high potential!

So take the time to really know your employees, not just from their current performance review, but from their potential performance review.