By Patricia Bramer
At IPRO, we believe our top-down culture shapes our entire organization. As such, we feel further developing our leaders will make an impact in growing the rest of our staff.
We want to foster a community of leaders who can:
- Help us through challenges
- Drive innovation
- Be mindful about how thoughts and actions affect our community
- Are thoughtful in their approach to delegation, collaboration, conflict resolution, and applying feedback
In 2019, IPRO partnered with Wind + Sail Leadership Partners www.windandsail.com to enable 18 of our employees to build their skills and further their relationships through unique leadership training. The program helped IPRO work with our leaders through training sessions and 1-on-1 leadership coaching, which allowed our managers to become nimble/agile, be more empathetic, productive, and vulnerable.
Since sending our cohort through the program, we have seen an increase in leadership maturity throughout IPRO, as they are able to draw on the skills and relationships they built during the training. IPRO also has experienced an increase in our annual employee engagement scores around agility, talent, and dignity.
Based on our engagement survey scores, we also identified that our middle managers that oversee a majority of our employees and deal with customers, operations, and manage the day to day, wanted more opportunities to understand the “why”, have a seat at the table and be better leaders. What we’ve found is that during our company’s high growth trajectory following two acquisitions, leadership development was a key area we needed to invest in in order to sustain the success of the organization by investing in our current leaders.
Internal growth and development
Since investing in development of our future leaders, IPRO is seeing the benefits of giving opportunities for these and other employees to grow.
In fact, the leaders we sent through the program feel IPRO is better poised for future success because of the success of the program and said it helped them become more effective leaders, which in turn helped create the cascade effect of growing their teams. And it’s no surprise to us that just two years later, IPRO was able to promote 25% of our staff to higher roles, including new management and senior manager positions.
Does your company focus on growth and development? Does it specifically invest in training both in and outside-the-job training of new skills, or opportunities to move into management? If so, what is the end goal for their investment? In yours?
IPRO’s internal company culture consists of growth and development that helps shape our entire organization to ensure future success. We believe it’s important to take care of our current and future customers by ensuring we keep improving the institutional knowledge across our entire organization. Our focus on promoting from within helps us in turn continue to evolve our business to be more productive for our customers.
Retaining talent
Not only do we focus on strengthening our company culture, but we also focus on retaining our top talent. IPRO rewards our loyal, high potential employees by helping them continue to grow and develop new skills to increase their abilities, and then rewarding them with a higher level role in the organization.
When we interview for new talent, we often hear prospective candidates are looking for a new opportunity because their company is not focused on growing their skills or there is no opportunities for promotion.
I’m proud to be able to share with them that IPRO invests in programs like the Wind + Sail Leadership Partners L6 training program as well as other internal and external trainings to not just build our employees’ skillsets, but also equip them with the development they need to become a future leader at our company. At IPRO we have found that our employees feel more connected and purpose to their work, which brings a higher quality of life for them than they had with other employers.
Find out more about working at IPRO and see what specific roles might best fit you.
