If the last few years have reinforced anything for organizations, it’s the importance of attracting and retaining top talent. Ambitious and effective leaders are eager to advance and, as they consider their options, are more often asking themselves: Is this the culture I want to be a part of? Does the company really share my values? Do they actually care about me and my development?
LDW's clients are responding by investing even more in creating a culture where all employees can thrive and grow. Some have started paying more attention to how leaders engage teams and create inclusive environments, through team building and training on psychological safety. Others are prioritizing succession planning and career mapping so that top talent clearly understand their path to potential advancement opportunities. Executive assessments that lead to informed, actionable development plans and supportive coaching are being used to drive these efforts.
In all cases, these responsive organizations are setting themselves up for a win. In this issue of Touchpoint, we share stories of how we’ve partnered with our clients to identify where they can make a difference when it comes to driving growth and engagement in their people.
Insights From the Field
Rachel Maxwell, Ph.D.
Atlanta
Onboarding and Retaining Top Talent; Prioritizing New Leader Assimilation
Many of our clients are in the middle of onboarding new leaders and pulling together new teams due to a slew of early retirements, recent turnover, and restructures in their business. We are often asked how they can maximize cohesion and productivity as soon as possible, while ensuring they retain the talent moving forward. One of the investments that we recommend is facilitating a New Leader Assimilation in the first 120 days. Through a half day process, teams not only learn more about each other, but also gain a deeper appreciation for their new boss’ leadership style, how to best communicate with them, their preferences and pet peeves. From there, the team starts to establish new norms, clarity around team roles, and ways to better engage and help each other. This way of building trust and strengthening relationship is especially important with virtual teams who don’t have much opportunity to get to know each other in person.
Katelyn Aase
Calgary
Cohort-Based Development Programming
We are excited to see our clients continuing to invest in the development of their high-potential employees. For some of our clients, we are engaging in cohort-based development programs. Through these programs, groups of high potential participants move through a developmental process that includes a combination of 360 surveys and online psychometric assessments. Each participant has the opportunity for 1:1 feedback with an LDW consultant to go over their survey and assessment results and to help them create an individualized development plan. These customized programs strike a balance between individualized developmental support and large group experiences, as they often run in parallel to internal events or programming. Prioritizing and nurturing these next-level leaders creates greater engagement within the client organization, and the individualized development plans create a foundation for each leader to build upon as they progress in their roles.
Joe Wiggin, CPsychol, AFBPsS
London
Talent Management, Succession Planning, & in vivo engagements
As consultants, we are seeing significant investment from our clients into programs that support the talent that forms the very heart of their organisations: talent management and succession planning activities. This is really satisfying, since at LDW we get to invest deeply into leaders through assessment, feedback and coaching activities, and we can really see the behavioural and mindset change at an individual level.
A second trend that we are helping to support is a renewed investment into activities that are focusing on ‘face to face’ team engagement activity. I am personally encouraging clients to include exercises that reinforce mutual understanding and trust as part of the operational review and strategic planning activities that typically form the backbone of these events. The feedback has been that these activities have been a crucial catalyst in the process of rebuilding teams, addressing core pillars of collaboration that have been weakened by the level of virtual working many have recently experienced.
Maximizing Your Developmental Investment in High-Potential Employees
Formalizing development programs is a great way to show how much the organization values employee growth. Most often, these programs have a clear process and set of learning objectives that address specific organizational and leadership capabilities. They typically involve a cohort of top talent where employees learn side by side. The social nature of learning is important because it creates a community of support while preparing for increased complexity and responsibility, and a network that each can continue to leverage after the program has ended. When building a development program, consider the following to ensure a maximum return on investment:
- Use data to inform development – incorporating a well-validated personality assessment can assist an individual in understanding their reputation and identify blind spots they hadn’t uncovered through more traditional performance management platforms.
- Build in time for self-reflection and individual development planning throughout the program.
- Measure progress by incorporating a developmental 360 survey into the process. This will provide employees with information on how their efforts are paying off and allow them to refine and refocus their improvement plan.
- Incorporate on-the-job training, action learning projects, or rotations, so that employees get opportunities to practice what they are learning.
- Engage senior business leaders as mentors to employees to assist them in applying lessons to the current business environment.
In addition to structured development programs, some other actions to improve employee retention (while being mindful of the budget) include:
- Begin development early – When onboarding an employee to a new role, make sure an informed development plan is also involved. This will help them better understand what it takes to effectively execute their responsibilities, as well as understand what type of support is available for their onboarding and professional growth.
- Identify challenging projects – Actively seek out initiatives that would provide opportunities to upskill your employees. Make sure to delegate ownership, while helping employees learn how to successfully achieve results.
- Provide regular feedback and coaching – Don’t wait until the end of the year to have performance management and developmental conversations. Building in a regular, two-way feedback cadence gives frequent opportunity to understand and pulse-check issues, express empathy and lend coaching advice.
- Ritualize learning and peer coaching – Encourage the regular dedication of time for development and sharing of challenges among team members. A mutual learning environment tends to encourage collaborative problem solving and feelings of team cohesion.
Credits:
Created with images by f11photo - "Skyline and reflections of midtown Atlanta, Georgia" • Andrii Yalanskyi - "Businessman with a magnet pulls wooden figures of people out of big crowd. Recruiting workers. Formation of a new team. Search for required people and workers with the necessary talents and skills" • tadamichi - "Selecting person and building team. Human resource management and teamwork concept.Connecting last jigsaw puzzle piece." • Monster Ztudio - "Human resource and talent management and recruitment business building team, Personal development of employee in organization, Copy space"