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The only constant in life is change.
Running a successful business requires continually evolving your organization to embrace and adapt to change (market transitions, economic conditions, customer requirements, employee perspectives, etc.). This requires strong leaders who can do things like:
Craft a clear vision and mission
Define and execute strategy
Motivate and inspire teams
Build a positive and productive culture
Manage crises and challenges
While numbers can vary quite a bit across companies and industries, data from Ravio shows a typical company has a headcount mix of ~20% leaders (including execs through first-line leaders) and ~80% individual contributors. Many companies devote significant resources to building leadership skills in that ~20% of leaders. While this is important, if you’re only focusing on this group, you’re missing a huge chunk of your organization that significantly impacts the success of your business…your individual contributors (ICs).
Investing in your IC leaders provides a strategic advantage to your business
Your ICs are company leaders in their own right – their leadership just looks a little different. Instead of leading people or teams, they’re doing things like:
Building and deploying their subject matter expertise across your organization
Developing and mentoring peers
Leading initiatives and special projects
Inspiring innovation of your solutions, business processes, etc.
Driving the execution of your strategy
Influencing the evolution of your culture
How can investing in your ICs’ leadership skills positively impact your business?
Increase Employee Engagement and Morale: Gallup’s Annual Employee Engagement Indicator shows only ~23% of employees globally are highly engaged at work. When your ICs feel valued for their leadership and contributions, they become more engaged and invested in the success of the organization. In short, happy and engaged employees are more productive ones.
Improve Retention: Investing in your ICs’ development and growth demonstrates your commitment to their success, which ultimately can influence their desire to build lasting careers in your organization. In fact, the 2022 Talent Management Survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) indicated companies with strong leadership development programs, experience 28% lower voluntary turnover.
Enhance Innovation: By empowering your ICs to influence innovation within your organization, and fostering a culture of collaboration and critical thinking, you bring a more diverse pool of leaders with diverse perspectives into the innovation process. This can help unlock the creative potential of your teams and improve your competitive advantage.
Improve Customer Satisfaction: Leadership requires strong communication and problem-solving skills. By building these skills in your ICs, many of whom engage with your customers every day, you can improve your overall customer satisfaction rates. Happy customers are more likely to buy from and continue to partner with you over time.
Decrease Time to Productivity for New Leaders: Some of your ICs of today will become your people leaders of tomorrow. By building their foundational leadership skills now you create a better-prepared pool of internal candidates that can hit the ground running and be more immediately impactful when they take on new people leadership roles.
How traditional leadership skills apply to your ICs
The good news is that many of the skills crucial to the success of your traditional people leaders, apply to your ICs as well. Again, they just look a little different.
Visionary Thinking: Proactively suggesting innovative ideas, proposing improvements to processes, or envisioning future opportunities for the team/organization.
Strategic Thinking: Contributing insights and perspectives on long-term goals and objectives, aligning individual efforts with organizational strategy, and seeking opportunities to add value to the broader mission.
Empowerment: Taking initiative, volunteering for challenging tasks, and offering to support colleagues in their projects to empower their peers and contribute to a culture of collaboration and trust.
Inspiration & Charisma: Effectively communicating ideas, sharing their enthusiasm for projects, and encouraging collaboration among colleagues to help inspire and motivate others to excel in their work.
Emotional Intelligence: Demonstrating empathy, understanding the perspectives of colleagues, and effectively managing interpersonal relationships to foster a positive work environment and culture.
Adaptability: Demonstrating flexibility in response to changing priorities, being open to new ideas and perspectives, and effectively managing transitions.
Resilience: Maintaining a positive attitude, staying focused on goals despite obstacles, and persevering through challenges to inspire peers to do the same.
Coaching & Development: Sharing knowledge, providing feedback, and mentoring less experienced colleagues to contribute to the development and growth of the organization.
Integrity & Trustworthiness: Upholding high ethical standards, honoring commitments, and being reliable in one's work to build trust and credibility among peers.
Tips for developing the leadership capabilities of your ICs
How can you build your ICs’ leadership skills and empower them to unleash their leadership potential? Here are some ideas.
Open your people leader development programs to your top talent/high-potential ICs. For topics that may not apply to ICs (e.g., hiring/firing practices), focus their efforts on related topics (e.g., managing difficult conversations). In addition to building your ICs’ leadership skills, this can demonstrate your perspective that you can (and should) be a leader in any role.
Roll out Design Thinking learning (formal or informal) to help your ICs learn how to take a more human-centered approach to innovation, that balances what is a real business need from an end-user point of view (customers, employees, etc.), with what is feasible with existing capabilities (technology, business, expertise, etc.), and is economically viable (real business opportunity).
Create an “Innovation Challenge” program that invites submissions of innovative ideas across the company. Leverage your internal innovation experts to vet submissions and select interesting/viable ideas for further exploration and investment. Provide feedback to unselected ideas to help improve future submissions.
Encourage your top expert ICs to explore trends within their domains, determine “what’s next”, and how to align the company with those evolutions. Provide opportunities to present their perspectives to leadership. This will demonstrate you value your ICs’ expertise and insights, while also enabling their influence and communication skills.
Launch an Emotional Intelligence (EQ) program with your ICs, including assessments (self or 360) to provide feedback on their current EQ capabilities, and development activities to enhance their skills. Building EQ skills can not only positively impact the business – it also demonstrates you value “non-technical” skills in your culture.
Provide opportunities for your ICs to participate in change initiatives being driven by your senior leadership. Allowing ICs to help systematically influence change can make it less “scary” and something that can lead to positive outcomes. Your ICs are also your “feet on the street”, so they’ll likely have great insights into how the change will impact the broader organization. They can become your champions as the change is being rolled out as well.
Encourage your ICs to talk with their leaders about their failures, struggles, and frustrations, as part of their regular check-ins/performance reviews or in less formal settings. Discuss what happened, what they learned, and how they can apply those learnings going forward. By removing the stigma from setbacks and positioning them as opportunities, you help your ICs be more resilient in the face of obstacles. As a bonus, you can also turbo-charge their innovation and creativity.
Build a mentorship program for your more experienced ICs to mentor earlier-in-career employees. This allows your ICs to share their expertise and build their mentorship/coaching skills while jump-starting the careers of your newest employees.
Give your ICs stretch assignments to deliver training around their areas of expertise to the broader organization. This can help you scale upskilling your global teams while helping your ICs build their communication and charisma skills. It can also foster a culture of collaboration and increase the influence of your top-talent ICs.
Start a ToastMasters club within your organization (or connect with a local chapter) to enable your ICs to attend. Toastmasters is a great program for peer-to-peer enablement on communication and charisma skills. It can also help your ICs expand their networks.
Ready to unleash the leadership capability of your ICs?
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you drive formal and informal approaches to build a culture of leadership in any role.
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