Ask yourself the question ‘Can you afford disengaged talent in your organisation?’. In order to build a high performing team, you have to invest in leadership development, it is not a nicety, it is a must. In order to stay competitive, innovative and at the forefront of your market, your leaders need developing, after all it is them that are going to take you there! I was delighted to read an article by the Harvard Business Review earlier this week which highlighted the impact leadership development has on businesses across the globe. In it, it stated that “Companies that invest in leadership development deliver stock market returns five times higher than the returns of companies that place less emphasis on human capital”. Furthermore, in a study by the ICF in 2018, 86% of the companies able to provide figures to calculate ROI indicated they had at least made their initial investment back and the median company return was 700%, indicating that typically a company can expect a return of seven times the initial investment (BMA Group). Business leaders often have difficulty presenting the return on investment to their Board so as a result, development plans either fall by the wayside or leaders are left with a huge challenge on their hands as they overcomplicate defining the metrics to prove the return. Our advice is to align your leadership development plans to the needs of the business as much as possible – if you are in HR or L&D work closely with your operations team to define them together. This will help you to articulate more clearly the KPIs you need to look at and give you a more measurable outcome which will help you see how this development will target the bottom line whilst improving the culture, employee engagement, morale etc (those more intangible things we find harder to measure). Improvement in measures representing output, quality, costs, time, job satisfaction, customer satisfaction, work habits and innovation are the most common indicators and our clients most often see their return in these areas. Aside from the bottom line, leadership development reinforces the company’s vision, its values and its ‘why’. All too often, people lose sight of why they have chosen to work for an organisation, getting caught up in the daily grind of problem solving, fire fighting and general deadlines. Developing your leaders sends a strong message that you care about them, that you are investing in them and that you want them to be part of the future. Coaching and mentoring programs are particularly effective when it comes to creating an engaged platform of people. If you would like to hear more about our leadership development programs, please contact us at hello@mindsetleadership.co.uk. |
