1 post tagged “labour market”

Survey after survey show that employees don’t’ want just good pay, they want to be developed, valued and work for an organisation that makes a positive contribution to their communities.

For example, earlier this year the Sunday Times published its results for the 100 Best Companies to Work For. It demonstrated that the best businesses value their employees, and as a consequence have low staff turnover. Their employees want to work for them and stay with them, a highly prized commodity in today’s tight labour market.

The survey revealed the best performing businesses had high levels of engagement with their staff. Clearly good employers value feedback and consult regularly with their employees over issues that might affect them.

But who does the consulting, the listening, the valuing? It is not the “business” but the leaders and managers within it. They demonstrate through their behaviour the importance of these things.

But how do we ensure that our managers and leaders are equipped with the skills to make them successful? The answer is straight forward enough:

By recruiting those people who want to take on the responsibility for leading and managing others and by giving them the necessary Management Training and support to enable them to succeed.

In this way a Management Training programme can add real value to the business. However, Management Training should not be about sitting in a classroom! A Management Training programme that truly seeks to develop it’s managers and leaders should encompass a wide range of learning actions to help the participants develop the necessary management and leadership behaviours that will make the business successful.

For example, the programme could contain project work, community work, starting a business, personal coaching as well as personal learning actions and research. The programme should also practical and relevant to the business and the participants on it. There is no point including theory or topics that cannot be used!

At the end of the day the most successful businesses are ones where there is a real sense of shared ownership for the success of the business and this stems from the leader’s and manager’s ability to engage with their staff, which they can learn from the right type of Management Training.