There’s a saying that employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers – and today they are leaving more often than ever. According to ONS statistics, the average tenure of an employee in the UK is falling, mirroring what is happening in the US where it is just 1.5 years. What do these numbers mean? Are managers doing that bad of a job engaging and retaining their people? Is this churn and burn dynamic the new norm?
In today’s competitive environment, only high performing organisations will survive. There is intense pressure, leaving little or no margin for error. Keeping ahead of the competition demands a leadership team who understand that both individual and group contributions are paramount in order for the organisation to succeed.
Career transition advice historically helps clients do things like create a barnstorming CV, practise to ace an interview, develop mind blowing propositions or build a 30” sales pitch – as if they were simply goals to knock over.
At Rialto, we increasingly think goals alone are insufficient. A focus on goals doesn’t seem to work that well in today’s volatile world which is why much careers advice isn’t worth getting. So instead of goals, adopt a systems approach to career transition.
The need for effective leadership at all levels in our organisations has never been greater.
The increasing levels of regulation, litigation risk, morale and stress problems within many workplaces, public suspicion about the motives of many large corporate bodies, increasing complexity and the accelerating rate of change all conspire to make greater demands on organisational leaders than ever before.
Leaders need to deal with an extensive range of problems. They range from crises which need focused direction to system and management problems where the leader has to bring the enhanced thinking and appropriate resources to bear on the problem.
Whatever the level of the individual leader it seems that we can identify six key areas where leaders need to be more effective particularly if they want to be sustainable in their positions and work in a diverse and multi-cultural setting:
Not only are 70% of organisational changes failing, but that failure rate is increasing. According to research from IBM, the need to lead change is growing, but the ability to do it successfully is shrinking.
Change is getting harder. A single leadership team can be overwhelmed by workload pressures, stretched across different countries and time zones creating the risk of missing concerns and difficulties arising in separate teams. Additionally there is a trend for less investment in change management programmes. Read our 5 tips to ensure change management success.
Who will lead the company in five years’ time?
How confident are you that the people in your leadership have the potential to step up to the next level and ultimately to the C-suite?
Not everyone who excels in a senior management position have the capability to move into an executive leadership role. Succession risk at the executive tier is a critical issue so how can organisations ensure that they have the right people in their leadership pipeline that are able to step up to senior level. Is now the time to consider executive coaching?
Performance management discussions are one of the most frequently criticised talent management practices, with criticisms ranging from their being an enormous waste of time to them having a destructive impact on the relationship between managers and their subordinates.
The key to achieving an effective performance management discussion requires having a conceptually sound business framework that links and integrates strategy, management processes, and comprehensive metrics to an effective process for continuous improvement.
Many organisations often face themselves with the challenge of having square pegs in roles, which can have a negative effect on individual and team performance.
Rialto Director, Richard Chiumento, explains how to avoid creating square pegs and how to successfully resolve those individuals who become misaligned.
Organisations are constantly seeking new ways to ensure their management and employees are more productive and their businesses are more profitable.
Many companies have created rigorous strategic plans that don’t come close to delivering the required outcomes. According to research, the average team achieves only 63% of the objectives of their strategic plans.(Source: Harvard Business Review 2005).
The key issues of a high performance team include, how well the team communicates, aligns itself around top initiatives, creates short term/long-term plans and holds themselves accountable to deliver the required results.
Rialto approaches team development and effectiveness in the context of an organisations vision, mission and business goals. We build leadership and management capability at all levels of the organisation ensuring that unique team attributes and skills are aligned towards achieving desired business results.
We utilise models and practices that successfully address teamwork, emotional intelligence, networking, influencing others, improving team performance and managing difficult conversations through effective coaching and talent assessment techniques.
It is understandable that many UK leaders will have started the year with a sense of trepidation. The impact of Brexit looms large and will come more sharply into focus when Article 50 is triggered. But business leaders cannot afford for 2017 to be just about planning to leave the EU. There are too many other factors to take into consideration if leaders are to future-proof their organisations and ensure their work-forces remain motivated and productive and able to compete on a world stage.
