Earlier this summer, we began to select articles from leadership and management websites around the internet to support your professional development. The publication of this post makes three roundups in our new series, a series which is firmly establishing itself as we seek to provide you with the best news and thoughts on leadership topics.
We start today’s roundup with a post from the Knowledge and Insights section of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). This insightful post lays out a vision of seven key attributes employees will need in the world of hybrid work.
The CMI, the benchmark institution for raising professional standards in the leadership and management industry, asked a leading psychologist to analyse the World Economic Forum’s ‘Future of Jobs’ report, and the finding was that automation and globalisation were going to drive a shift in job skills and requirements. The institute then identified the seven key competencies they believe will be in high demand over the next decade:
This is an important article, and we’re not going to argue against these predictions. Resilience, diversity and inclusion, and the use of tech have all come to the forefront during this pandemic. Meanwhile, critical thinking has always been an important part of leadership and will continue to be. We offer several courses to help you prepare for the future the CMI envisages:
This article in renowned US business publication Fast Company discusses the impact of perfectionism on organisations in which leaders expect only flawless performance. The writer states that these organisations will receive what they wish for, but that the demands for perfection will produce the less desirable results of stress, anxiety, depression, resentment, exhaustion, and, overall, burnout after a while.
The author recommends that leaders develop a healthy culture that encourages a growth mindset, by taking the following measures:
Evidently, such an impact isn’t good, and we’d add to the outcomes explained that the quest for perfection will diminish productivity, increase frustration, and dismantle the confidence of teams, who will take longer to complete tasks and feel generally unsure of whether they’ve executed tasks to the desired standard.
If your workplace culture demands perfection from your employee, we’d suggest two courses: our ‘Leading Through Change Programme’, which will enable you to manage change successfully in your organisation (because the impact of the culture on the employees suggests there will be a need to change).
More importantly, we’d recommend our ‘Strategic Wellbeing and Resilience Programme’, which invites the participants to consider the company culture, and how they can integrate coaching and supportive measures at a policy level. Since you’ll be implementing change in your organisation, the course also covers leading through change and how to support your employees during periods of change.
Also from Fast Company, this article discusses the change in the nature of career progression, explaining that whereas careers were ladders before, now they’re ‘lattices of horizontal and vertical opportunities, shaped by personal and professional aspirations, in addition to company needs’. This means businesses must foster a growth mindset, allow employees to diversify their skillset, and avoid pigeonholing employees as performing a specific role for which they only need particular skills.
Lack of training and development opportunities, resulting in lesser engagement from employees with their work, is a major reason why employers are seeing their best talent head for the door. They should consider their employees’ different talents and how to harness these for the good of their organisations. Potential is going to waste, otherwise.
As a coaching and training and development company ourselves, we wholeheartedly embrace training drives and the promotion of professional development and encourage professionals to build their skillsets. Developing new skills makes you more employable and valuable to your employer, and creates options for them. You solve problems for them. When reviewing requests from employees for training, the organisations must understand how the employee’s new skills will benefit the organisation when they’ve completed the training.
Here we’d recommend our ‘The Role of the Human Resources Director’ course. Human resources teams play an important part in shaping culture and professional development in organisations. On the course, participants will learn how to lead HR departments, form initiatives in line with the organisation’s aims, take responsibility for the organisation’s talent functions and culture, analyse employee feedback and data to create a better working environment and engaged culture, and more.
In this article on the Entrepreneur publication website, the contributor discusses seven different ways to successfully manage managers. The contributor highlights that a manager’s superiors should not only be overseeing the manager’s work but also ensuring the manager is supporting their team effectively. They suggest seven ways to manage a manager successfully:
Management of others entails a delicate balance of allowing subordinates enough autonomy to operate while still supervising and supporting them. The above recommendations create the space for the managers to perform and develop without feeling as if they’re being micromanaged.
Here we’d recommend a coaching course, such as our CMI-accredited Level 5 and Level 7 Coaching and Mentoring programmes, to help you embed coaching into your organisational culture. Coaching is a way to guide and support employees, and boost their performance, by encouraging them to find solutions themselves to challenges. As well as learning how to incorporate coaching into your organisational culture, you’ll gain insight into different coaching models on these courses, how to hold coaching conversations that motivate team members, and ways to develop people in line with performance management objectives.
The articles above are a call to action for organisations to change their cultures, where necessary, to foster growth mindsets and empower employees, and respond to the demands of the future. This is beneficial for the employees and for their organisations, allowing the former to develop professionally and the latter to retain top talent, have more options at their disposal, and solve problems. Changes in culture create upheaval, however, so organisations must support their employees before, during, and after the organisational change.
Besides the courses we’ve recommended above, we invite you to explore all of our training courses by visiting our Courses page. To book a place on the course or find out more about it, click on the course, or email us at enquiries@inpd.co.uk, message us via the form on our Contact page or call us on 0161 826 3139. We’re here to answer your questions and support you in your professional development journey, and we look forward to welcoming you to InPD.