Every business operates in a crowded marketplace with competitors and rivals vying for the attention of customers. As a business, you need to be streamlined and responsive, continually pushing forward with innovative solutions that make you the go-to business.
And this means strong leaders and leadership. There is a whole sector of academia that looks at the roles and types of leadership that are important within a business.
Nature or nurture?
Many people assume that people are either born leaders or not. It is true that a successful leader has certain attributes but even they have learnt to be a leader, what it means, how people react, what needs to happen and when.
If your business lacks leaders, it will lack focus and direction as well as the person or people who can push things on and bring the staff team with it.
Evolve offers programmes that upskill workers, moulding them into the leaders that your business needs and wants. And these are the five reasons why improving on the skills of leaders will make a difference to your business.
1. Improved team morale
Morale is about the overall ambience and the emotional well-being that people enjoy about working for your company or business. People need several things from a leader—direction, feedback and praise. And yet, all too often, these basics needs are not met.
From supervisors to department heads to the CEO, leadership spans many levels of your organisation. But it only takes a weaker link in the leadership chain for the whole thing to become weaker than it should be.
Poor leadership means poor staff morale. Strong leadership and direction means boundaries and creativity, it means excellent management of people and their aspirations.
2. Better productivity
This is an ongoing issue in business across the country, in all sectors and industries—how to get more and improved levels of productivity. This might mean investing in new machinery, changing or tweaking a process or it may mean staff working smarter, but not harder; or it could be all three of these factors.
A strong leader can see the bigger picture. They can identify where productivity is stalling, where the bottlenecks in the flow of productivity are, but—and this is the important bit—they can initiate change in a way that is welcomed, and not feared.
3. Better staff retention
When people are valued by the company they work for, they stay. When they feel challenged in their work, when they feel safe, when they feel they are an important and integral part of the process, they stay.
Continually recruiting new staff is disruptive for a company, as well as expensive. New staff can signal new growth but it can also be symptomatic of a bigger issue: poor staff retention. Poor leadership often leads to poor retention.
4. Better bottom line
From suppliers to wages, the rising costs of running a business severely dent a business’s bottom line. As a business, you need to be constantly and consistently monitoring your outgoings, the cost of raw materials and other expenditure items.
Monitoring is one thing, being proactive and decreasing overheads with new technology and new, cheaper, leaner ways of doing things are all things that a good business leader will bring.
5. Faster growth
And these four reasons combine to give the fifth reason to why people, who have completed courses to become better leaders, benefit a company—providing faster, sustainable and scalable growth.
The majority of businesses want to grow, but they need a firm foundation with well-laid roots and the right kinds of growth in the right direction. Growth that is too quick causes weaker strands of growth that can prove to be problematic.
But, with strong leadership, your business can grow in the right direction. This growth will be sustainable growth and scaled at a speed that suits your business.
Upskill your leaders
Leadership needs to be different things at different times to face the challenges and the opportunities that markets present.
But like other skills, you need to invest effort and resources into training people to be the leaders that your business needs. With business courses, they can gain these vitals skills without having to take months or even years out of work. They can study at work or at home, at a time that is convenient and at their own pace.
Just imagine how your business would benefit from skilled leadership.
- Click here to find out how Evolve can turn your team members into great leaders.
—Nick Cooper