Most businesses prefer investing in fostering leaders internally over hiring third-party candidates. Raising in-house talent is a more cost-effective and less time-consuming option. Yet, developing company leaders doesn’t always go the way you plan it.
With a growing management role in modern organizations, the demand for strong and high-performing executives has jumped up accordingly, and so is the importance of in-house leadership selection and development.
Despite a solid focus on agile leadership and all the efforts companies take to grow effective managers and executives, nearly 50% of managers still fail. In this article, we’ll look into the best methods and tips that will help you make leadership development in your organization a success.
Prime Characteristics of a Strong Manager
Effective management is one of the key business success drivers. Hence nurturing and growing effective managers is of utmost importance for modern companies that struggle to thrive in fast-changing and extremely demanding business environments.
Today, a strong leader is a high performer, motivator, team-builder, inspirator, and organizer that possesses a set of qualities that enables them to lead their teams and achieve company goals. Major characteristics of a successful governor include the following:
- Clear vision of the business’s success, how to achieve it, and how to encourage teams to work toward it;
- Solid communication skills to clearly convey their messages, effectively listen to their personnel, deliver feedback, and promote open communication in the team;
- Emotional intelligence to establish honest trust-based relationships and create a positive work environment;
- Resilience to adjust to changing circumstances while staying open to new ideas and anticipating potential risks;
- Decisiveness to confidently make tough decisions upon collecting info and closely analyzing data;
- Accountability to take themselves and their employees responsible for their actions and decisions as well as for meeting goals and achieving success;
- Integrity to be honest, open, and ethical and promote this behavior model to their workers;
- Empathy to be able to put themselves in the shoes of others to create strong bonds inside the team and build supportive relationships of trust;
- Creative thinking to generate ideas, find innovative solutions and new approaches, and encourage creativity in their team members;
- Resilience to be able to embrace changes, handle challenges, and stay positive even in difficult situations.
What is Leadership Development?
Basically, it is the process of upgrading and refining the management skills of individuals in a professional setting. Normally, this is done through practical learning, special training programs, coaching, mentoring, and other forms of learning depending on the industry and the leading position in question.
The internal leadership fostering goal is to help promising workers become effective managers and executives capable of inspiring and motivating their team members, making sound decisions, and leading their teams to success by hitting intermediate objectives and achieving bigger goals. It involves identifying the employee’s fortes and knowledge gaps and revealing their managerial potential to the full.
Great leaders need to be fostered, and by investing in management development, you invest in your future business growth and success. Above that, it can also help organizations increase overall performance, improve employee engagement and satisfaction, retain talent, and ensure effective succession planning.
Benefits of Fostering Leaders Inside Your Company
While management training might seem a pricey and laborious task, it still proves to be a better option than finding new hires. Here are a few benefits of promoting and developing your existing workers that are already committed to your company:
- Employees that have already worked in your organization will be much quicker and easier to adapt to a new role. Besides, knowing your home-raised leader’s needs and aspirations, it’ll be easier for you to manage and cater to them;
- Training an in-house employee will cost you less than preparing a hire from the outside. And in-house programs are usually much more practical, relevant, and aligned with the organization’s vision and values that are already grasped by your workers;
- With a home-grown leader, you’ll avoid unwanted cultural difficulties. Perfectly aware of the company’s internal culture and work principles, in-house managers are already integrated into it and will seamlessly fit a new function;
- By identifying potential leaders within your company and helping them develop their managerial skills step by step, you’ll establish a pipeline of future leaders already built into your organization’s culture and in line with its values. They will be able to replace those who retire or simply take emerging new positions.
Tips for Leadership Development
Raising an effective controller inside a company is about creating a work atmosphere that encourages individuals to hone their governing skills. Let’s consider a few simple tips that will help you foster leaders in your organization.
1. Assess the Current Leadership
You should start with employee management skills and behaviors assessment to figure out the personal powers and flaws of the worker and identify the areas for improvement. This will enable you both to detect potential managers and understand how to organize future training and educational programs to gain the most out of your internal leadership development.
2. Set Clear Goals
To help future leaders grasp their new roles faster and make the transition as smooth as possible, you should clearly outline your plans. Describe the development results to be achieved and the set of skills and competencies employees should embrace.
All goals and deliverables should be measurable and achievable for employees to properly apply their efforts and for you to be able to track and estimate the progress.
3. Keep an Eye on Soft Skills
To be a good manager, an employee should own not only professional skills but also so-called soft skills such as the following abilities:
- To communicate;
- To establish trust;
- To distribute and share responsibilities;
- To encourage accountability in others.
In-house leadership development should consider this aspect as well. Though less obvious and tangible, soft skills are no less important for successive management than proficiency.
4. Provide Relevant Training
Training programs might embrace both more formal classroom-style courses and informal on-the-job training. Workshops, seminars, and online sessions are the most popular methods today.
Yet, you should remember that people feel much more enthusiastic about learning and training when they see that programs are relevant to their daily jobs and the roles they perform. So, offer training focused on developing specific skills and competencies that are aligned with future employee obligations and responsibilities.
5. Ensure Development Opportunities
The best stimulus and incentive for potential leaders to grow is to give them an opportunity to try their hand at management in real-life conditions since knowing what to do and doing are different things.
Provide individuals with opportunities to gain experience in governing roles via job rotations, participating in special projects as managers, or leading cross-functional teams.
6. Use Coaching and Mentoring
Personalized coaching is a great method for developing specific skills and broadening knowledge in a certain area. You can assign experienced executives to employees that will share their experiences, guide employees’ efforts, and provide valuable expert feedback. In fact, this is how existing effective leaders can foster a new generation of strong managers in the company that match the organizational paradigm, culture, and structure by default.
Tips that may also be helpful
Encourage Continuous Learning
Modern leaders should be not only knowledgeable and communicative but also agile and resilient to always stay on top of situations and lead the changes. Consistent learning will help them stay active, dynamic, open-minded, and flexible and enable them to promote the learning culture in their teams.
So, encourage learning through ongoing education, reading, or attending conferences and other industry-specific events.
Recognize and Appreciate Progress
Recognition and reward are strong incentives that make people feel valued and inspire them to keep moving forward and developing their skills. Appreciate and reward the resultative developmental efforts of your employees via promotions, salary increases, and other monetary and non-monetary forms of recognition.
Measure the Results
To ensure leadership development programs meet the organizational and individual needs, evaluate their effectiveness on a regular basis. Assess the results and use participants’ feedback to adjust the program if necessary.
Bottom Line
Developing leaders in your organization is vital for ensuring continued business growth and success. The benefits you’ll get from raising in-house managers and investing in their growth are certainly worth every effort and cent spent. Just make sure your management development programs are relevant, up-to-date, and properly planned to be maximum efficient.
