Effective yet inspiring leadership might be one of the hardest masteries to pull off in business. But it’s also one of the most valuable ingredients for your company to stand out from the competition. Besides, the perspective of becoming a leader most certainly drives motivation in your top employees.
Now, we’re pretty sure you crossed paths with a few remarkable leaders and some bad ones, too. And we bet many of your staff members think they could be leaders. But the thing is: Suddenly appointing someone to a leadership role without solid preparation is a recipe for disaster.
Leading couldn’t be farther away from simply giving instructions. It’s risky and requires empathy and yet cold blood, accountability for better or for worse, and planning in a timely fashion. And this is a skill set that aspiring leaders must build over time.
Do you need to prepare one of your team members for a management position and don’t know where to begin? This article will unfold a few tried and tested leadership development plan examples that’ll set you up to hit the ground running. But first, let’s advance your knowledge of leadership development training.
What Is Leadership Development?
Becoming an effective leader is a terrific opportunity! But it’s also a terrifying responsibility and a tough challenge that doesn’t happen overnight. And although some feel naturally inclined towards leadership, not all are ready to take on a leadership position. Why?
Because the most inspiring leaders in the world’s history were previously equipped to succeed. And that’s what allowed them to lead by example, rolling up their sleeves when their teams needed them the most.
Stellar leadership comes with experience and development. It requires employees to practice abilities, acquire knowledge, build skills, and adopt behavior necessary for leading effectively. And it’s an in-depth, long, carefully planned process that’s broad in scope and consists of different types of training.
For instance, coaching, eLearning, and on-the-job training are excellent for preparing future managers. They make senior employees confident about leading projects, teams, departments, and even entire companies. But usually, those employees are already high performers in their current roles.
Also, it’d be impossible to strategically plan the succession of your executive positions without leadership development. From your C-suite, all the way down to managers, including VPs and directors, all of them need to learn and nail
- Effective communication
- People and team management
- Project management
- Decision making
- Strategic management
- Innovation
How Does Leadership Development Benefit Organizations?
Leadership development is extremely rewarding to individuals in the long run. They’ll guide their teams and departments more effectively and turn into inspiring managers whom employees can count on.
But leadership development also contributes to your company’s success in different ways.
Boosts profit
Investing in leadership development will improve your organization’s bottom line by
- Attracting top talent—by promoting yourself as an employer who not only trains the most outstanding employees to become effective leaders but also has the most inspirational leaders in-house
- Reducing HR costs—which are a consequence of reducing employee turnover and attrition costs and affect employer reputation, employee morale, productivity, and organizational knowledge
- Fostering new lines of revenue—because you need leaders to head the creation of new product lines and operate in new markets worldwide
- Raising customer satisfaction—as leaders guide team members into excelling in everything they do at work, and ultimately, that translates to happy, loyal customers
Improves employee retention
In July 2022, McKinsey concluded that two out of five workers considered quitting their jobs in the second half of the year. That’s 40% of the workforce, a significant number.
And a paycheck is no longer the number one reason for sticking to a job. According to the same study, 34% of employees leave a company because of uncaring and uninspiring leaders.
Now, replacing each one of them can be quite expensive. The Society for Human Resource Management estimated that the average cost per hire is nearly $4,700. And the number rises to approximately $28,000 in the case of executives.
Facilitates the implementation of business strategies
Raise your hand if the first definition of leader that comes to your mind is someone who supervises workers! Well, you’re not alone because we learn since childhood that there’s a figure of authority in any context of our lives. And the workplace is no different.
But the most accurate definition of a leader goes way beyond overlooking their teams’ work. It involves planning, guiding, coordinating, evaluating, influencing, and—our favorite—inspiring. And it also involves finding ways to bring your business strategy to life.
No matter how autonomous your staff members are, you’ll always need leaders. They’ll act as your personnel’s road navigation app and assist them in moving your business forward. And leadership development determines how well your leaders will execute that mission.
Makes change management easier
Remember that team captain who managed to keep the players’ morale up when the coach quit? That’s a leader with change management competencies!
In other words, that’s a person with the born ability, acquired knowledge, skills, and attitude to lead—a team, in that case. But leaders might also lead projects, departments, or entire companies.
Leadership development advances change management skills in executives and managers. And that’s how you maximize your organization’s odds of navigating disruptions successfully—just like the coach’s resignation in the example above.