Investing in your employees is a great way to build morale and to add value to your organization. Of course, recruiting the best possible candidates is the first step in this strategy. And once you have placed great talent on your team, whether from an internal hire, or an executive search firm, you can take active measures to ensure their success. What are some ways to invest in your team?

Character development yields the greatest return on investment. Think about why people get fired. It is rarely due to job performance. Usually it is related to a character issue, such as the inability to work with others. Other common issues are integrity, punctuality, and other areas that are frequently relegated to the “soft skills” sector of training. Investing in these core skills builds better leaders, and leadership development ultimately builds organizations.

The Importance of Leadership Skills on Your Team

One of the best investments you can make in your company is to enhance your staff by helping them become more effective leaders. Think about the best leader that you ever worked for. You would likely follow him or her anywhere. If he or she needed the team to put forth the extra effort, the team would double what he or she expected. That is the power of leadership. And it has a significant economic impact on the bottom line.

Leadership can be studied and brought into the workplace and should be developed at every level. It’s about giving purpose to the lives of your team, and showing these team members how they can lead others and help others see how their daily tasks fit in with the long-term vision of the company.

What is their return on these investments? What would leadership success look like if it could be analyzed and quantified? Anything that can be measured can be improved.

Three Key Ways to Measure Leadership Effectiveness

  1. What is your tenure within the company? How long do people stay? Why do they leave? People join companies for professional reasons. They leave them for personal reasons. Leadership is a personal issue, and by becoming a better leader, you will become the employer of choice in retaining star talent.
  2. What is the attraction rate of your company? What’s your company’s story? Why do people join the company? What are the values? What’s the purpose? It’s more than the strategic plan. If you grow in your leadership effectiveness and show others how to do the same thing, you would be amazed to see how much pride is instilled in your workplace.
  3. What is the ‘fun quotient?’ Accomplishment is critical, but having fun while doing it separates the star companies from their competitors. Do people have fun working in your company? By fostering an environment of innovation and creativity, people are more inclined to enjoy what they do. And when they enjoy something, they will give their best effort. And the best effort is enough to give you an edge over your competitors.

Attitude is Everything

How do employees perceive and respond to these investments? When you implement an initiative, which is a focused effort on improving leadership skills within the company, it must be done with the right attitude. People observe leaders in their company to make sure they are congruent with the message they are sending. Anytime there is a lack of congruence in developing leaders, it can do more harm than good for the organization.

If the initiative is implemented with sincerity, then the response will be positive, as long as you show why you are doing it. Share with your team that the program will not only help the company achieve its goals, but that it will help them grow personally. People buy in to decisions that benefit them, so you need to show them what’s in it for them when you implement such an initiative.

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