Three Good Reasons To Embrace Lifelong Learning and Re-Skilling In Your Business

One of the buzz concepts often talked about within the community of business leaders these days is the need to re-skill and embrace life long learning. It’s very outdated to aspire to the ‘authority figure’ style of leadership that dominated working culture in the 90s and 00s. No longer does the idea of an infallible, unquestioned and fully-formed leader fool anyone – instead, today’s ideal leader understands their limits, accepts what they don’t know, is dedicated to constant improvement and seeks out a diversity of perspectives to give their business the very best chance of success. And the truth is, a constant state of growth and development is something that we should all want to achieve. Leaders should ask themselves where and how much they need to grow, in order to grow others. Finding a mentor is an important step in this process, and can help you to improve company performance , make better decisions and better fulfil the expectations of stakeholders. Modelling a behaviour of improvement and development will also raise the standard of other members of staff.

Growing A Business Is Growing People

What is your company’s most valuable resource? Most leaders will immediately answer ‘people’. Certainly, the resources consumed in sourcing talent, recruiting and onboarding usually rank among the most significant costs a business faces. So proper leadership and business growth is all about growing the people within the organization. Your business strategy needs to be broken down and translated into clearly defined objectives. You can then recruit and train the best people, who have a knowledge of what they’re working towards. Visualize what success in each role you create might look like a year or so down the line – what training or additional skills are needed to get there?

Make Yourself Obsolete

It sounds like a strange aim – particularly if you’ve created a business from the ground up – but your end game should always be to make yourself redundant. What is meant by this is training up a succession of people who can run your business so well, you no longer need to. If you understand the qualities that will be required in a future successor, so you can work these attributes into the company values and culture that you set. Technical skills, leadership attributes and adaptiveness all need to be taken into account, but this kind of long-term thinking is a true springboard to growth.

Encourage Learning In All Forms

Learning should be a part of your own values and those of your company – but these can take many different forms. From learning to network properly to understand the landscape and developments in your industry, to more formalized types of learning like undertaking an MBA, there are many ways that you can bring new developments and skills into your life. You may even decide eventually to take a career break to accommodate this  – so if you never expected to find yourself looking to find out more information on student accommodation in London , you may be in for a surprise yet! Also, with so much now available online, and e-learning platforms like 365 Data Science and others expanding all the time, you don’t even have to leave your desk to load up on cutting-edge knowledge.