Leadership Development News Roundup: Engaging Employees and Building Better Leaders Edition

With large numbers of baby boomers exiting the workforce and a young talent pool that’s untethered from the idea of long-term employment, keeping your top talent engaged and interested in sticking around at your organization requires serious focus on leadership and employee-development strategies.

This week we found a collection of leadership development articles and blog posts from around the Web that offer good advice on engaging employees and building better leaders at your organization.

• Using Heart-Centered Leadership to Engage Your Workforce. Entrepreneur:  “Leaders have to take personal responsibility and accountability for how they act in the workplace. ‘Everything you say and do has an impact,’ says Steinbrecher, who encourages leaders to perform 360-degree feedback assessments to truly understand how their leadership style is perceived in the company. A 360-degree feedback includes direct feedback from employees as well as a self-evaluation and can, in some cases, also include feedback from external sources such as customers and suppliers or other stakeholders.”

• Cynthia McCauley’s Manual for Leadership Development. Strategy+Business: “To be effective, every executive needs a broad perspective on both the organization and the business context that it operates within. This perspective can only come from having work experiences in different parts of the organization, in different businesses, and, for global companies, in different parts of the world. Although important, traditional leadership coaching, training, and mentoring programs -- which most companies have focused on in their efforts to build leadership skills -- are no substitute for carefully organized and managed on-the-job leadership experience.”

• Three Ways to Actually Engage Employees. Harvard Business Review: “Shareholders may care about financial performance, but employees are more often motivated by the impact their organization has on the world around them. That’s particularly true of younger employees, the Gen Xers and Millennials who make up more and more of today’s workforce. At a recent conference, Dell founder Michael Dell spoke of the billions of patients who received better health care and the billions of students worldwide who had access to better education as a result of Dell’s information technologies. He said nothing about the benefits to Dell’s bottom line.”

• The Leader's Leverage: Coaching Conversations That Generate High Results. Forbes: “One of the better studies conducted to evaluate the return on investing for leadership coaching involved a group of 100 executives. About half were at the VP level and half had six-figure incomes.  Conservative calculations showed that those who had received coaching estimated an average financial return of 5.7:1 for the money expended on coaching. For every dollar invested, the organization got back just under six.”

• To Become a Better Leader, Be Aware. Bloomberg Businessweek: “Uber-achievers, like many current and post-MBAs, often fall into the trap of thinking that working harder will get them ahead—and into that next leadership role. But hard work takes them only so far. What we fail to emphasize in business school and in corporate mentorship programs is the importance of developing softer skills—an ‘awareness’ of yourself and the people around you that helps you leverage previously untapped personal qualities. In other words, leaders need to develop empathy—a concept that is infinitely more complex than it sounds.”

Let us know if you’d like our help developing your organization’s leaders.

Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.