How HR Can Inspire Strong Leadership Throughout the Company
Source: @punttim
It takes robust management to move a business forward and sustain its growth. Great leaders know how to engage individuals and make them feel valued and driven to reach their potentials. An engaged workforce is more productive, performs better, and works harder to achieve company goals.
The Human Resource staff is in a core position to influence how a business works. Indeed, HR does more than handle employee relations, process payroll, and hire or fire workers. One of its most complex and crucial roles is to create excellent leaders who will steer the whole business to the path of success. With that said, here are three simple ways HR can foster effective and reliable leadership within the company.
Create Strong Company Values
Company values are principles that serve as your cultural foundation and guide your organization’s actions. They establish your identity, act as a uniting force for employees, and set your business apart from the competition. Your company’s ideals impact how you work with your clients, partners, customers, and shareholders.
Value setting is essential for every company but formulating one that truly reflects and aligns with your workplace culture could be challenging. Advice from HR job specialists in Manchester, JGA Recruitment is that ambiguous or hallow value statements can cause confusion among employees and diminish the credibility of the management team and it’s best to onboard HR talent that already have clear core beliefs that match company values to drive the values to the rest of the employees. Worst case scenario, muddy values can lead to poor company culture, effecting employee behavior and ultimately, it can put off customers.
When you create your value statement, ensure that it is specific, attainable, and well-defined so that the workforce will understand what they are working on to achieve. The process requires a careful examination of your company’s mission, vision, and goals. What behaviors do you want the employees to display when they come to work? Reliability? Accountability? Teamwork? Remember to keep your statement short and straightforward so that it is easy to remember and understand. More importantly, make it uniquely yours to make you stand out from other companies.
Take the Initiative and Grow the Business
Business growth takes a long time and plenty of hard work. And with the stiff competition, breaking into the market is tremendously hard. However, do not delay taking the lead in driving the company forward. How? By planning well and wisely. Successful companies often set out with a long-term strategy that focuses on sustainable growth. Your first step is to build and strengthen the company’s culture and create a way to bring in only the top talent.
Invest in your employees. Aside from training them, you can cultivate a passion for work through an incentive system, including cash bonuses, vacation perks, and acknowledgment. Engagement helps eliminate employee turnover, allowing you to focus on cultivating leaders and developing the business.
If you are going to invest in your employees, don’t forget to invest in your leadership as well. We go into more detail here; Leadership Coaching: how to motivate and bring out the best of your employees. By investing in your leadership style you will learn how to offer guidance and support and bring out the very best in your team, thus helping the business to grow.
Take advantage of technology to promote your brand and reach a broader audience. You will attract more customers and top candidates to fill vital job positions as your company expands. You can work with the marketing department to determine how to best use the internet, especially social media, to achieve your goal.
Inspire Learning
A lucrative compensation package is one factor that draws in employees. But most will only stay if the company has a concrete learning and development plan in place. Support your employees' interest in professional and career advancement by providing them with training, skill enhancement courses, and other development activities.
As your company grows, you may encounter hard-to-hire positions. Instead of recruiting new talent, check first if any of your existing employees have the potential to perform the job. Then invest in upskilling your workers to ensure they are well-equipped to take on new roles and adjust to changes. Upskilling also plugs in any skills gaps, making the workforce more efficient and productive.
Although not everyone wants a management position in the future, consider providing the employees with leadership or management skills courses and inspire them to become autonomous. The purpose of this training is to instill in them the characteristics of a good leader. In the long run, this will enable them to initiate their own projects.