When it comes to the issue of office development, people often focus on departments like sales, IT, HR and customer service, seeing as how improvements here directly boost productivity. Nonetheless, if you’ve decided to make some improvements to leadership, what you get is an indirect boost to all of these fields and more. The problem with this change lies in the fact that it’s systemic and, therefore, hard to implement. There are more than several reasons for investing in leadership development that make all of this trouble more than worth your while and here are some of them.
1. Talent retention
The first thing you need to understand is the fact that your employees are more likely to leave you due to the behaviour and attitude of their direct supervisor than for any other reason. Keep in mind that, when losing a person that’s been in your employ for a long time, has passed all the training and certification, you’re losing an invaluable asset. You, most likely, can’t just hire someone to take their place. There’s bound to be a certain amount of time until they’re proficient and competent enough to be a suitable replacement (if they ever manage to do that). In other words, losing an employee is a loss of an asset and investing in leadership development is a way to avoid this.
2. Inspiring others
Every ambitious person hopes to become a leader, at one point in their life. Some hope to achieve by climbing corporate rank the traditional way, while others aspire to achieve this by becoming entrepreneurs. Either way, a great leader will, to them, seem like someone worth listening to, someone worth learning from and even someone worth copying. In order to do so, they’re bound to heed to their every advice and work extra hard to impress them. In other words, simply by becoming a figure that inspires others, you’re boosting both office discipline and productivity. Most importantly, your staff is intrinsically motivated to work in this direction.
3. Setting an example
No matter how satisfied you are with your leadership, there’s always some room for improvement. Keep in mind that there are a lot of companies out there who act like their leadership is infallible. For them, it makes sense that the HR department can be improved and that the same should be done with the IT sector and customer support, yet, once someone mentions the same thing about the management, they get all riled up and defensive.
Due to the fact that people in decision-making position always belong to the management, they might take this as a personal jab at them. Still, by admitting that much can be improved, you can make your management appear… well, more human or more relatable. Moreover, sooner or later, you’ll have to do some work on one of the above-listed departments. So, if you start the work from your leadership through a specialized agency like The Impossible Institute, this transition might come as more natural and be embraced much easier.
4. Better decision-making
The biggest problem with this entry to the list is the issue that no amount of formal education can turn you into a better or more ambitious entrepreneur. Some people simply have it while others don’t and there’s that. On the other hand, by giving your company’s management an extensive training filled with examples, tests and simulations of real events, you can prepare them for this much better. Still, even people who show promise during the drill are known to crumble under pressure, yet, this can give them a taste of what is to come, as well as an edge in similar situations they might face in the future.
In conclusion
As you can see, the return of investing in leadership development gives a disproportionately large ROI, so, no matter how uncomfortable this may be for some of your employees, it’s still something worth doing. Other than above-listed major improvements in various fields you also get a boost to interpersonal relationships within the office, better organization and better communication. The fact that each of these side-effects would be more than worth the effort (on its own) speaks of just how much your business needs this.
