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Why leadership development should be part of your ‘skills for growth’ strategy
Good leaders and managers are critical to the effective operation of any business. It’s essential they can lead, motivate, communicate and inspire those who work for them, ensuring employees are engaged in the business vision and aligned with achieving the goals for growth.
When leaders adopt consistent behaviours around a business vision and values, the opportunity to shape a strong and attractive organisational culture is highly achievable. With the skills gap experienced by many UK businesses, being able to set yourself apart through strong leadership and a positive, future focused business culture, organisations will be far better equipped to attract and retain the skills they need to grow.
Empowering your leadership team
Enabling your leadership team to develop their own skills to further support organisational growth is essential to your business but also for your teams and individuals. Creating a cohesive, structured and motivated leadership team through a defined developmental journey can have positive outcomes for employees across the business.
Investing in leadership is about creating a unified approach amongst your senior managers. This creates a support infrastructure that filters to teams below. Communication becomes more efficient across all levels, realistic goals are set and focused upon, strategic work plans can be developed and implemented more effectively, and employee engagement becomes a natural part of activity.
A leader or manager can often dictate whether someone chooses to leave the business or remain. If your business is experiencing a ‘revolving door’ scenario, then developing leadership strengths within the business is an area to consider focusing on – by having a strong and effective leadership team in place you can create a strong and stable employee culture for your future.
4 key leadership skills for positive employee development & recruitment
Adaptability
Leaders need to be adaptable to a changing landscape, identifying solutions and making decisions in a flash whilst nurturing and engaging employees along the way. Many people don’t naturally respond positively to change; a good leader will communicate, involve and support their teams to feel able to engage and benefit from change.
People Skills
Traditional leadership tended to focus more on outcomes and results. In today’s world where leadership models, such as “transformational leadership” is recognised as generating greater outputs through high performance, more emphasis is being placed on developing “people skills” in leaders. Being able to delegate and empower, involve, coach and support people is critical to a motivated and productive workforce.
Collaborative skills
Good leaders understand how to encourage and include team members and employees in generating ideas and making a contribution. If processes need to be changed or teams restructured then including employees in the process can help greatly in improving employee buy-in, confidence and learning plus create a more energised and loyal environment. Collaboration facilitates communication across the business, eliminating silos and can ensure everyone is aligned and delivering common objectives.
Problem Solving
Although leaders should be able to identify solutions to problems with ease, a good leader involves and coaches a diverse workforce in arriving at solutions that might not be the “status quo”. A great leader will put aside their solution in favour of a team mate’s if it is indeed a viable option. This takes courage, trust and vulnerability – all qualities of effective leadership.
Investing in your leadership team can have a positive impact across many areas including:
- Increase in people performance
- Increase in team motivation
- Increase in employee engagement
- The ability to hire the right people for a role and develop them
- Improved staff retention
- The skills to grow and develop the people around them and retain employees
- Creating a high performing leadership team supporting your vision
- To support the business ethos and visions and know how to share these
At Think Forward we work with business owners and business leaders to create a bespoke developmental journey specific to your leaders and your business goals.
By utilising specific tools from the Lumina Learning suite which are particularly suited to developing leaders, we implement a programme which looks at both individual and team development needs.
The combination of the Lumina Learning methodology, our coaching expertise and our experience in transforming behaviour means your team will be best placed for achieving long lasting outcomes such as: improved employee retention, reduced skills-gap, increased productivity and the opportunity to set your business apart as an employer of choice. Last and not least, you will be supporting your goals for growth as a business!
