Investing in People

People—and how we invest in and develop them—will ultimately determine whether organisations thrive or merely survive. This article outlines how some principles of ‘Adaptive Leadership’ can support you to focus your priorities on your most important asset.

There is evidence in some places in the world, that investing in people is starting to be considered in the same context as investments in digitisation. Companies like IBM, PwC or Amazon are currently engaged in massive programs to upskill and reskill their workforces. In far too many organisations, however, human capital is still viewed as a commodity. McKinsey found that an astonishing 87% of executives report current or anticipated skill gaps[1] but lack a clear path for closing these gaps.

“I love the idea of finding stars within our employee base and having them mentored all the way to the top. At Zmarta we have a culture of openness and transparency combined with a lack of hierarchy. We encourage a winner’s culture coupled with a big pinch of humility”

— Gustav Berghog, former Group CEO of Zmarta Group

The importance of learning and development

As humans, we like having a sense of agency. The more we can lean into autonomy at work, the more engaged and motivated we’ll feel. After two years of seismic shifts in the ways we work, many employees have realised that they want to refresh or pivot their careers. In a competitive job market in which workers have the advantage, growing businesses can retain talent by creating an engaging work environment where learning is encouraged and applied. Organisations that can harness people’s desire for change and growth without losing their talents to another business, are the ones who are working smart. To achieve this companies need to proactively reskill and upskill their workforce to maintain a competitive advantage in a post-pandemic world. By redirecting their budgets into learning and development of leaders and their teams, businesses can extract additional value for both their stakeholders and their workforce. Upskilling investment is not only a protection against ‘The Great Resignation’, making learning a priority can also help high-growth businesses plan for future workforce needs to align with their business strategy.

From March to April 2020, the UK supermarket company Tesco reskilled 45,000 furloughed workers to process online orders. They ultimately hired 16,000 of those trained workers full-time. By offering a training program, Tesco expanded its hiring pool while helping workers develop new skills. The need for skills was driven by a sudden shift in the business model but the benefits of upskilling were ultimately more profitable than the alternatives.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure

Understanding the baseline for where your upskilling and reskilling efforts are starting from is essential to measure their progress and effectiveness. This is important both at a business level – retention and engagement statistics, and at an individual level with capability assessments. The benefits of upskilling and cross-skilling should soon become evident with regular repetition of these KPIs.

The role of adaptive leadership

Being intentional and proactive about teams’ learning and development drives both worker and business growth. As a leader, you can help your team members map out their individual pathways to greater job satisfaction by looking closely at their motivation and desires for personal development. Ultimately, internal transfers also allow organisations to retain talent and reduce training time that would otherwise be necessary for an external hire. By providing opportunities to learn across teams, leaders can also allow their employees can grow into new roles within the organisation.

*Fig: 1 - People factors involved in learning and development*

Leaders benefit from upskilling and development as much as any employee. In fact, it could be even more crucial to develop and improve leadership skills in order for them to be able to foster similar improvements in their team members. Correctly identifying the traits and drivers in employees and matching their motivations and capability for extension and improvement in skills and experience, requires empathy and people skills that may occasionally appear secondary to the control and functional talents inherent in leadership.

They are however fundamental to the principles of adaptive leadership, which uses an optimal talent mix that employs everyone’s skills to meet strategic objectives rather than just those of top-level executives. Leaders who foster trust and delegate tasks, allow their employees to experiment and develop in new areas; perhaps finding hidden talents and accelerating knowledge pathways.

Leaders that can drive people transformation through supporting their teams and offering them growth paths that open doors to new areas will be the real key to delivering a genuine return on an organisation’s investment in its people.

“Adaptive leadership has been summarised as the ability to mobilise a group of individuals to handle tough challenges and emerge triumphant. Given the relentless global turmoil organisations are facing, there probably is no more fitting model of leadership for the current times. Empowering your workforce is a natural way to upskill them and allow for personal experimentation and growth.”

— Clovis Rondineli Silva, Director Leadership Consulting , Alumni

6 ways to bring adaptive leadership in to play for natural upskilling

Keep job duties broad-based to maintain flexibility and change
Create fluid roles that can be filled by multiple people if a situation warrants it rather than keeping employees in a tightly defined box.
Encourage cross communication networks between employees so that they can share information rather than receive it top-down.
Create policies that encourage innovation and solution finding rather than hard and fast rules on how things can be done.
Build organisational structures that are temporary and fluid to meet immediate situations rather than regimented siloes that work in isolation.
Grant influence to employees that demonstrate the ability to add value to products or processes rather than maintain a rigid hierarchy.

About Alumni

Alumni has a wealth of in-depth knowledge on the specific challenges of leadership. As a business we have been investing in people for more than 30 years. Our expertise in executive development, leadership auditing and development can help secure performance and profitability, as well as strengthen and align leaders with their business strategies.

We offer individualised programmes for developing leaders and their teams using a thorough 360-degree analysis of competence, motivation, and possible development areas – all in the context of the organisation and its unique situation. We identify the challenges and focus areas linked to leaders and their teams and provide insight and advice on their learning and development potential.

References

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/mind-the-skills-gap