Introduction
In the business world today, a mainly overlooked area of needs assessment is leadership, talent management, and succession planning. This case is no different in Salmon Industries where there is lack of the necessary skills, especially in department leadership and succession planning. It is essential that we nurture skills in this area because it is more expensive to continually hire leadership from outside than it is for the organization to nurture leadership talents from within. This article will focus on what tools Salmon Industries can use in its leadership training modules, the duration the program should run, how much it is likely to cost, and the potential outcome and benefits of the program.
Current Situation
Currently, Salmon Industries has an underperforming human resource management incapable of handling employee disputes, disagreements and concerns. This is true since the department lacks a proper channel of listening to employee grievances. At the same time, the organization lacks tools for evaluating employee performance in a bid to boost their productivity through exposure to new techniques of operation, mainly equipped through training and seminars. Additionally, Salmon Industries lacks proper mechanisms of employee appraisals.
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Background
The three areas that the program will focus on as far as training leadership concerns are leadership, talent management, and succession planning. This is because while Salmon Industries has heavily invested in corporate direction, it has completely ignored these three areas from the department point of view.
Leadership Training.
This should not be confused with the other two areas of leadership that need improvement as well, and neither should be taken to be an umbrella under which the two regions should be categorized. This is an area on its own that deals with department management. While it may be true that other training programs in the past have dealt with leadership and management training needs from the top corporate governance, there is a clear distinction between management and leadership training in the department levels. The departments lack in leadership competencies that are supposed to exist within the organization. There is the need to define a leader in terms of the departmental organization, define their roles and expectations. This program will focus on leadership competencies and definitions to modify them in a manner that fits with the Salmon Industries’ organizational culture ( Gigliotti & Ruben, 2018). After defining the leader, the program will identify the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that exist within each of these competencies while at the same time defining levels of leadership within the knowledge base. This knowledge base is the entry level versus management level.
Talent management.
This is one of the poorly performing areas of the organization. We lack the clear guidelines of leadership in finding ways and avenues to identify and promote the skills and talents of the employees necessary to assist in their growth and development the effect of this is reduced performance. This is because the market industry is continuously under revolution and would equally take revolved skills to cope up. At one time or the other, the conventional ways of production and management become too old-fashioned to function in this new era. By developing during the training these diverse skills, there will be the need of managing these skills. In the past, Salmon Industries has not had stable and reliable systems of managing and implementing these new skills acquired during training. As such, it becomes only a matter of time before production sinks back to the old conventional ways of work. Talent management training needs are those that are needed to help supervisors and managers to manage, implement, and track the talent that comes out of leadership training. Currently, sad to note, most supervisors and managers of various departments are not prepared to access their teams for leadership potential, coach them, and prepare them for a future leadership role. It is sad to observe this because the goal of any leadership training program is to develop these spheres. But with the lack of a better mechanism to keep track of these developments, then the efforts realized through these training programs only prove to be futile. This part of the program will focus on equipping managers and supervisors with the skills to identify a person's strengths and coach those while at the same time developing opportunities (Riggs & Porter, 2017). It will also focus on enhancing the creation of the HRIS system that will be created explicitly for talent management.
Succession Planning.
In as much as it may be a sad reality to point out, at one point or the other, there is always a change in the management and leadership structure. The frequent levels of turnout even within the leadership teams imply the shift in leadership management. The other sad reality is that the company is never equally prepared for this reality. That is why mostly when a leader steps down or is proven incompetent, or has to be replaced for any particular reason, the organization in most cases sources for the replacement from outside the company. There is no groomed personnel who the company believes is competent enough to take over such enormous responsibility. But this is primarily because the organization itself does not support leadership grooming geared towards a succession plan. It is never adequately prepared with a succession plan in which an individual from within the company takes over these leadership responsibilities for when a leader has to step down or be replaced. However, as this training program emphasizes, succession planning needs border directly on talent management and leadership and may be a part of those needs assessment areas. What this program will seek to define include the Salmon Industries’ philosophy on succession planning. By doing this, it will narrow down to high professional and high potential leadership. It will also seek to equip managers and supervisors with unique skills and training to create the plan ( Hollenbeck, DeRue, & Nahrgang, 2015). This is essential because unlike any other aspects of leadership, preparing an individual to take over a leadership role could be a bit more demanding and tricky, and deserve even greater caution that would require leaders to be more experienced in grooming others to take over.
Qualifications
This program will be comfortable and cost-effective to roll out for three days because first off, the company through the human resource department, having rolled out a similar program one year ago is quite capable and experienced in rolling out another plan. This is because, during the first program, the human resource department managed to implement such tools as used to enhancing engagement in leadership, assessing leadership competency and developing a plan for leadership. With this knowledge in mind, it will be easier to run the program. Another additional advantage is that the program will mainly rely on leaders who were groomed from the previous plan to train this year's batch (Northouse, 2018). As such, the program will only need a few motivators and team builders from outside as compared to the last training program, and as such the company will spend way fewer resources than it did the previous training program.
Work Schedule
Since this is a three-day training program, the program schedule will be divided among the three days. On the first day, the program will focus on leadership as a whole. The session will be divided into two sub-sessions; the corporate and departmental leaders will be trained on how to handle employees better and establish open channels of communication while the employee representatives will also be taught the value of open communications n ad the better avenues to air employee grievances.
On the second day, the training will focus on talent management. There will only be one session for the department leaders in which they will be taught the importance of grooming employees for appraisals. They will also be introduced to the right tools to use for this purpose and how to track employee performance.
The last day will focus on succession planning. Here employees will be taught the significance of always being ready as far as leadership skills are concerned to take over management. They will be introduced into the necessary skills and insights of corporate leadership and how they can tap into this. Department leaders, on the other hand, will be taught the art of identifying potential successors and how to groom them.
Proposal Statement
For these factors in leadership to be addressed correctly, it is essential that a combination of steps be taken during the three-day training program to ensure all the challenges are treated holistically. These should ensure that at the end of the day greater care is taken to strengthen the corporate culture in the critical areas of leadership, talent management, and succession planning. So far employee feedback has indicated that these areas of weaknesses can be improved through the exposure to better channels of authority. To amicably address the concerns, training is recommended not only managers but also to a selected group of employees who the company have a high potential in leadership and management. This group should be trained on how to identify and develop open channels of communication between leaders and workers, amicably listen to employee grievances and solve disputes, and how to identify and nurture talents and skills in the process of succession planning. Once the training has been completed, check systems should be put in place to ensure that these skills learned during the program are correctly implemented, and their effectiveness is closely monitored.
Holding these parties accountable for better results of the program will bring parity to the workplace. This is because the workforce will be made to realize and practice compensation and bonuses based on specific employee roles rather than just corporate profit. This new system will serve as motivation and a reward system for the successful implementation of the skills that will be learned during the program. In this new system, those employees who do what is expected of them to achieve the desired result will be rewarded. This system ensures that employees learn to implement and keep track of the policies emphasized during the leadership training period on their own. Those who miss the mark, on the other hand, will be required to address the reasons behind their low performance and will not receive any compensation in return. By teaching the workforce the importance of explaining their underperformances, the leadership will be able to impact the value of personal accountability into the team. To effectively achieve this, there will be the establishment of a performance improvement plan that will play a key role in tracking the performance of each employee over a period ( Lacerenza, Reyes, Marlow, Joseph, & Salas, 2017). This plan will help the employees keep in touch with their targets, and teach them the value of goals as far as [production is concerned.
Costs
Training program (25 employees) $ 25,000
HRIS configuration $ 5,000
Total Direct Costs $ 30,000
Results
At the completion of the three-day training session, the organization should be able to adopt a more positive approach towards leadership where human relations will be fostered, employees will know how, and the departmental leaders will be better equipped to listen and address these issues amicably. On the other hand, by investing in succession planning, the organization will be better prepared to tap into internal leadership prospects, therefore, save on a lot of resources used to source for outside replacements.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is crucial to observe that good management and leadership structure lies in its ability to manage and better address the grievances of the employees, appreciate the diversity and provide avenues for the workforce to develop their skills, abilities, and talents. That is what the training module will be geared towards building so that at the end of the training period, Salmon Industries will be better placed to answer to the dynamic nature of business and management more comfortably.
References
Gigliotti, R. A., & Ruben, B. D. (2018). The role of communication theory in leadership training and development. The Handbook of Communication Training: A Best Practices Framework for Assessing and Developing Competence .
Hollenbeck, J. R., DeRue, D. S., & Nahrgang, J. D. (2015). The opponent process theory of leadership succession. Organizational Psychology Review , 5 (4), 333-363.
Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., & Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology , 102 (12), 1686.
Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and practice . Sage publications.
Riggs, B. S., & Porter, C. O. (2017). Are there advantages to seeing leadership the same? A test of the mediating effects of LMX on the relationship between ILT congruence and employees' development. The Leadership Quarterly , 28 (2), 285-299.
