From my associate Janice Giannini.
Did you know that organizations investing and excelling at leadership development and engaging their workforce aren’t just better places to work? They report 21% higher profitability and a 17% higher productivity rate. In today’s volatile business environment, leadership resilience isn’t optional—it’s a competitive necessity.
The concepts below help companies to tap into more stable long-term growth, increased ROI, and increased reputation in the marketplace.
1. Resilience as a competitive edge/advantage
- The pandemic demonstrated that organizations with adaptive, well-coached leaders sustained profitability and minimized or avoided operational disruptions, outperforming competitors. For many of these organizations, the kernel of this adaptiveness resulted from prioritizing and developing strong adaptive leaders prepared to navigate crises. These crises come in various ways: market fluctuations, customer changes, competitive changes, and technological advancements.
- This Resilience and preparation didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of strategic investments in executive coaching and development.
2. Cost of leadership gaps
- For any company, there is an optimal turnover rate to refresh skills/ideas and ensure an effectively staffed pipeline. There is a significant cost when the turnover is unexpectedly high and critical staff leave. Over a third of employees report leaving over lack of connection with leadership. Only about 20% of employees indicate they trust company leadership. That cost frequently looks like costly errors missed deadlines, delays in delivery, lack of engagement, and friction within the team.
- These risks drive significant cost increases. Organizations with stellar reputations for delivering the right stuff to the right people at the right time actively invest in risk management by investing in leadership development at multiple company levels. They recognize that a company’s financial and reputational success is a function of the company and leadership’s abilities.
3. Understanding the needs of a multi-generational workforce
- Today’s workforce is multi-generational. The priorities and needs of each generation of the workforce are very different. With such diverse expectations and work styles, equipping the leaders across the organizations with communications, understanding, adaptability, and averting conflict is essential for the entity to thrive and flourish.
- The cost of failing to prioritize those growth opportunities and coaching drives higher costs, burnout, high turnover, and less-than-expected financials in many cases. When hired, associates, regardless of the level of responsibility in the company, do not always come equipped with these skills. Frequently, they are knowledgeable about the subject matter or experts in their vertical. Integrating across the multi-generational workforce and multiple verticals is not an innate skill. And as additional generations come on board, refreshing skills increase company success.
4. Leading in a technology-driven world
- Making business decisions in a technology-driven world requires rethinking strategic risk-taking, a different level of technology literacy, and an understanding of effectively leveraging technologies for competitive relevance. These may be skill sets that not all leaders possess. It is more effective across the board to invest in development to enable these conversations than to ignore the potential disconnect.
- Executive coaching equips leaders with the mental agility and strategic foresight to leverage AI and data analytics for competitive advantage.
5. Adopting cultural–alignment to drive financial success and long-term growth
- One of the major responsibilities of all CEOs is to define the culture and constantly reinforce the cultural expectations across the leadership. Culture is a binding force. It creates a common perspective and reference framework for essential operational and strategic risk management. Cultural misalignment across the company leads to increased costs and financial losses, increased risk across the board, missed opportunities, diminished innovation, and diminished associates’ engagement driving high turnover.
- A strong company culture leads to higher profitability, employee satisfaction and engagement, and customer satisfaction. Constantly re-enforcing cultural expectations is essential and requires consistent and ongoing investment. “Once and done” will not deliver the needed results.
6. Positioning for unknown challenges in the future
- Continual investment in leadership development encourages continuous learning and growth. Furthermore, it fosters:
- Out-of-box thinking
- Increased innovation
- Mental agility to respond to unknowns with confidence versus relying too heavily on current practices
- Increased collaboration to address unanticipated future disruptions
- ROI for companies that invest in leadership development have 20-25% lower turnover rates than those who do not invest
Organizations with well-coached leaders achieve operational stability faster, avoid layoffs, maintain higher levels of employee engagement, and maintain customer trust. Viewing coaching as a growth opportunity rather than a cost transforms leadership into a scalable competitive advantage. Research shows that every dollar invested in leadership development returns up to $6 in improved business performance.
Leadership development isn’t just an investment in individuals; it’s an investment in your company’s future. Start building a resilient, adaptable leadership pipeline today to secure your organization’s success tomorrow.
