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As business owners, operators and leaders, the last thing we want is to lose our best staff! As our People & Performance expert Amanda Crawford explains, retaining your best staff involves factors that most of us overlook. Read on to find out more…

Amanda Crawford is a People & Performance expert and has worked closely with CMPartners over the last decade.

She is an Executive Coach, Facilitator and Chartered Accountant, with a background in corporate restructuring, commercial management and consulting. Her experience includes functional roles (operational and financial), strategic project management, large-scale sale transactions, and design and implementation of culture and change initiatives. Amanda has worked across a diverse range of industries, from finance and legal to sport and government (and much more in between).

Evolving her corporate experience into founding and running her own business, Amanda brings passion, energy and a knack for helping her clients see challenges in a new light that inspires action and drives positive change.

Amanda’s vision is to shape leadership by promoting and developing ‘mentoring as a culture’, working with her clients to connect them to their potential.

Nathan: Are great leaders born or are they made?

Amanda: Great leaders who are born great leaders, is definitely the exception rather than the rule. What we most often see is that people who are really good at their job, really good at their trade or profession, will naturally move up the ranks or decide to start their own business and when they are getting to that leadership role, they suddenly find a whole new realm of struggles. And the struggle is real!

What it centres around is the fact that they’re really good at their trade, what they trained for. But leadership is a whole different landscape and whole different skill set. 

The truth is, it rarely comes naturally to people so the first thing to point out is – cut yourself some slack and if you are struggling, you’re not alone.

Nathan: Is that skill set something that leaders can learn?

Amanda: Certainly. I reassure leaders that they are learnable skills but it does take a choice to want to learn them. It takes a choice to understand that they are capabilities that need to be developed but, the investment in developing those skills will be far reaching and the costs of not doing so play out in your bottom line.

Nathan: What are some indicators that leaders need to be aware of in terms of underdeveloped leadership skills?

Amanda: The common symptoms of leadership underdevelopment that I see in organisations is a low level of staff engagement – where people are just turning up and just doing enough.  The staff don’t have that motivation to look beyond their job description. 

You might see it play out in toxic environments where staff don’t feel safe to fail. Or to call out behaviours that may be problematic. Toxicity in the workplace leads to very visible and very measurable outcomes. For example, regrettable amounts of staff turnover and losing your good people – your best staff!

Nathan: Those are critically important problems to address. So, what can we do as leaders to fix these issues in our workplace? 

Amanda: One of my favourite sayings right now is “what we accept becomes acceptable”.

So as the leader, people are looking to you to demonstrate and set the bar on the behaviours that you want to see. But it also involves calling it out and putting a stop to those things that are unacceptable, and it starts with you. 

Another quote I love to use is “in order to lead others we have to be able to lead ourselves, but in order to lead ourselves we have to know ourselves”.

So everything comes back to the leader and that commitment to want to be a great leader. Think about the type of leader that you wish that you had – the type of leader that is going to inspire their people to go that extra mile. We want to create a workforce who wants to show up to work, and tell their friends and their family “this is a great place to work”.

Nathan: What’s one example of how fixing workplace problems could play out?

Amanda: When your employees engage with your customers or clients – it’s there you can see quite easily the impact on your bottom line.

Nathan: So what can leaders start doing right now?

Amanda: The evidence shows that you should start by focusing on the employee experience. When you get that right it will naturally flow to your customer experience which is then directly correlated to your business success and bottom line.

If you want a business with leaders who people want to follow, it starts at the top.

Your bottom line is a consequence of every action taken by your people and what your people do and how they do it is a direct result of how they’re led. It starts at the top, so it makes sense that you need to get it right at the top first. 

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If you’re interested in learning more or want to get in touch with Amanda Crawford, reach out to your Partner or Associate at CMPartners or send us a note at https://cmpca.com.au/contact-us/