Leadership development is not just about developing existing leaders, it’s about nurturing future leadership talent. An environment that supports ‘high potential’ can immensely enhance talent engagement and attraction and improve colleague retention. Developing, coaching and promoting people internally is significantly less expensive than the cost to replace someone that leaves the organisation prematurely.
Organisations that take a proactive approach to L&D and train existing talent to become the future leaders of their business are going to have a distinct advantage over their competition that does not. They will be more productive and profitable as they maximise their most valuable asset – their people. It provides an excellent opportunity to maintain a competitive advantage in an industry and all organisations should have leadership development strategies high on their agenda. Tailored individual development plans and selecting people to be part of leadership development ensures people feel appreciated, motivated with higher levels of retention, and it provides the tool to evolve and navigate change, challenge and economic turmoil in today’s fast paced ever-evolving world. It also helps grow the bottom line of any business by ensuring future leaders have a more holistic understanding; in order to understand all aspects of an organisation and the wider impacts of decision making.
Leadership is both an attitude and a skillset and must be delivered and promoted from key business leaders who are trusted and inspire those around them. People want to be nurtured and invested in to ensure career progression and at the same time, it has the huge benefit of creating succession planning to mitigate the impact of senior individual’s leaving. It also creates a positive culture in the marketplace, by investing in people and fostering a strong culture in turn aids your talent attraction strategy, which is critical in today’s fiercely competitive candidate market.
Emerging leaders are the backbone of a business and HW People have learnt, from the many senior hires they have delivered, that attracting ambitious, high performing individuals into the right culture and investing and nurturing these people benefits not only the employee ensuring high performance with the ability to take on more responsibilities, but also improves a company’s bottom line. Our executive team has placed individuals into organisations who, 5-10 years later, have become part of the Executive Board and are incredibly loyal to their employers as a result of inspiring leaders who have invested and connected with them.
A good example of where we’ve seen this approach work very well is with one of our global FMCG clients. We are currently working with them to build transformative talent and leadership functions looking at current and future/current state capabilities across the businesses functional areas to understand where investment needs to be made, now and in the future. They understand a critical driver to accelerate business growth is their people/workforce/leadership teams and where their investment, training, hiring or development needs are to give them a significant advantage over their competitors in the market.
