Return on Investment
This week I met with a manager of a service organization who was looking at leadership coaching and training options for her supervisors. She asked a meaningful question, “How will I measure success for this investment?’
I love being asked this question. When you invest in developing your leaders here are a few ways to measure success…
Improved employee engagement either through a robust survey process or more informal boots-on-the-ground observation
Increased leader confidence and job satisfaction gathered through 1:1 meetings
Reduced number of employee complaints to the Human Resources Department
Improved quality of written performance reviews
Increased sales
Reduced turnover
Increases in production and improvements in other P & L measures like extraordinary maintenance expense
As you work with these measures it is important to think about all the elements that go into improving these data points and assign a percentage to leader development. For example, if you want to measure the maintenance leader's effectiveness you could use the reduction in extraordinary maintenance expense as one measure because you could assume that if he improves as a leader, coaching and developing his employees, you would see a reduction in catastrophic failures. However, new equipment and new team members could also be inputs to this measure. You could choose to attribute one-third of the success to leadership. This means if the extraordinary maintenance expense improved by 30 percent, you could say that leadership development has attributed to a 10 percent reduction in extraordinary maintenance expense.
It’s an estimate, not a perfect science when you are measuring ROI (return on investment).
Remember too, when you invest in training, you need to have an effective transfer strategy to ensure newly learned skills are applied on the job. Success goes beyond the training session. There need to be action plans and ongoing coaching from the leader's manager.
These are just a few thoughts. If you’d like help thinking about how you can justify the investment in leadership training reach out… https://talent-advancement.com/contact
