Everyday I read articles and news bytes reaffirming to me the importance of employee engagement and the impact it has on business performance. But just as strategy is ineffectual without great execution the same applies to employee engagement.

Without great leadership you wont have a culture that attracts, retains and get the best out of your talent and you certainly won’t be successful executing your organisation’s strategy and delivering on the performance goals.

The leaders you hire and promote internally must be able to engage and inspire the best from their employees, while making the right decisions to successfully compete in the ever increasing complexity of today’s dynamic business environment.

“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organisation’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.” – Jack Welch

High levels of customer satisfaction and strong financial results are impacted by the efforts of your employees. So how do you hire in and build great leadership from within to lift employee engagement and achieve improved business performance? The first step is by having a clear leadership strategy. Written in 2014 and called ‘Developing a Leadership Strategy – A Critical Ingredient for Organizational Success‘, the Centre for Creative Leadership released a comprehensive white paper that can help you plan the steps needed to build your leadership strategy. There are many other good resources you can use to help develop your strategy, but from my experience the priority and starting point in any leadership strategy is knowing what great leadership looks like for your organisation.

Defining what great leadership looks like must be linked to delivering success, based on the needs of the organisation today and on what’s needed to ensure success in the future.

There’s a library of academic research and business articles out there on what great leadership looks like. One of the best I’ve read was the McKinsey article from 2015 titled ‘Decoding leadership: What really matters’.

Their research canvassed 189,000 people globally across 81 organisations with workforces of between 7500-300,000 employees. What the research findings demonstrated was that quality leadership was critical to organisational health and higher shareholder returns. It importantly identified four key differentiating qualities consistently displayed by high performing leadership teams.

Whilst it’s valuable and very relevant to consider the McKinsey research and other studies, it’s not as simple as just taking their findings and implementing them into your leadership strategy. While I recommend looking at multiple external sources to build upon your own internal research it’s also important to look within your own organisation.

It’s about discovering what leadership qualities are needed in the culture of your organisation to best engage your employees and to drive performance.

So external research is just part of the solution. It’s very important to get input on the leadership qualities that are seen as essential by your senior executives and from your emerging talent across the organisation. This ensures your final blueprint for what great leadership looks like will be in sync with what existing leaders see as critical, supported by robust global research findings published by credible external entities.

When you’re hiring, your leadership panel will also feel more invested, given their contribution to developing the qualities essential for great leadership being used in the evaluation process. Equally important is you’ll have better consistency across your organisation globally in terms of the quality, capability and cultural fit of your leadership hires.

Once you know what great leadership is in your culture then it’s all about hiring in, promoting and developing the right people.

The foundation for success in hiring a great leader is their alignment with the values, attitudes, ethics and personal motivators you want and need in your organisation. Getting this right is the most critical in having a work place of high engagement and performance. In essence it’s the new leader’s cultural fit.

Having assessed a positive cultural fit, sequential to this is ensuring new leaders have the people, business and change management qualities needed for their leadership role.

Next, is their experience and knowledge going to ensure accountabilities are met while bringing in new thinking to drive improved performance? Do they have the learning agility and potential to keep growing and developing? Will they adapt and continue to perform well as complexities increase, accountabilities grow and employee and customer dynamics change?

These are important questions given the VUCA world leaders must perform in today. Prioritising industry experience and qualifications over cultural fit and leadership qualities is a mistake, as experience and qualifications don’t link to high performance and potential.

When I first joined a previous employer heading up talent acquisition globally, we instilled this recruitment strategy hiring across cultures and nationalities. We hired 1000’s of new employees every year, and for every hire the priority criteria was their fit with our organisation’s cultural values, followed by their competencies and personal qualities linked to the roles they’d be doing. Their experience and qualifications were important only in getting them to the more rigorous assessment stages.

As we tripled in size to around 36,000 employees over an eight year period, our revenue per employee more than doubled and the net profitability contribution of each employee across the organisation tripled. It was easy to demonstrate to the President the value of a strong recruitment function to the organisation’s performance.

It also reinforced that our strategy was right and in every piece of research that comes out we continually see the reference to the importance of cultural fit. It’s even more important when hiring new leaders, the people who’ll be leading your employees.

Having invested in attracting and hiring the right leadership talent into your organisation there’s another very important next step, setting the new leaders up for success as they transition into their new roles.

Hiring great leaders with the cultural fit and qualities needed to successfully engage talent and drive improved business performance is only the first step.  For many organisations this is where it stops though, as they believe they’ve hired a great leader and now the appointee will just get on with the job and be successful in their new role.

However, there’s another very important next step that needs to be taken to set new leaders up for success as they transition into their new roles. This is having a dedicated leadership induction.

Once established in their roles, organisations also need to invest in ongoing support and development for their leaders. The following paragraphs are about leadership induction and setting new leaders up for success. In future posts I’ll share some great leadership development resources and practical initiatives that can help new (and longer tenured) leaders be more successful in lifting employee engagement and delivering improved business performance.

There are significant employee engagement and business performance benefits to be gained from having a dedicated leadership induction.

When I was accountable for the corporate leadership and talent management functions with a previous employer, our organisation hired in and promoted internally around 20 mid to senior level managers (up to Vice President level) every month. With the support of the President we established a corporate leadership induction to have one day available with all new leaders (those hired in and those promoted).

This day was in addition to the time allocated for the standard corporate induction given to all new employees. We did this because of the significant employee engagement and business performance benefits we’d gain from having new leaders participate in a dedicated leadership induction day.

It’s important to engage new leaders so they can emotionally connect and feel positive about their decision to join your organisation.

Having invested in attracting and hiring the right leadership talent we wanted to set the new leaders up for success. We wanted them to understand exactly what great leadership looked like in our organisation and what we expected of them as both people and performance leaders.

We had the opportunity to reinforce the importance of the values, attitudes, ethical drivers and leadership behaviours that underpinned our culture. We were also able to engage the new leaders as key contributors to our organisation’s future success and what would be important for them to do as leaders to have successful careers within our group.

Having the new leaders engaged and better equipped for their new roles meant their teams would in turn have a better chance of adapting to their new leader, being more engaged and performing at their best.

Engaged leaders are also essential to having engaged employees.

After sharing the qualities that reflected what great leadership was in our organisation’s culture, I’d always ask the new leaders, “how many of you don’t want to be seen by your people as great leaders? Not surprisingly I never once saw any hands raised. To the contrary, they all wanted to be successful and we, as an organisation having hired them, had a responsibility to set them up for success.

By demonstrating our commitment to their success it was clear at the end of the induction they felt more supported and positive about the move into our organisation and their career ahead.

To be successful businesses have to deliver financial results. Leaders at all levels therefore need to be commercially aware and capable of making good decisions that impact the performance of their teams and the wider business.

To accelerate our new leader learning and increase their business awareness we took time in the leadership induction to share our organisation’s vision, growth strategy and structure.

We discussed the competitive landscape across the industry sectors where our businesses operated and we emphasised the strategic imperative for great leadership and why anything less was unacceptable.

We reinforced that average leadership was not good enough if we wanted to not only sustain, but also achieve even greater success. Success measured not only financially as we continued to grow our businesses internationally, but also through the positive awareness of our corporate and employment brands globally, the engagement of our employees and the enhanced service experience and value delivered to our customers.

“Neurons that fire together wire together” – Hebron’s Law

Importantly, the opportunity to have up to 20 new leaders interacting together early on after joining the organisation was very advantageous. Being new to the organisation they could start forming collaborative networks, building credibility and establishing business relationships. The new contacts they made in other business functions were very beneficial given each new leader would be returning to their own area to be immersed with the immediacy of their new role responsibilities.

Providing an opportunity for them to establish contacts across other business areas also supported our strategy to break silos and build greater collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Communicating effectively across business functions and divisions was also seen as pivotal to being more efficient and having faster and better quality decision making across our organisation.

I’ve always said to new leaders that “collaboration is the capability multiplier in our organisation”, encouraging leaders to grow their internal networks by establishing credibility and building trust.

To kick-off the leadership induction day, one of the two Group Presidents would welcome our new leaders by video. The President would emphasise our organisation’s corporate values and reinforce the importance of quality leadership in the engagement of our people and in driving business performance.

We also had different Divisional Senior Vice Presidents attend the opening and closing of the induction day. They would speak informally for around 30 minutes, sharing their leadership experiences and the vision for the future to inspire the new leaders. The senior executives had great value to share, their presence was motivational to those listening and they also enjoyed the opportunity to speak.

Having senior leaders open and close the induction day was also a key strategy to engage more executives in investing in other leadership development programmes. Another goal was to have our leadership talent across all business areas seen by executives as an organisational resource.

Given our rapid growth as an organisation we needed to influence some senior executives to the merits of workplace rotations and secondments as part of leadership development and succession planning initiatives. Engaging them in the leadership induction helped achieve this.

The return on investment for setting new leaders up for success and having them go to their roles and teams more inspired, clear on expectations and feeling supported was significant.

Within the content of the induction day we also outlined how the wider human resource’s teams and the employee well-being/development resources available could support them as new leaders. Again, we wanted to demonstrate our commitment to helping them be successful as great leaders within our organisation’s culture.

It was not a costly exercise to have a dedicated induction day beyond some travel expenses and the time and people resources involved, and the return on investment was considered significant.

There are also benefits in having leadership induction in smaller businesses with fewer leadership hires. Between the HR team, the CEO and other executives an induction can be established using technology and on-line collaboration tools to engage and communicate with new leaders.

In my last role, a medium sized business, this was a clear component of the leadership strategy. We established induction using technology to communicate online to our employees who were located in different offices based around the globe. Again the purpose was to engage them, communicate important information on the business, outline expectations about our culture and set them up for success.

Key Takeaways

Without a leadership strategy and great leaders you won’t attract, engage and retain great talent and you won’t successfully execute your organisation’s strategy and deliver on performance goals.

Having a blueprint of what great leadership look like in your organisation is essential. It will ensure all new leaders hired and promoted have the cultural fit and the qualities to engage talent, manage change and drive improved performance.

Once you’ve hired against your blueprint, having a leadership induction to accelerate their transition and better support their success as new leaders will benefit your organisation.

By involving executive leadership in the induction, outlining the vision and strategy ahead and reinforcing their importance to the organisation’s success, you will better engage and inspire your new leaders.

Setting clear expectations on the leadership values and behaviours they need to role model to drive a culture of engagement and performance will also help new leaders build successful careers going forward.

Finally, offering ongoing support and facilitating opportunities for new leaders to start building trusted collaborative networks helps achieve faster and better decision making across the organisation.

Engaging new leaders and setting them up for success is the key, as they will be more confident and knowledgeable as they take on their new business and people leadership responsibilities and become positive contributors within your organisation.

Rick Helliwell, September 2018.