How is your current leadership program working out? Do you have any statistics about the success or shortcomings? How do you measure success?
These are questions your Middle Market organization can answer if you have a successful leadership program in place. If you can’t answer these questions or don’t have a current leadership development plan in action, it probably is something you should be investing more time and money into.
What’s Your Plan And Goal?
To begin developing a robust and successful leadership development plan, you need to have an end goal in mind. You’ll have to build a plan to help you reach your goals. What do you hope to achieve with your leadership development program? Realize what your Middle Market organization wants is likely quite different than your competition.
Maybe your goal is to groom leaders to move up within the ranks of your top-down organization. Or, to cross-train leaders across numerous roles so they can be better advisors and leaders. It could be just to make every leader the best they can be in their roles. Then standing back and allowing them to spread their expertise across their teams. The goals have to be right for your Middle Market company and have to be achievable.
Depending on the scope of your services and products and the overall structure of your organization, you might place more importance on customer service. Or, it may be on faster and more efficient production, etc. Knowing who and what you are and where you want to go in the future is the first vital step.
How Do You Identify Leaders?
What makes a potential leader in your organization? How do you differentiate between great employees, those with possible managerial skill sets and those that can be visionary leadership? Do you have a formal process for evaluating and identifying your future leaders? How is the process shared with employees and how is it implemented?
Some companies start off promoting anyone who shows any particular talents and assuming they can be molded into great management and leaders. Sadly, this rarely is the case. Instead of waiting for the one in a hundred to come your way, your organization needs to know how to spot a future leader in the wild.
When you know what your goal and plans are, it will be much easier to identify what someone needs in order to be a potential future leader.
Make A Plan And Stick With It
There are many jokes in the business world about what gets axed first when finances aren’t great. Training and development are sadly always towards the top of the list. If you want to have a successful program for identifying, building and shaping leaders it has to be a priority – now, tomorrow and when times get tough.
So, don’t make a plan that only functions well in times of prosperity. And, make sure you give some flexibility to your program, but don’t hit the brakes and completely change tactics when your Middle Market organization experiences a shift – either good or bad.
By getting clear about what your company hopes to achieve with a leadership development program, creating a plan, having a clear way to identify future leaders and by creating a plan that can be seen to fruition, you can help to solidify your success.
So what’s in the Mighty Middle Market for me? — get it right now at www.Go4ROI.com.