The benefits of developing your human capital into Leaders

One of the things that can make us successful in life is our ability to learn new skills. We’ve done it throughout our entire lives. As children; we learnt to walk, we learnt to talk. As we’ve grown, we’ve learnt more skills, became more capable, more advanced. It allows us to try new ventures, attempt things that we would have never thought possible. Although developing yourself is incredibly important, what about the benefits of helping others to develop?There is a body of literature showing the benefits that can occur from developing the human capital of your organization. When our organizations are faced with new challenges, we always have two choices; learn or get help. Hiring in someone to fix a problem can be expensive and if it should ever happen again, you’ll constantly have to rely on them. However, if you learn a new skill or teach a new skill to your team, it’ll never be a problem again.A recent paper by Subramony, Segers, Chadwick & Shyamsunder (2018) highlights the link between developing leaders and organizational performance. They showed that if a firm improves their human and social capital there is a clear boost to organizational performance, “In conclusion, this study furthers the leadership development literature by demonstrating significant positive relationships between leadership development practice bundles, intangible assets, and organizational performance within the context of an emerging economy.” (Subramony, Segers, Chadwick & Shyamsunder, 2018; p.127). Within the context of emerging economies, building relationships is just as important as collecting skills.This isn’t a new concept though. Every great sports team that has ever been, spends hours training, practicing and learning, so they can perform better. As a leader you can really ramp up your organizations ability, not just by training new skills to your staff, but by training them to be leaders. John Maxwell once said, “To add growth, lead followers- to multiply, lead leaders”. Each leader you train has the ability to train others, pass on skills and develop the next generation of human capital for your organization. Furthermore, with that new bit of knowledge, they can take it to solving problems, providing solutions you may never thought of before.E.M. GodsmanELAvate Global