A Guide to Leadership Development

So you recruited the right people and built a great culture. People look forward to work every day and retention isn’t a big problem. Now that you’ve got great people who actually want to be there, it’s important that you have a strong employee leadership development program in place so that your employees can effectively grow with the company. This is one of the biggest challenges for human resource teams, but is a critical initiative. In order to be successful, a leadership development program must contain reliable meetings, good content, and extensive resources. We’ll detail each of these below.
Reliable Meetings
In order to appropriately gauge performance, it is important to have consistent meetings across the board. Choose a cadence and make sure that all managers meet with their employees regularly to discuss performance and improvements. To avoid bias, provide managers with a standardized form they can use to rate this. Be sure and hold a training session to go over what the different levels of performance should look like. This will help managers have an understand of what constitutes a perfect or poor score. In the meetings, make sure that managers bring up any concerns that they have right away and that the lines of communication are always open.
Good Content
As the HR team, it is your job to make sure there are appropriate opportunities for leadership development. Whether they’re online courses, lunch and learns, external events, or a mix of all three, it is important to make sure you’re bringing value. If you choose events that no one is interested in, no one will show up. And on the other side, if you plan fun events that lack value, no one will learn anything.
Extensive Resources
If your employees don’t feel like they can go to their boss with questions or ideas, you are the next in line. Be sure your employees know that they can always come to you, and that you will be there to help in any way that you can. This includes providing the right resources to answer their questions and foster development. Finding the right resources means staying in-the-know on things like conferences and up-to-date on changes and advancements in your industry.

These are just a few of the things that will help you develop and maintain a strong leadership development program at your company. While it will require time and money to put together a good program events, it will prove to be well worth it down the line as your employees are promoted and drive the company forward.

