Member Article

Developing your Rising Stars

Jill Cannon is a Management and Leadership Development Consultant at Aspire Development. With both in-house and consultancy experience, Jill works with businesses of all shapes, sizes and sectors across the UK, delivering business improvement through people development. Here she discusses why it’s important for companies to support their rising stars, and how the investment will provide a significant return.

I want to ask you a question. Think about your recruitment process, especially when looking to fill a junior position – what exactly is it you’re looking for?

In my experience, I’m certain your answer won’t be ‘a flash-in-the-pan’ – someone who will be with you for a matter of months to get some experience on their CV before moving on to the next big thing.

Rather, when recruiting for a permanent role, at a junior level, you’re looking for the next big thing – a rising star. You’ll want someone who will be with you over a longer period of time. You’ll want someone with raw talent. Someone you can develop and shape so that they fit seamlessly with your company’s culture; a person who will help your business to achieve its goals by optimising their outputs.

But how do you do this? What is key is providing ongoing learning and development, bringing with it a clear career progression plan. Countless studies have shown that people perform better in the workplace when they are encouraged to develop, are offered opportunities to learn and grow and feel like a valued member of the team. So how does this investment in your rising stars deliver ROI for you as a business owner?

As you know, recruitment is an expensive exercise. Not to mention the time, money and productivity also spent on training a new person and embedding them into the culture of your company. Research tells us that it’s cheaper and more cost-effective to nurture your existing talent so they can develop into more senior roles.

An example of this is, a few years ago, call centres were renowned for having a high turnover of staff and people joked it was a ‘bottoms-on-seat’ type of job. Development wasn’t seen as important – having people plugged into head-sets to take calls was the main focus. Fast-forward to today and call centres have realised that in order to retain their workforce, they have to provide the opportunity to learn and grow both personally and professionally, providing their employees with a number of different progression and promotion routes. As a result, the turnover of staff working in call centres has significantly dropped, meaning these companies have cut their recruitment costs while creating a happy workforce.

It’s a win-win situation: you cut the cost of recruitment while retaining an engaged and motivated workforce who has a deep-rooted knowledge of your company, its culture and the required key competencies. Plus, you know the people working for you - their personalities, team dynamics and so on. There are no nasty surprises when you hire someone who interviews really well and then is a nightmare to work with once their foot is in the door.

The benefits of developing your rising stars are clear to see, but before you go promoting your juniors into management positions, a word of warning first…

It’s important to remember that when people are making this step in their career, it’s often because they’re good at their current job – delivering work on a daily basis and doing-the-do. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have any management or leadership skills. At Aspire we recognise this conundrum – you want to develop your workforce but there’s also a skills gap that needs filing. That’s why we’ve created our Core Management Skills open programme.

During the course of the workshops, junior managers and supervisors of any business are shown how to improve their effectiveness as a leader in the workplace and gain an Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) qualification at the same time. Delegates develop practical techniques and core skills that are instrumental in achieving business objectives including: personal leadership, leading people and teams; managing performance; managing time and effectiveness; and delivering for the customer.

What makes our Leadership and Management programmes stand out is their practical nature. Learning new skills and knowledge is great, but it’s important that it makes a positive difference to actual performance, and this is the true measure of ROI when developing your rising stars.

For more information about Aspire’s open programmes, visit: http://www.aspiredevelopment.co.uk/ilm-training-open-programmes-west-yorkshire

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Aspire Development .