Leadership Development: Investment in leadership development programs is a proactive measure any organisation can adopt to improve the quality of their leaders. But, not just any leadership program. It needs to be one that understands research-backed insights from psychology, the science of human motivation and peak performance and apply them to building loyalty and improving productivity.
Research has shown how to elevate the performance of every single employee – we don’t have to guess, we know. Fuelling people’s psychological needs by ensuring they are growing at work, feeling connected to their colleagues in a genuine way, and having some say in how they do their jobs. Any effective leadership development program should have these concepts as their foundation, i.e., an absolute focus on the quality of the working relationships, an autonomous-supportive work environment and staff being trained in their role to a high standard and given opportunities to improve, be it through training, mentoring or peer collaboration.
Leadership Selection: One of the most important decisions organisations make is who to appoint as a manager or leader. Take the selection process seriously and focus on their leadership knowledge and skills beyond the usual motherhood statements, such as being “passionate” about leadership or having an open-door policy – look for specific behaviours and identify any gaps and address them early.
Prefer appointing managers and leader from within your organisation. People from within have absorbed the cultural standards and their strengths and weaknesses are known. The challenge with hiring a leader externally is that they can appear to be a near perfect person at the time of hiring – you don’t really know them – and it turns out afterwards that they have the same ratio of strengths and imperfections as the rest of us.
A suggestion that is a bit different, is to get the future team member of the new leader to have a say in the selection process, or at the minimum, get their opinion. This not only taps into the need for autonomy and having a say, but it also gives you some buy-in from them for the new leader. This buy-in has the effect of the team being more invested in making it work, as opposed to the team adopting the attitude that their leader has been foisted on them by people who don’t have to work with the new leader every day.
Staff Survey: Conduct an anonymous survey that is straightforward and not too burdensome on the staff. I recommend asking staff to rate their job satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, then get them to list 3 things they like about working at the organisation and 3 areas where there could be improvement. The final question is “If your leader faced a re-election to their role as leader, would you re-elect them?”
Exit Interviews: Whether you think you have a leadership problem or not, exit interviews should be attempted on all exiting staff and preferably by an independent person. This will give you authentic and genuine insights into the reasons behind staff departures that may not be easily shared within the confines of the organisation. Understanding the causes of staff departures is instrumental in shaping targeted strategies for improvement.
