To deliver organisational performance you need to engage and developing great leaders. But to achieve this you need a commitment from both the organisation and your leaders.
- Organisations must have a learning culture that not only embraces innovation and performance improvement but drives it!
- Leaders must keep learning, growing their capabilities to successfully inspire and engage their employees to deliver the best performance possible.
In my last article I highlighted the importance of having a well thought through leadership strategy with the blueprint for what great leadership looks like in your organisation. I also outlined the business benefits that flow from successfully hiring, promoting and setting the right new leaders up for success in your culture.
‘Great leadership is key to employee engagement and business performance – So hire great leaders, inspire them and set them up for success’ – Rick Helliwell, September 2018.
A key component of your leadership strategy must also focus on the ongoing engagement, support and development of your leaders.
For organisations to remain successful and competitive they must remain relevant to their customers and continually seek performance improvement. Organisations have to ensure those they hire and promote will remain great leaders as business, customer and leadership complexities increase. This requires relevant and focused ongoing leadership development.
Ensuring leaders are staying current and agile through targeted development not only keeps them engaged but helps them grow the acumen and capabilities that they’ll need as they broaden their careers and take on greater responsibility. Yes, they also need to take personal responsibility for this, but organisations must provide focus and resources to support leaders in their ongoing development.
It’s important that organisations share the responsibility for their leaders’ development. We all know the important link between impactful development and the retention of your talent. Both are critical for succession planning. Leaders must continually grow their capabilities to be successful at leading change as they inspire and encourage their employees to constantly learn and look for ways to do things better and smarter, and organisations must help.
- Only with a learning culture that’s open to new ideas can leaders and their teams continue to deliver the best performance possible.
How you support and successfully grow leadership capability within your learning culture doesn’t have to be expensive. If you have large budgets for leadership development (most of us don’t) then you could use external consultants who are very capable and can contribute positively. I’d recommend looking first at relevant external resources that you can access, share and use while also harnessing the potential wealth of knowledge and capability you have internally within your organisation. Yes it’s there! Over 70% of workplace learning also happens according to research on the job and the same percentage if not more applies to leadership.
Later in this article I share some practical high-impact (low cost) initiatives all organisations can use to develop their leadership talent in the workplace. But irrespective of whether you use external or internal resources the right focus and business performance alignment must be established from the outset, i.e. linked to your leadership strategy blueprint.
The right measures of success must be put in place to demonstrate the business impact of the improved knowledge, skills, capabilities and behaviours gained from any leadership development initiative.
There are various resources you can consider to help measure the impact. I’ve used and found the Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Training Evaluation valuable. Starting with Level Four, results (knowing what business measure will improve), means not only greater focus on connecting leadership development to results but also ensuring accountability for it happening. This helps optimise valuable time and budget to get the best return.
I’ve seen money get spent on leadership programmes that had great content but it didn’t change the leadership behaviours of those who attended. Plenty of post course enthusiasm but little application. The problem was there were no measures linked to improved people, customer or business performance and no reinforcement of the learning. I’m certain we’ve all seen managers appease their employees by sending them on training programmes with little accountability for any improved performance.
Most leaders also don’t get coaching to embed new knowledge, skills and behaviours after returning from training. This ROI is vitally important for organisations to get right, at all levels including leadership development! So ensure measurement happens and you’ll also get more accountability.
Great leaders, those you’ve hired and promoted, are busy delivering results in their workplaces.
- They don’t want to waste time on development initiatives they see little value in.
- They need to be convinced on the value and inspired to apply what they learn to become even better leaders.
As resources are finite you have to focus on what is most important to achieve high-impact people and performance leadership growth across your organisation.
What you invest in must be linked to your leadership strategy blueprint for what great leadership looks like. Development resources and initiatives must reinforce the values, attitudes, ethics, personal motivators and behaviours defined for what reflects great leadership within your culture.
In addition, development must build upon the people, business and change management qualities leaders need to deliver high engagement and high performance. Less is more and quality beats quantity every time when it comes to leadership development. So be focused, demonstrate value and link it to organisational performance measures .
- By being focused on development priorities that make sense to your leaders you’ll get better engagement to apply the learning.
- By being measurable, you’ll get better ROI on leaders’ time away from their workplaces and achieve better consistency across your organisation in terms of capability.
As leaders return to their workplaces they must have coaching sessions with their senior leadership (or HR) on what new knowledge they have picked up and how it will be applied in terms of behavioural change to deliver the impact to performance.
Through physical follow-up discussions or on-line collaboration tools the different practical workplace applications of any learning and the positive impacts measured, can be shared across leadership teams in the organisation. Sharing learning and sharing success is important in building engaged high performance cultures!!
Different ideas to drive engagement and performance can be picked up and used by all leaders. On-line tools make this collaboration achievable across global teams and are easy to set up. In this way the value of leadership development is multiplied and a collaborative learning culture is reinforced. Benchmarking and sharing results transparently is also a powerful way of motivating commitment to performance improvement.
Great leaders are an organisational resource, not a departmental one.
As leaders rotate or move as part of their career development, the consistency in their cultural and leadership capabilities will give more confidence to the organisation’s senior leadership that business priorities will be met and employees will continue to be well led.
In addition, having had executive leadership contribute to the blueprint for great leadership and be part of setting new leaders up for success at induction, the chances of getting their support to resources or time away from the workplace for focused high impact development is also much higher. They will also understand the ROI given the link to business measures and they can be used as mentors and coaches as part of your leadership and succession strategies.
In summary, leadership development resources and initiatives must be:
• Relevant, impactful and measurable;
• Linked to people, customer and business results;
• Consistent with your leadership strategy blueprint for great leadership;
• Reinforced through coaching and shared accountability for results;
• Multiplied through collaborative sharing of how new knowledge is applied;
• Supported from the top.
Key Takeaways
- To remain successful and competitive organisations must have a learning culture that not only embraces innovation and performance improvement but drives it! This applies to leadership too.
- As business, customer and leadership complexities increase, leaders must continue to learn and grow in their capabilities to successfully inspire and engage their employees to deliver the best performance possible.
- This requires high-impact, relevant, focused and measurable ongoing leadership development to not only build capability but to keep leaders engaged, build consistency and retain leadership talent.
- What-ever you do it has to be supported from the top!
To achieve sustained organisational performance, prioritise the recruitment and promotion of high potential leaders who fit your culture. Inspire and develop them on what’s important for success and retain them. Investing in these strategic imperatives will deliver the highest ROI to your organisation.
Rick Helliwell
Rick Helliwell - People Performance Insights 