What Everyone Forgets About Leadership

With a leadership development industry being worth over $366 billion, we’re spending more and more on improvements - but are we getting results?

Was Leadership Development Ever Relevant?

We’ve all been there. Workshops, seminars, training days, you name it. And while they may provide some valuable insight into what a good leader is, have they ever been very practical in showcasing how a leader can improve on a day-to-day, human-to-human basis? Sure we all know that great leaders can pave the way for great success, but it’s not always something we can learn from study. In fact, research shows that 70 percent of people try but end up giving up on the methods they’ve picked up in order to improve their leadership skills.

Perhaps We’re All a Bit Disconnected

“When employees feel engaged, they care about the company and they do their best work to achieve the company's goals.” - smarp.com

 Employee engagement can mean many things to all those involved within a company, but at its core, it’s about every employee feeling a part of the company, the culture and having a sense of belonging and worth - ultimately defining their commitment and therefore work ethic. Currently, the level of employee engagement in the global workplace is at only 15 percent, according to smarp.com. That’s a pretty shocking figure to come to terms with, but it also raises the question: what can we do to improve engagement?

Leaders Exists In Every Company, at Every Level

It’s easy to assume that it’s down to C-Suite leaders to bring about change and be the ones that transform the future of a company. While this is true, it’s crucial to understand that by encouraging everyone to lead - and most importantly lead by example - massive benefits can be found. Those in leadership positions can be more effective, employee engagement can soar, and productivity can reach new heights.

A key point to also consider is just how well leaders are being experienced by their colleagues and most importantly, by those who report to them. It’s here that we find the key differential in great leadership training.

Your Mind is on Metrics - But Are They the Right Ones?

Perhaps the most apparent way to measure the effectiveness of leadership is to look at the results of the company as a whole - whether that’s increased productivity, KPIs, sales, whatever it is that may show business growth. Unfortunately, measuring leadership in this way often leads to disappointment. Why? Because leadership improvement cannot simply be measured in business results.

Leadership is about people. It’s about human action and human interaction. But can we effectively measure such interactions when oftentimes these are passing moments that can easily go under the radar?

Making Leadership a Measurable Daily Behavior

Echelon+ provides a unique solution that not only provides invaluable leadership skills and lessons, it also provides an effective way to measure leadership interactions with all company personnel. Perhaps most crucially, it also offers reliable feedback from every employee within the company to accurately gauge just how productive said interactions were.

Not only does this provide the company with insight into how their leaders’ actions are having an effect, it means that those with whom they interact can have a say - which, at the end of the day, is what’s most important in measuring engagement and how effective a leader really is.

Leadership is a Verb; it’s a Doing Word

When leaders start their journey on Echelon+, they go through the beginning levels of understanding more about themselves. It’s in these stages that leaders can define their own Core Values. By understanding what values matter to them and how they wish to be perceived by others, they can immediately begin to understand what it’ll take to have a lasting impact as a leader.

From here, each leader is shown Keystone Leadership Behaviors (KLBs), that in turn set tasks and skills in which they’ll be challenged to carry out within the workplace. These can be as simple as approaching a colleague and asking them about their weekend. Why? Because this shows a level of interaction that they perhaps had not had with their team members in the past, and actively represents their efforts to engage with their team, putting new skills into action.

Constructive Feedback Makes a Great Leader

Following the example given above, the colleague who was approached by their leader can then confirm the interaction happened via the Echelon+ app, and give a score based on how they feel it went; such as whether it was genuine or beneficial. This feedback once relayed to the leader provides immediate insight into how others are experiencing them as a leader - what they're doing well already and what they can do better. Perhaps they nailed it the first time, in which case they’ll be rewarded with points, allowing them to level up and move onto further, more advanced tasks.

Effective Leadership Training, in the Palm of Your Hands

Echelon+ removes the consultant and puts a tailored leadership development program in your hands. Literally.

It’s a far cry from the tired and ineffective methods of traditional leadership training and allows people to take control of their own development, specific to their needs. By acquiring points and levelling up through the app, users can find a level of enjoyment in developing their skills, while leaving a lasting (and measurable) impact within the company.

If you’d like to learn more and how Echelon+ can create a tailored experience for your workplace leadership development, contact us today and we’ll help to discover your strengths and weaknesses, turning them into actionable lessons for your future development.