Natasha Wallace
Transcript taken from the video above
We need to grow to succeed. People need to grow and develop, and so do organisations. And unless we're developing people as leaders, we're not being effective.
People expect development as part of the unwritten set of expectations between the employee and the employer. Organisations that support learning and development help employees fulfil two fundamental human needs. The need to be sure they're making progress and the desire to achieve mastery. Therefore, development of employees is fundamental to creating a culture of wellbeing.
Employees learn throughout their career so they can function effectively in their roles. Leaders can catalyse that learning by providing the right level of support and guidance.
And the leaders who are effective don't only depend on training to support the learning of their people.
Effective leaders ingrain opportunities for learning in everyday experiences because they believe people can grow. They see failure and change as an inevitable part of life and a great opportunity to learn. Effective leaders encourage people to learn based on their own unique needs, seeing it as a fundamental human need, not an optional cost related activity.
Effective leaders aren't threatened by people becoming better than them. They encourage it and they encourage it in everyone, not just the more ambitious. They connect the team to other people with skills and knowledge they don't have, encourage experimentation and creativity, and want to learn themselves and role model learning behaviour.
Top performing organisations are said to be five times more likely to have a learning culture. And the best leaders recognise that simply recruiting the right skills isn't enough. They know they must develop talent internally and understand that investing time and money in learning and development is simply part of creating good business results and a sustainable organisation. Leaders who see employees as valuable assets will achieve higher levels of performance in the long term.
Finally, leaders are employees too, and they too are growing and see learning as a lifelong journey, not one that stops when you become a leader. Their results are impacted positively, as is their credibility and long term performance.
Learning and growing is important. In order to grow and encourage those around us to do the same, we need to take a step back and understand the process.
