By: Amy Twiggs

Retaining top talent is of the utmost importance in today’s competitive job market. If you are thinking about ways to spend your precious development dollars, think about investing in your emerging leaders to get more bang for your buck. Why? Because emerging leaders are often your top performers, culture champions, and future managers. It’s critical that you develop them to retain them and continue your business’s growth. Development is no longer just a benefit; it is a necessary investment. Here are three reasons why developing emerging leaders is a wise investment: 

So that they stay. Companies spend thousands of dollars on recruiting, hiring, and training employees, but what about efforts to retain them? Retention is more important now than ever in this highly competitive job market. Development programs improve employee job satisfaction, and when your employees are happy, they are generally more likely to stay at the organization. While the number one reason employees leave is a bad manager, a close second is a lack of career development and growth opportunities. If you are fortunate to have high-performing, future leaders working for your organization, demonstrate that by investing in them. Also, offering development programs to your employees can be a big differentiator when someone is considering which job offer they will accept. 

So that they lead better. The benefits of improved leadership skills extend beyond job satisfaction. Many organizations wait to invest in development until years after their employees have been promoted, and by then it can be too late. You run the risk of losing top talent to another opportunity or, even worse, giving them time to create bad management habits that can be hard to break and wreak havoc among their teams. Developing emerging leaders, even before they have the title, will at the very least benefit them on a personal level. Then, when it’s time to move them to a management role, they’re more prepared. Further, by implementing development practices at the emerging-leader level, you’ll also foster a culture of positive development experiences instead of fix-it cases, changing the appetite and general attitude toward development for leaders at any level. Picture the influence they can begin to have if you give them the power to do so. Anyone can be a leader in an organization, with or without the title, so imagine having empowered team members confident enough to step up and take the reigns on a challenging project or initiative. 

So that they don’t cost the organization money. Ill-equipped leaders tend to cost the organization even more money than development investment itself. To put it simply, between the risk of losing your top talent to the competition and the wasted dollars that stem from poor leadership, this is an investment designed to protect your organization’s most important asset, your people. Development for your emerging leaders does not have to cost a fortune or take them away from work for weeks at a time. We have a solution for wisely investing your development dollars, and we would love the opportunity to build a program for your emerging leaders that is effective, designed for the modern leader, and budget-friendly. Contact us to explore the ways to get more bang for your development buck!