Category Archives: Employee Development

Employee Development includes helping employees engage and do their job with excellence

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Introduce A Life-Long Learning Culture

  By christinapd • March 30, 2012 - 7:31 am

life-long learning Be an organisation that supports life-long learning!

If you are a Leader, Manager or HR Professional then you may have established a life-long learning habit.  In a survey by CIPD  shows that out of 332 responses from organisations; 77% of them used coaching and mentoring.  All activity was to help develop and improve talent planning and performance. A massive 61% used coaching to aid leadership development.

So learning by leaders is alive and well!

I don’t know about you, but if you are anything like me, life-long learning has featured as a major part of my career to date.  My love of lifelong learning has not just been to develop my career and work life.  I have been a lifelong learner for life itself.  The zest for learning started at an early stage for me.  And I can confidently say that the drive for learning is in all of us from the beginning.

Whether we like it or not, we are all lifelong learners.  Some of us learning consciously, a lot of us unconsciously. Some of us learn how to make our lives better, and this is usually a conscious decision.  There are people who learn the hard way by making decisions which don’t honour themselves or others.

If you are a coach then you know the concept of “away from” motivation and “towards” motivation.  If you haven’t come across those terms, they describe whether your motivation to learn is to avoid pain or to seek pleasure. An organisation which has a whole philosophy around “towards” learning would definitely be on my list of wants. In other words an organisation which supports and values life-long learning and development is a must for my employer of choice.

Not only does life-long learning  support the development of valuable skills, knowledge and competence; it also gives an employee a conscious and positive experience of learning and bringing out the best in them. It also raises self-awareness, which raises awareness and an understanding of others.

Unfortunately too often, organisations will slash the training budget or undervalue the life-long learning experience as not their responsibility.  Some employers resist helping their people to develop beyond their current skill set for fear they will move on, taking their newly found skills with them.  These mind-sets actually teach something.  They teach their employees that they aren’t valuable and that the employers don’t support growth. For employers who want to bring out their best in people and develop a learning culture as one of their cornerstones of being an employer of choice, here are my top tips:

  •  Wherever possible have a clear internal career path to allow employees to progress up the ranks
  • Support people with professional or specialism qualifications, either with time or money.  Tie in, if necessary as a condition, but not for too long.
  • Support personal development as well as skills and knowledge development.  Helping employees develop greater self-awareness,  emotional intelligence, confidence or a sense of wellbeing through your learning activities, will definitely empower them, and pay dividends for you.
  • Support your employees to move on to pastures new, when it’s right for them.  It gives the right signals, and if people are free and encouraged to do the right thing for them, then they know you have their best interests at heart.  You will never lose the reputation for supporting them.
  • Use a multitude of learning opportunities.  Learning can be encouraged, when employees are working on projects, helping develop business plans, being involved in customer relationships etc.  If the learning potential for employees was articulated and defined, when they are helping to move the business on, then it creates a win/win culture.
  • If budgets are tight, consider developing your in-house expertise for disseminating skills and knowledge.  Have a skills register, so you can tap into the rich resource you may already have at your fingertips.  There is nothing more frustrating for an employee sitting there with requisite skills and you don’t make use of them.
  • Make sure your life-long learning culture is at the top of your communication strategy, both internally and externally.  Even if you aren’t recruiting right away, you will be at some point.  If your learning reputation is to go before you, then you need to articulate it at every opportunity.

If you are a leader, you are continually developing and "Sharpening the Saw".  If you lead and manage teams, then you must read about our Inspirational New Leadership Programme.  Sign up now to find out more details when we launch in July 2014.  There is no obligation to undertake the programme, if you sign up today, you will simply be sent more information about the programme.  You can unsubscribe at any time!  Click below to register for further information.

   
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Succession Planning for Success

  By christinapd • February 6, 2012 - 11:50 am
Succession Planning Succession planning for success

Succession planning is a bit of an art, if it’s carried out effectively that is.  Perhaps I’m old fashioned, or perhaps I’m just an advocate of the principle of fair, open and transparent to the point of being a proverbial pain.  But do we score an own goal by disincentivising our employees, by not appearing to be fair, open and transparent when succession planning?

Why do we need succession planning?  Well in its purist form, it is to make sure that the organisation can continue to function with the right people, with the right skills at the right time. Some spin-off benefits of succession planning, can be bringing in new and fresh talent, or existing employees with a clear and possible career path.

One of the biggest confusions I have seen about succession planning, is when people are being earmarked to replace people who may be ready to retire, or they might be coming up for their next career step.   The practice of naming specific people to replace an incumbent is not succession planning.   It is a contingency plan.  There may be all kinds of reasons to have a simple contingency strategy, but usually it is because it is a specialist post which would leave a huge vacuum if the incumbent suddenly left and the talent pool is severely limited.

Even a contingency strategy like this can cause resentment with employees if it is not distinctly used away from any succession planning exercised.  To use a contingency strategy properly, employees would have no doubt that the person being earmarked for replacement was the right person, with the right skills, and the process fits with the organisational ethos.

The difference between contingency plans and succession planning is that succession planning is about helping people develop and be in the right place at the right time for existing roles, or developing roles.  Good succession planning should be about bringing in a range of talent, either in or outside of the organisation, and it should be fair and open.

Before you begin succession planning, you need to have an ethos.  Now that ethos will differ depending upon the business you are in.  For example, if you are succession planning in a family run business, it’s usually the first born son…..oh alright, or daughter.  If you are in a corporation or a public sector organisation, you might want to have a policy of growing your talent within and there are a number of ways you can do that.   If you are a business on the move, you might want to look at bringing in new talent with new and evolving skills.  Or you might have a combination of these approaches.

To successfully succession plan, my top tips are:

  1. Be clear about why you want to introduce succession planning.
    • Is it to recruit new and evolving talent?
    • Is it to develop new leaders/managers/specialists for the future?
  2. Be open about why you want to introduce succession planning with your current workforce.
  3. Be clear with your current employees about your rationale and let them see the possibilities for them.  If there aren’t possibilities for them, then be clear about that, but let them know why.
  4. Be clear about the difference between contingency planning and succession planning.
  5. If you have a list in a drawer with names, and the people who are named don’t know they are on there, then you might want to think about how helpful or not this is.
  6. If you have a list of names, and it is to replace specialist jobs and no-one but the named persons know they are on the list, then again you might want to think about your strategy.
  7. Be clear about the criteria you are going to apply to any succession planning exercise and communicate it widely.
  8. Be structured.  Make sure that you and everyone knows how it is going to work and what they can expect.  Align other employee lifecycle events with the succession plan where needed.
  9. Be open to attracting talent from everywhere.  There may be someone in your current workforce, who might not be displaying the characteristics for future job filling now, but with an open invitation, they might just go for it.
  10. If you decide the future is through a graduate scheme, try to make it accessible for existing workers, or have a route through for existing workers.  There is nothing more annoying than being great and going the extra mile, doing the duties of higher level jobs and being told that you can’t compete because you have to have a degree.
  11. If you want to source talent from within, then tie your succession planning to your appraisal/feedback scheme.  It is the easiest way to have those conversations and help people work in a way that helps them aim for different roles.
  12. If employees think they can progress in their own company, then they can be more likely to stay.  Chart out career pathways for your staff so that they can plan for the future.
  13. If your succession plan includes attracting talent from outside the organisation, make sure you have tapped the potential within first.

I have seen succession plans which have caused distrust and suspicion, the most toxic of employee attitudes.  So don’t ruin great relationships with your employees; make your succession planning, business focused, fair and transparent.

What do you think? Do you have any recommendations to add?  Do you have any views?  I would love to hear from you.

If you are a leader, you are continually developing and "Sharpening the Saw".  If you lead and manage teams, then you must read about our Inspirational New Leadership Programme.  Sign up now to find out more details when we launch in July 2014.  There is no obligation to undertake the programme, if you sign up today, you will simply be sent more information about the programme.  You can unsubscribe at any time!  Click below to register for further information.