NZ Manufacturer July 2024 by Media Hawkes Bay Limited – Issuu

David O’Connor, Commercial Manager, The Learning Wave

While it is a comparatively easy exercise for businesses to show the Return on Investment on additional plant or machinery, being able to crunch the numbers of the real impact of leadership development training has traditionally been seen as more subjective, and made even harder when faced with the current headwinds of tight economic conditions.

Businesses that continued to prioritise investment in their people during the earlier 2020s are now repeating the rewards of increased leadership bench strength, higher levels of staff engagement, and little or no employee churn.

And many of our clients can now confidently calculate the return on their training investment.

Much was made of the ‘Great Resignation’ during 2020 and the impact this would have on businesses losing their best talent, we all know businesses that stopped leadership development training while others doubled down on their investment to upskill their leaders.

It is interesting that the commentary around the great resignation disappeared from HR and business reporting without much noise at all, and has been replaced with plenty of articles on the VUCA era – a trendy managerial acronym short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

In this VUCA era, it is reported that businesses need leaders – at all levels – with strong resilience, who can actively engage a wide and diverse group of staff, manage multiple projects and demands, and have a curious mindset to be able to lead their teams through constant change.

So it is the businesses that continue to invest in their people leaders who will be reaping the rewards in the VUCA era, and being able to not only retain their top talent but also have a bench of talented leaders ready to step in and take on more responsibility.

And it is these businesses that can measure the real return on their leadership training investment.

As a training provider, we find that helping develop their leadership capability is often the burning platform and the area of urgent need for business owners and training managers. 

We have always focused on linking learning to business outcomes and making sure that development is not only practical for today’s leaders but also able to be applied back on the job.

Being able to take seemingly complex leadership theories and concepts and turn them into real workplace tools is one of the biggest challenges for the training industry.

A failure to see a real return is often sighted in HR and industry research as the reason why companies don’t invest in leadership development.

With two decades of experience in New Zealand workplaces, we know that leaders today need practical leadership tools that can be easily applied.

They want leadership skills that are relevant to the Kiwi context and able to fit a range of small and medium businesses, and they want to be able to show that they are learning and applying their skills.

We do this by having an individual or team productivity improvement project as a key aspect of the leadership training package.

The project provides leaders the chance to not only show what leadership skills they have learned and applied, but also show the impact of their improvement project on team performance and dynamics, workplace efficiency, and workplace culture.

And importantly, for business owners, and those signing off the training spend, they can calculate the return on investment.

One client who has committed to running their leadership development (NZQA aligned) programme over the past 6 years – reaching over 70 leaders –  has been able to report to their senior leadership team a 3:1 ROI on their training investment, this comes directly from the projects.

Coupled with this, all of those leaders who completed their development have been promoted within the business, and are now nominated their direct reports to be in the next cohort.

So while 2024 is proving to be economically tight for many businesses, we are looking at it as the year of “Great potential” for business who invest in leadership development that unlocks that potential in their people.

We believe that it will provide Kiwi Manufacturing businesses with a significant return in both the short and long term, making them more productive, and more able to navigate the challenges and constant change of todays world of work.

For more on the impact of leadership development check out the  Freightways – LEAD Case Study  https://vimeo.com/906515117