The last twelve months have seen huge shifts in the workplace from work from home (WFH) becoming the norm, hybrid working making an impact, and an economic recovery unimagined a year ago.
These separate yet connected events have created movement in the workplace, which no one predicted in the summer of 2020.
The BBC recently shared the CIPD latest research, indicating that over 56% of 2,000 firms surveyed planned to hire this year.
One of the sectors with the strongest hiring intention includes healthcare and its aligned industries.
Perhaps your star performers are looking around at your biggest competitor.
The good news is that while our employees might want to develop their careers, they are more likely to leave a below parr leader who has shown their true colours during the last year.
With more movement happening throughout organisations this year, how do you become the leader nobody wants to leave?
The answer involves honing and demonstrating those traditional leadership skills aligned with how our employees want to be treated today.
Lead the Team and The Results
I know this is an obvious statement, and yet far too many individuals still get this wrong. It consistently comes up during our insights discovery training. Leaders at all levels discover that they confuse driving and leading the delivery of results with leading a team of human beings.
This mistake has become more prevalent during the Covid crisis. Though many individuals have truly led their teams by understanding what hybrid working means, others have, in some cases, unexpectantly shown a distinct lack of empathy.
For example, expecting that the lack of a daily commute means more time at the desk or that boundaries on phone calls out of working hours have been broken down and are no longer valid.
A head-hunter friend of mine shared with me recently that she had received more enquiries last year than the year before because many people were experiencing a significant lack of flexibility from their first-line manager.
Lead the Accountability and Expectation Process
As high performers, we all have a level of accountability based on our expectations of ourselves and, of course, what our organisation wants.
When leaders behave inconsistently around the accountability and responsibility process and allow some team members to underperform at the expense of more successful team members, we reduce our appeal as a leader to stay around.
Expectations here are key; though, so is communication. Did Jane and James take away the same message or not?
Perhaps we did not agree on what was required and what hybrid working means in our organisation. Maybe our expectations on working remotely versus task achievement were different.
Perhaps certain individuals with homeschooling responsibility were allowed more flex than other individuals in the team who didn’t, on the surface, have the same responsibilities – though they were grappling with their isolation from others and their mental health was suffering.
Accountability of the task is one thing though interestingly, the delegation of work in the right context positively impacts your popularity. Let me explain.
Lead Through Delegation
Over many years as a leadership trainer and coach, I strongly encourage delegating to individuals in your team.
Yet leaders consistently struggle with this skill, either by being a control freak who meddles and micromanages rather than motivates or by abdicating everything to individuals who are not ready for the responsibility of the task.
Most leaders do not delegate enough and, for some reason, don’t appreciate that delegation is a fabulous development tool.
So, rather than delegate involved projects and then mentor their team through the process, they do the work themselves and wait to delegate when the staff member can deliver with no supervision; unfortunately, that isn’t how people grow.
They also hold a false belief that delegating more challenging work may be seen by their staff as avoiding their responsibilities.
The truth is leaders who consistently delegate are surprised by how appreciative their team members are to have the new responsibilities and more challenging work. Delegation greatly assists their employee’s belief that their leaders care about their careers and trust them to do good work.
This leads me onto one final area to explore aligned and connected to the power of delegation, and that is development.
Lead Through Development
Read any leadership content online over the last few years, and a consistent theme relates to the largest cohort of workers, the Millennials, wanting to be ‘developed’.
There is, of course, an upside to this, and that is by developing our team, we grow our business.
Unfortunately, last year saw a distinct lack of development taking place.
Though some organisations continued to develop their teams, others stopped everything, and development and training budgets were slashed.
It is not surprising then to read reports from McKinsey and PWC on the skills gap that is now occurring and its impact.
If the development of your team was off the agenda last year, please make sure it returns. Not only could you improve performance, but you could also stop your star performers from leaving too.
Next Steps?
Creating success and a culture where individuals want to stay is critical in our current climate.
If you want help leading and engaging your team and would like extra support, we can help.
Click here to learn more about the leadership programmes we lead.
Until next time,
Julia
