Are you investing in your employee’s leadership and development? If not, your organization may find itself with skill gaps among it’s employees or losing it’s best talent. This week’s roundup brings you 5 articles with insight and information into the importance of investing in leadership and development for your employees.
- Bridging the Leadership-Skills Gap Human Resources Executive Online: “The research finds what Elissa Tucker, APQC’s human capital management research program manager, calls ‘statistically significant gaps’ in leadership skills for modern companies in all areas except one: authoritativeness. ‘We’re calling it a skills or competency gap,’ says Tucker. ‘It’s the difference between the leadership organizations need to succeed and what they currently have.’ The most critical shortfalls identified in the study involved strategic planning, change management, knowledge sharing, listening and emotional intelligence.”
- How to Prepare Technical Employees for Next-Level Leadership Positions Success Labs: “There’s a saying that ‘what got you here, won’t get you there.’ In other words, the skills that made your employee successful in their technical position typically won’t make them successful in a leadership positions. Often times, they end up not spending enough time on the people part of their job or fall into the trap of continuing to do the same work they did before. The source of this problem is failure to prepare employees before we promote them to leadership roles. Preparing technical employees for a supervisory positions requires you to focus on helping them develop a group of leadership competencies, including motivating others, command skills, conflict resolution, creativity, managing and measuring work, planning and gaining perspective on the company as a whole, before they step into their new positions.”
- Investing in Employees: Smart Companies Are Increasing Their L&D Budgets TLNT: “Employers will have greater inventories of skills in-house and may not have to turn to the marketplace as often — or expensively — in coming years to support basic business operations. Additionally, by providing skills development to younger workers who are arriving with significant skills deficits, employers may be staunching the early talent drain from their organizations. But the opportunity to develop management and leadership skills may be the most valuable investment for both sides of the employee-management relationship. It prepares the next generation of organizational leaders, it communicates a commitment to employees’ futures and it strengthens the ties between these two sides of the employment equation.”
- 10 Ways to Make Sure Training Sticks Great Leadership: “Practice, practice, and more practice. Try this: fold your arms the way you usually do. Unfold them. Now, fold them again, except this time, fold them the opposite of how you normally would. Feels pretty weird, doesn’t it? Repeat, two to three more times. Soon, you’ll be able to do it almost as fast. However, if I asked you to do it again tomorrow, chances are you’d be compelled to go back to your old way, and it would just as hard to fold them the new way. That little exercise illustrates how hard it is to change our ‘old habits.’ That’s why it’s always good to build in practice time in a training program, in a safe environment, to try out new skills. Then, you need to look for opportunities to practice at work and home, until it starts to feel natural. It takes time and perseverance — some say up to a year!”
- How to Negotiate for Better Learning Outcomes Training Magazine: “Ask for commitments — and make them accountable. Never let management devalue training or your role as an L&D professional. For example, if a senior executive had agreed three months ago that 10 vice presidents would enroll in leadership training, but then informs you two days before the course that four of them won’t be attending, don’t just accept it — because you’ll weaken your position. Make that executive commit from the start, while you set conditions. In this case, you could stipulate that for every vice president who cancels within two weeks of the course, an additional 50 percent will be charged back to each of their departments.”
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