Human capital – creating leadership and engagement through better communications

Human capital – creating leadership and engagement through better communications

Article Type: Strategic commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 15, Issue 1

Armin Hopp

Armin Hopp is based at Speexx, Munich, Germany.

The challenge of finding and developing leaders who are fit to lead sophisticated organisations is widespread across all sectors from large commercial enterprises to government departments. Organisations are struggling to develop leaders at all levels and are investing in new and accelerated leadership models (Global Human Capital Trends, 2015), exploring new approaches to learning and development as they confront widening skills gaps.

Effective leadership comes down to communication. You can always find someone with management qualifications, but it is less easy to find someone who has the empathy and communication skills to be a real leader. As organisations become more sophisticated and fast moving, the need to have leaders in place that have all the necessary attributes, including communication skills, is perhaps becoming more pressing.

Leadership is not just about having talents to inspire and motivate. Employees need leaders to provide a clear idea of what is wanted. Great leadership is about setting achievable and reasonable goals, communicating clearly how to get there and showing the way by example.

Technology to reach leaders

Human resource (HR) managers facing the challenge of developing, engaging and retaining leaders might make more effective use of technology to address the issues. Fast HR has the edge over slow HR and technology can support more efficient operations. For example, when recruiting top sales people, speed is of the essence. A day’s hesitation in the recruitment process can mean the loss of a top performer to a rival. Successful management of human capital is increasingly related to speed and speed is mostly down to technology – using on-boarding systems, recruitment systems, leveraging technology to reach the best people out there in the market, processing them faster and getting them on board faster and of course developing good people ready to lead.

There are some key steps to addressing leadership issues and creating better engagement at the senior level. Virgin boss Richard Branson says, “Whenever I am asked what is the missing link between a promising business person and a successful one, mentoring comes to mind. Giving people advice on how they can best achieve their goals is something that is often overlooked” (Virgin).

Many large corporations do not take advantage of potential mentoring opportunities and in fact have siloed operations that act as a barrier to people exchanging their experiences and mentoring each other. It is crucial to formalise mentoring and that can contribute towards the on-the-job element of the 70:20:10 framework for development, where 70 per cent of learning is on-the-job learning, 20 per cent comes from people and colleagues and 10 per cent from courses and reading.

HR must show leadership itself in a corporation, adding value to the business by being successful recruiters and attracting the better people to the organisation. HR also has a key role to play in communicating the corporate culture of its management team to reach out to other potential leaders.

Culture of communication

Communication is a crucial issue. Being transparent and communicating that transparency is vital to create an engaged workforce that will report the experience of working with your organisation positively to the outside world. Websites such as Glassdoor.com, for example, allow employees to rate their employer and present potential employees with a composite score out of five that includes approval or otherwise of senior leadership.

Multinational organisations increasingly make use of social media style platforms such as Yammer. These break down geographical boundaries and hierarchical siloes and enable a culture of communicativeness and transparency. There are still some organisations that resist this and, under the impression that social collaboration is time-wasting, not only do many not have enterprise social platforms but also ban Facebook use on corporate systems. In the increasingly mobile world, though, technology will be the basis of work communications, whether the organisation “allows” it or not. Pandora’s Box is open – people will use social media on personal mobiles when faced with a ban – so effective leaders will incorporate as much of that communication within the structure of the company as they can and use it to build their leadership profile within new, flatter organisational structures.

Positive or negative, communication is at the heart of the ability to lead well. The ability to communicate opens doors – and internationally, the more languages leaders speak, the more they are able to talk to people and the more transparent the organisation becomes. The goal is to create an organisation that fosters transparency, communication and collaboration, where a leader is able to communicate goals clearly and employees collaborate to reach that goal in a transparent organisation.

Here are three initiatives to help foster effective leaders:

1. look for opportunities to promote mentoring within the organisation;

2. put effective communication of goals at the heart of leadership development; and

3. do not attempt to lead a multilingual organisation just by translating documents – communication is about much more than translation and incorporates cultural differences too.

References

Global Human Capital Trends (2015), available at: http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/human-capital/hc-trends-2015.pdf

Virgin, available at: http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/the-importance-of-mentoring

About the author

Armin Hopp is the Founder and President of Speexx. Speexx helps organisations everywhere to drive productivity by empowering employee communication skills across borders. For more information, visit http://www.speexx.com. Armin Hopp is also the author of Human Capital – Creating Leadership and Engagement Through Better Communications.