{"id":2205,"date":"2015-08-13T15:36:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T19:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/?p=2205"},"modified":"2015-08-13T15:38:45","modified_gmt":"2015-08-13T19:38:45","slug":"the-on-going-need-to-invest-in-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/?p=2205","title":{"rendered":"The On-Going Need to Invest in Leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Committing to Leadership Growth<\/h2>\n<p>There is nothing new about dedicating time, energy and resources to develop leaders through formal or informal learning.\u00a0 Organizations have made commitments to leadership growth and improvement for years.\u00a0 However, it is always surprising to us how often HR leaders need to convince senior leaders that investing in leaders will result in better business results.\u00a0 Often they need to fight to budget or \u201cborrow\u201d funds from another initiative to find the dollars needed to create a meaningful and impactful learning experience.\u00a0 As many teams are finalizing their L&amp;D plans for next year, let\u2019s explore the obstacles you might face and the business case for why investing in your leaders is a good use of company resources.<\/p>\n<h3>Common Objections<\/h3>\n<p>Common objections that our clients face when trying to build or expand upon leadership training include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No budget!<\/li>\n<li>No time<\/li>\n<li>Not a business priority<\/li>\n<li>No quantifiable ROI<\/li>\n<li>No agreement that performance gaps exist<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The Business Case for Why<\/h3>\n<p>For each objection there are ways to overcome the perception from some senior leaders that investing in leadership development is a \u2018nice to have\u2019 rather than a \u2018must have\u2019.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Not having a budget to build a learning and development program or deliver training to leaders is a major obstacle. To earn budget approval you must be able to make the link between what is valued in the organization and where resources are allocated.\u00a0 If your organization says they want to recruit and retain the best employees, that can only be achieved through strong leadership.\u00a0 Since the top reason employees leave an organization is due to a poor relationship with their manager, high performing organizations can\u2019t afford to have ineffective leaders.\u00a0 If senior leaders expect teams to deliver increased business results, they need strong leaders to lead them there. This is achieved through dedicated learning, development, coaching, mentoring and feedback.\u00a0 Not all of the learning activities will need to be costly. There are many things that can be done internally for low cost or free, however, the overall program must have some budget to work with. As one advisor once said to me \u201cpeople don\u2019t value things they don\u2019t have to pay for\u201d.\u00a0 If your senior leaders are unprepared to invest in leadership development and put \u201ctheir money where they mouth is\u201d then it\u2019s a strong indication that this is not a core value of the organization.<\/li>\n<li>Time is always scarce. Pulling leaders away from the business for learning is a challenge.\u00a0 Find ways to break up the learning experience into small pieces to allow for greater flexibility or conduct intensive off-site learning sessions where there is dedicated time away from the business and all leaders are expected to attend and be focused on the learning experience.\u00a0 In our fast paced work environments, the use of technology can help support learning, though our clients find that face to face learning with peers still delivers the best outcomes by increasing both engagement and performance quickly.<\/li>\n<li>Similar to the objection around budget, if learning isn\u2019t a business priority it is sure to become one when performance drops, client deliverables are missed or targets aren\u2019t achieved.\u00a0 Business performance is directly tied to employee performance. Naturally strong leadership is a significant contributor to keeping teams on track, on time and on budget.\u00a0 There will always be cycles in your business that will prevent formal learning to take place, but informal learning, just-in-time e-learning, mentoring and coaching can always happen to ensure that leadership development is an on-going activity that is imbedded into the business, not separate from it.<\/li>\n<li>Measuring the ROI of learning has long been debated.\u00a0 Since Kirkpatrick released his 4 levels of evaluation, L&amp;D professionals have struggled to track and measure outcomes from learning.\u00a0 We find that many clients simply do not want to invest the money required to evaluate the impact of learning on business outcomes due to the complexity and time required.\u00a0 However, there are several ways that assessment tools can be used to validate, support and reinforce the positive impact of leadership development.\u00a0 They include:\n<ul>\n<li>Engagement surveys \u2013 individual leadership scores<\/li>\n<li>180 degree assessment tools<\/li>\n<li>Customer satisfaction surveys<\/li>\n<li>Increase in team results<\/li>\n<li>Reduced turnover of high performing employees<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes our clients confide in us that while they know leadership gaps exist and can see the need for development, they need to convince senior leaders that an issue exists.\u00a0 This is particularly difficult if a leader\u2019s team is achieving business results.\u00a0 If your senior leadership team believes that leaders are born, not made and that people will just \u201cknow the right things to do\u201d, it will be an uphill battle to gain their support for a robust leadership development program.\u00a0 If senior leaders think that hitting revenue targets is proof that a leader is effective, this will be challenging to overcome.\u00a0 The best approach is to agree that high levels of performance exist and that since the leader(s) are so high performing they should be rewarded with further development.\u00a0 You can integrate skill development (often people leadership skills) within a broader learning plan that includes very advanced learning so that leaders don\u2019t feel that the learning is \u201ctoo basic\u201d or not sophisticated enough for their level.\u00a0 Using self-reflection tools is also a great way to have leaders self-identify where their areas of development are which often leads to a request for support and learning.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Committing to Leadership Growth There is nothing new about dedicating time, energy and resources to develop leaders through formal or informal learning.\u00a0 Organizations have made commitments to leadership growth and improvement for years.\u00a0 However, it is always surprising to us &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/?p=2205\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2207,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[16],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2206,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205\/revisions\/2206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ngenperformance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}