What skills, behaviours and mindsets are you looking to develop?

This can be a challenging question to people leaders even when focusing on the ‘right now’

Digging into current business challenges, performance metrics, internal feedback systems, client feedback and collating data from the pain points and development needs of people across a firm usually reveals a lot need help with the answer!

The thing is though, many of our development solutions are focused on building the ‘bench’ for succession planning, looking forward and often being anywhere from 6-24 months in duration – the question isn’t just about right now, but about the skills, behaviours and mindsets which will help people be more effective in the future. And this can be very challenging.

Firms that:

– are constantly creating a picture (vision) of the future with a clear strategy on how to move towards it
– have solid and balanced metrics and measures to evaluate business and individual performance and progress
– have mapped out capability and progression frameworks to identify what ‘great’ looks like, what to do and how to do it
– have effective systems to listen and understand their people and capture the development needs of individuals

are able to answer the question effectively

But for many it is difficult, and of course it is. It is tough enough focusing on today and tomorrow, let alone lifting the head up to peer into the very foggy thing called the future!

When we help with creating a future vision, we ask leaders to ‘live’ 3-5 years ahead and to think in four interlinked areas:

– Clients, markets and services
– People and culture
– Operations, systems and processes
– Financial and Commercial

We guide them with a lot of questions, it helps to drive strategy and decision making. And as firms are people businesses it also helps to identify how people may need to think, feel and do things differently, what they may need to learn and change; which in turn helps identify the future skills, behaviours and mindsets that the firm may need to support and invest in.

We have developed a simple one pager that could help to start the process, which you can view here:

Creating a future vision

If you’d like to talk further, and explore how we can help you and your firm drive your future strategy – please get in touch with alex@thegrogroup.com