Closing the leadership gap within small business requires a dramatic transformation in company culture. Employees must trust managers, have open communications channels, and understand their roles within the mission of their employer.
Problematic for many businesses is their failure to implement strategies and initiatives designed to close this gap, making it hard for them to compete in their market or expand their business.
1. Recruiting
Recruitment is the practice of recruiting qualified candidates for open positions at your organization. Recruiting can take many forms, from writing job descriptions and interviewing to selecting and training new hires – it all plays an integral part of making your company run more smoothly!
At the core of recruiting is understanding your company’s needs in order to find suitable candidates. This analysis may include creating a talent gap analysis or writing job descriptions outlining specific qualifications you seek in employees.
Hiring can be a complex and time-consuming task that takes both resources and planning to complete successfully. To make the process more effective, it’s wise to be strategic when choosing where and who to advertise the position – for instance if you need someone with digital skills it might make sense to post an ad on an industry specific job site such as Indeed or Monster.
Promotion of your company culture during recruitment is also crucial. Candidates look beyond mere salary and benefits packages when considering new employment; they want to feel like part of an integral team environment.
Keep up with the latest technology – hiring processes and tools can help attract candidates with specific skills that fit what you need. An applicant tracking system (ATS) with real-time dashboards and analytics reporting can give you valuable insight into improving recruiting efforts; also using such an ATS can allow you to monitor every stage of recruitment from initial contact through to acceptance of offers by candidates.
2. Training
Leaders are an essential element to the success of any company. While leadership skills may come naturally to some individuals, others can learn and refine them through training programs designed to teach these essential abilities. Proper education for developing these abilities is imperative to business’ growth and future prosperity.
Unfortunately, many companies struggle to fill an increasing number of leadership positions. With Baby Boomers retiring early and companies expanding rapidly, this challenge can become especially formidable. However, these organizations can close this gap by investing in their employees through targeted training courses and targeted investments in employee development.
Training requires senior leaders to model the behaviors being taught. When leaders feel that leadership development is an important priority, they are more likely to take it seriously and put in the effort necessary for it. A young, emerging leader should never get training from someone who shrugs it off or acts as though it doesn’t matter.
An effective way of identifying areas requiring training is to review employee evaluations and feedback and identify any recurring themes or incidents. Error reports and customer complaints can also provide useful insight, revealing trends that leadership training could address.
Closing the leadership gap takes time and intentional effort, but will prove highly profitable for businesses in the long run. Doing so will create a more structured leadership development framework, facilitate internal candidate training programs and boost company culture overall.
Training can only be successful when all members of an organization participate. If a young, aspiring leader attends leadership training only to have their boss discredit it as unimportant, they are unlikely to take that training seriously going forward.
3. Mentoring
Mentorship offers many advantages for employees, from helping them develop crucial skills and learn about new areas of the business to increasing employee engagement – participants report feeling that mentoring helped them become more invested in their roles.
To help employees feel engaged, it is vitally important that mentoring relationships have clear goals and objectives. This may involve creating a formal program matching mentors with mentees or simply encouraging employees to search out potential mentors themselves; when doing the latter, providing a list of questions for use when meeting with potential mentors could prove especially helpful.
Dea suggests selecting a mentor who can offer support in areas that interest their mentee most, and who shares some kind of commonality – perhaps another department, background or career path is shared between both of them.
Businesses often rely on mentoring strategies such as high-potential mentoring to identify and foster up-and-coming leadership talent, wherein a junior-level employee is paired with a senior leader for career coaching interactions. Other organizations use “shadowing programs,” wherein the mentee spends time in the office of more senior-level colleagues in order to observe how these experienced workers complete their jobs while picking up valuable tips. Finally, some companies utilize “flash mentoring sessions”, which involve short and targeted meetings designed to address specific learning goals or objectives.
4. Coaching
Leaders can adapt a more coaching-like approach to people management in order to close the leadership gap and increase employee retention. This means providing team members with all of the skills, resources and support needed for them to thrive in their roles on their team. Likewise, it may increase collaboration, openness, employee retention rates as well as team collaboration.
Leadership coaching differs from mentoring in that coaching usually entails a structured programme with clear expectations while mentoring tends to be less structured and informal. Leadership coaches are typically experienced managers with formal coaching credentials while mentors may have no professional coaching qualifications or experience.
Even though they differ significantly, both coaching and mentoring play an essential part in any business’s learning and development strategy. Both focus on developing people to become leaders within an organization while improving its overall performance.
However, it is crucial that one differentiate between coaching and mentoring to ensure they are used effectively. Research indicates that both interventions have positive results on employees’ performance and work engagement.
Studies on leadership mentoring revealed that employees experienced improved job satisfaction and relationships at work after being assigned a mentor, due to them building trusting relationships with their mentor and receiving guidance and advice on how to address challenges at work.
Note that mentoring programs only work effectively if all members of an organization participate. If an employee attends leadership training but their boss disregards it or dismisses its significance, then that training will have no lasting effect on that individual.
5. Supporting Employees
Employees who feel supported at work tend to be more confident and motivated; this goes beyond providing practical help like helping with job-related concerns or creating healthy working relationships; it includes helping them cope with personal matters that could compromise their performance at work.
Of course, successful leadership requires many hard and soft skills; one of the most vital – but often neglected – components is employee support. This does not simply involve offering listening ears or accepting employee feedback; rather it could include hiring outside counsel when necessary, providing access to health insurance plans, or offering flexible work arrangements for those caring for children or elders.
Good managers know they must strike a delicate balance between being an authoritative figure and an employee’s source of support, especially when handling delicate situations that affect direct employees such as breaking bad news or mediating a conflict.
Overall, supportive leadership can help your small business bridge the leadership gap by increasing morale and productivity as well as encouraging employees to seek new challenges. Furthermore, it allows leaders to focus on what truly matters – driving business growth – while making sure their teams have everything they require for success.
As work evolves rapidly, possessing strong leadership abilities is increasingly critical to the success of any organization. Unfortunately, however, many managers are finding it challenging to fill their roles, leaving a significant void between what’s necessary and available resources.