Losing great leaders is painful!
Last week, we looked at the expenditure on talent acquisition as an important investment, not just a cost. If you missed it, here’s the link.
This week, we are looking at not leaving it too late to recognise your return on investment (ROI) and the impact of losing a great leader.
The impact your leaders have and the period of time they are in place are crucial to assessing your ROI. The opportunity is to learn from it.
By looking at the leader’s impact and the investments you made, you can assess the impact of their mindsets, behaviours, leadership style and how they role modelled. You can then use this to shape future talent acquisition decisions.
But you don’t have to wait until they leave to gain value from understanding your ROI.
Don’t leave it too late.
By assessing ROI throughout, you can keep reviewing your leaders' needs and requirements to deliver the desired outcomes.
For example, if you are seeing low levels of sickness absence, but targets are being missed, is there an opportunity for additional investment to bring greater returns?
By exploring further, you discover that the leader is creating a supportive and inclusive environment, and the team feels connected. Still, they aren’t too clear on what needs to be done. You have a brilliant starting point, and clearly, this leader is doing well at nurturing their team, but they would benefit from some support on direction setting and performance goals.
By understanding this early, you can decide if the additional investment will be beneficial or if another course of action is required.
Providing development and support for that leader in this scenario should reduce the chances that they feel frustrated with their own capability, and they should be able to move their team to a higher level of performance. This reduces the chances of them or their team members choosing to move on.
Understanding your ROI
This won’t be the same for every organisation, but as a rule, the investment should return more value than what was spent.
ROI, especially when considering people, can be difficult to measure, but you should be able to identify quantitative and qualitative measures. Start thinking about this when you are creating an understanding of your investment, and then identify the outcomes you want from this leader.
For quantitative measures, you should look at the key employee experience and business performance metrics. How did these improve during their time in the role, and what was the financial impact?
For the qualitative measures, you should look at the impact of their presence in the organisation; yes, these will have had quantitative impacts, too, but there is a different value here.
This ROI review will help you understand the impacts of your investments, positively and negatively. Have you invested too much, just right or too little? What can you learn to shape future investments?
The aim of investing in great leaders is that they provide greater value for their team and the organisation. Reducing the frequency of losing great leaders is vital, not only to the ROI but to the impact felt by the team when a great leader leaves.
Losing a great leader is painful.
I’m going to ask you to pause.
Take a moment and remember a time when a leader you admired left.
What was the impact on you?
What was the impact on the wider team?
How well prepared was the organisation to replace this great leader with another?
If I think about my own experiences, I remember the sadness I felt when my leader left our team. It was hugely significant; they meant a lot to me, and I’m not ashamed to admit there were tears!
I also remember the immense disruption and change brought on by them leaving our team and a new leader being appointed.
It meant investing time and energy into building new relationships and establishing trust, understanding and knowledge. I remember I was distracted, and I was no longer able to focus. It meant I wasn’t as productive or happy as I had been.
Ultimately, it then led to more changes impacting my role. This is the natural impact of senior leaders leaving and new ones being appointed. Changes in leadership cause disruption; sometimes, it’s good, but there is always an impact.
It’s important to remember these impacts and factor them into your ROI. When a team loses a great leader, one they love working with – it’s painful and should be avoided.
When it can’t be avoided, try to ensure you can repeat what went well so the team who remain in your organisation quickly feel the benefits of a new leader, one they quickly identify as a leader they will also love working with. This reduces the pain of this change.
The key takeaways.
Keeping track of your investment approach from talent acquisition onwards will enable you to react quickly and ensure you continue to grow your leaders in the way they need to deliver the outcomes you want. With this approach, you will attract, retain, and develop great leaders for your organisation.
If you consider the teams’ experience, you should be appointing and developing leaders your people will love working for, the type of leader they are sad to lose. You want teams to be sad when their leaders leave; it means they and you were doing something right!
By understanding and learning from your ROIs, you’ll be able to quickly replace the sadness a team feels when they lose a leader with the excitement of meeting a new leader who they know they’ll also love working for.
By learning from the experience of the great leaders in your organisation and providing them with the support and ongoing development they need, you will maximise your return on investment and have a clearer path for future leadership acquisition, onboarding, and success.
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