KPIs and hardline growth strategies are key to growing your organization to the next level. But, even the clearest and most concise plans are useless without addressing one the biggest assets your organization possesses: people.
Growing your organization is partly dependent on your ability to incorporate leadership development into your organization’s core strategic plan.
- Growth happens beyond upper-management. As an executive, you may dictate the strategy. But, you may not always be the one executing the plan. If you don’t have leaders in every level of your organization, you can forget hitting your growth numbers. According to an article by Forbes, the most successful performing companies invest the most in their people’s leadership development.
- You won’t see success unless you engage, retain, and grow your employees. Investing in your team to become strong leaders allows you to have strong leadership skills throughout your organization while. It shows you have invested in skill development, keeping them engaged and excited to contribute to the organization’s success.
- You can’t stand on a culture that doesn’t allow people to thrive. So much of strategic planning is building a culture that allows it to succeed. You have to invest in your organization’s development and culture before they’ll invest in you.
So, here are a couple steps you can take to make sure that you are investing:
- Make it part of the planning process. Articulate the importance of leadership development during the planning process and develop it in the same way that you would develop other parts of the plan. It helps build a foundation and expectation to your organization at a cultural level.
- Listen to how your leaders want to grow. Listen to how your team members want to grow and make recommendations on how to make it happen.
- Make them goals in your plan. Just like sales or process goals, make leadership development a goal in your strategic plan. Just like a regular goal, it should be time-bound, have an owner and have an expected outcome.
- Hold your team accountable. Review goals quarterly and hold your team accountable for their performance.
People are one of the biggest pillars of your success, but are often overlooked during strategic planning. Just like sales and marketing, it requires your organization take the initial time and monetary investment, but the outcome may be more than something much larger than you can measure in just dollars.
