March 2020 - Strategic Catalyst

Is your company among the 87% of employers who say improving retention is a key priority?*

It’s a struggle for business owners and HR professionals alike – keeping employees, especially those deemed as high-potential. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median number of years wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.2 years in January 2018.

Business with a strong learning culture enjoy employee engagement and retention rates 30-50% higher than those that don’t. – Robert Half

Keep your employees by demonstrating your commitment to them.

Vistage Master Chair Christine Spray will be taking a limited number of applicants for her Emerging Leader Program, kicking off on April 2.

The program curriculum is organized into four modules – Personal, Interpersonal, Team, and Organizational. Today’s post shifts our focus away from the leader.

Researchers Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard developed the Situational Leadership Model to shed light on an oft-overlooked aspect of practical leadership development: the attributes of the staff.

The makeup of any given team is as diverse as the number of possible DNA sequences. People are on different intellectual, maturity, and motivational levels. Effective leaders need to address their staff where each employee is at. The Situational Leadership Model identifies these as the four types of leader/follower styles:

Telling
- Staff are characterized by low competence and low commitment, being unable and unwilling to comply, with possible feelings of insecurity.
- Leaders must focus highly on tasks, with clear instructions and regular follow up. The leader must be encouraging and motivational, offering praise for positive results and correction for less than positive results.
Selling
- Staff at this level have developed some competence with an improved (but perhaps not reliable) commitment, and are open to becoming cooperative and motivated.
- Leaders must still focus highly on tasks with a focus on developing a relationship with the employee, and spend more time listening and offering advice, less “telling” and more “suggesting” and encouragement, acting as a coach.
Participating
- Staff is now highly competent, but not yet convinced in his or her ability or not fully committed to doing their best and excel.
- Leaders no longer need to give detailed instructions but do need to be involved to ensure work is done at the level required, focusing less on the tasks assigned and more on the relationship between the individual employee, the leader, and the team.
Delegating
- Staff now feel fully empowered and competent enough to take the ball and run with minimal supervision, and are highly committed, motivated and empowered.
- Leaders delegate tasks with minimal follow-up, knowing acceptable or excellent results will be achieved; there is low focus on tasks and no need to compliment staff on every task, though praise for outstanding performance must be given as appropriate.

The Vistage Emerging Leader program provides a holistic view of leadership, along with training to apply what’s learned in the classroom to the workplace.

*source: Future Workplace and Kronos

Contact Christine to register today

WHO:

Companies with 20-500 employees
Employee is currently second/third in the management hierarchy, or poised to be in a management role soon, or identified as a rising star

WHAT:

2-year program with six full-day programs every other month
Interactive workshops on 12 core leadership competencies
Mentor/mentee training for on-the-job reinforcement

WHY:

Benefits to your organization

Bench strength
Employee retention
Improved execution

Benefits to emerging leaders

Develop core leadership competencies
Improve career advancement opportunities
Grow your network with other emerging leaders

Leaders CAN be made. Where will your next leader come from?

The saying is that leaders are born, not made. If you’re a parent, you know that’s not true. You were thrust into a situation of vital importance and stepped up to the challenge. Often, it’s outside events that ignite the leadership potential within each of us. When combined with dedicated and structured internal exploration, great leaders can indeed be made.

Simply adding a star performer to a team boosts the effectiveness of other team members by 5-15%. No wonder, then, that study after study shows stronger financial performance in companies that make proportionally greater investments in identifying and developing top talent.

-Harvard Business Review

Are you ready to invest in your top talent?

Vistage Master Chair Christine Spray will be taking a limited number of applicants for her Emerging Leader Program, kicking off on April 2.

The program curriculum is organized into four modules – Personal, Interpersonal, Team, and Organizational. Working from the inside out, participants will develop the core competencies necessary for successful leadership.

Here are self-directed exercises established and rising leaders can implement to enhance all four arenas where strong leadership skills are needed:

Build meaningful work relationships – Have intentional team interaction, like asking about interests outside the office or writing sincere thank you notes to individual members for jobs done well.
Motivate others – Write an open letter to acknowledge your team’s achievements, administer a team morale survey, or initiate a simple rewards program to show appreciation.
Strategize for improvement – Create a task force to make a “stop doing” list of outdated or cumbersome procedures and policies, ask individual team members to define quality and how the company achieves it.
Coach others – Conduct individual goal-setting meetings with your team, institute a new hire forum to discuss workplace excellence, and simply ask the team often, “how are things going?”
Drive positive work values – Openly discuss what it means to be value-driven, identify and clarify team norms for professional interaction, write the workplace values that define your leadership approach and share with all.
Build trust – Ask a small group to identify “trust busters” and work to eliminate these, establish a feedback group to discuss levels of trust within the team, define authentic behavior for yourself.
Conduct better meetings – Address latecomers to eliminate tardiness, let the team know you’re working on facilitation skills and ask for feedback, stop meetings midway to ask for suggestions, list ways to cut down on meetings.
Clarify issues – Create a committee to identify and prioritize team issues, find a personal mentor to talk openly about leadership issues, try to identify patterns in recurring issues, log how long it takes to resolve issues.
Vision – Discuss the future of the team with them often, keep a journal for visionary thinking of needs, wants, desire, and dreams, write the “best case” scenario for your team’s future and share with them.

Without the opportunity or external challenge, it’s hard to truly see a person’s intrinsic leadership capabilities. The Vistage Emerging Leader program provides the perfect opportunity for participants to learn the techniques of true leaders, and a forum to put those techniques to use to build confidence, face challenges, and make decisions.