Any business owner or CEO knows that their company’s leaders are crucial to the success of their business. Poor leaders equate to poor employee satisfaction and, as a result, poor performance. It is no secret that poor performance has a direct impact on your business’s bottom line. Unfortunately, not all businesses are properly cultivating the best leadership for their employees. Over the next few articles, I will be writing a series about where, why and how you should be obtaining your organization’s best leaders. Be prepared, however, because the truths you discover during this series may not be the ones you were expecting.
What if the Outside Pool of Company Leaders Were to Suddenly Dry Up?
It’s not likely. It’s probably not even feasible. But ask yourself this… What would your company do if universities stopped creating management professionals? What would your company do if the pool of leaders in the job market were to suddenly dry up? Most companies would be in serious trouble, not knowing how to manage their businesses without the proper leaders in place. Some, however, would barely be affected by this change. In fact, some might not be affected at all.
The truth is, the best businesses know that cultivating their own leaders is crucial to their company’s success. Not only does training leaders and management from within provide employees with significant growth opportunities, but it allows businesses to mold their management into the business’s ideal of what a leader should be. In situations such as these, there are no worries about whether or not a new department manager will understand the corporate culture of your company or take proper care of your company’s greatest asset (your employees), because these managers have been created by your company. The leadership skills of these managers have been fostered by your executives and the standards you have set.
Complaints Regarding Team Leaders and Middle Management
There is no doubt that the corporate world is swarming with complaints of middle management and employee dissatisfaction. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you were to sit down with an employee of a company who promotes from within and cultivates their leaders and then sit with an employee of a company who hires from the outside, the feedback you would receive about how these two employees feel about their jobs and the companies they work for would be very, very different.
If you want your employees to be satisfied, productive and goal-orientated, you have to give them goals to strive for. Promoting from within and cultivating your own team leaders and management from your existing employee pool is one way to do this.
We will go into exactly how your company can begin doing this in a future post, but for now, understand that the job-seeking managers of the outside work force have very little to offer to your team of management when compared to that of your already-existing employee pool.