So often, companies immediately turn to external hiring to fill a leadership position. But cultivating leaders internally has a lot of advantages; you know their performance history, you know they get your culture (or don’t!) and you are well-aware that a focus on career development can help recruit top talent. After all, it matters to all of us to know we’re valued and that our contributions matter to the organizations we work for. Lastly, but an important consideration, it is more cost effective and time efficient to train and retain than to hire from outside your organization. Now that you’re picking up what we’re putting down, here are our top tips for building great leaders from within.
So many of us have bad associations with performance evaluations and reviews, because we associate them with being judged or we worry the fate of our careers is hanging in the balance. It’s no wonder that employees and employers both have lost faith in professional and performance evaluation tools. We respectfully disagree! We’ve seen how the right solution for performance and professional evaluation can empower employees and help employers create passionate, resilient leaders from talent that’s already inside their four walls. Leaders need a 360-degree evaluation approach to grow. A dynamic, holistic performance review solution provides necessary feedback in a way that is meaningful and collaborative. Performance solutions should be customizable and allow for communication to ensure that team members are getting information that’s pertinent to their experience and goals. Feedback should be actionable and structured in a way that is planned, managed and tracked easily to ensure everyone stays motivated and focused on the next steps. The right solution will simplify the process and give every employee the opportunity to succeed in their career aspirations.
A key to finding future leaders within your organization starts with keeping talented people from leaving to pursue other opportunities. One way to do this is to provide high quality on-the-job training and online learning opportunities. The best leaders are constant learners and online learning gives your team members an easily-accessible way to hone their skills or receive certifications without having to leave your organization to go back to school or gain experience they’re missing. eLearning gives your organization the ability to provide up-to-date, convenient and scalable training and learning opportunities for your learners, giving future leaders the opportunity to continue to advance their careers from their mobile devices or in a self-paced course they can complete in their own time. Experience builds our leadership skills and, with the power of high-quality online training, learners can expand on their experience and build new skill sets in a risk-free environment. Tech like video training, augmented reality and virtual reality allows learners to practice skills for a broad range of situations that they would not otherwise have the opportunity to experience on the job.
We believe in the power of communication to get through challenging times, but it’s also a huge part of the day-to-day life of an organization. Future leaders want access and communication from their organization’s leadership team – and they want to feel seen and heard. A great way to do this is to engage in activities that encourage cross-communication, bringing future leaders together from across team boundaries or seniority. In good times and in challenging times, communication is a core leadership function and must be trained and fostered. This doesn’t have to be a complex program. A great way to start could be by forming a corporate book club or lending library that’s focused on leadership topics. To get you started here are the 25 Best Leadership books of All-Time. Also, don’t forget to emphasize the importance of your corporate values and culture, and make sure your leadership team is buying-in and walking the walk.
At Vector Solutions, we’ve identified four key factors that drive optimized performance and leverage our total performance solutions to help prepare your future leaders for anything: C.O.R.E. (Compliance and Certification, Operational Readiness, Risk Management and Efficiency Improvement). Our comprehensive tools will help your organizations increase efficiency, mitigate risk and develop leaders that want to stay with you for years to come.
