Leaders are as strong as the experiences and opportunities available to them. Find out how experiential development is solving this for STEM companies, one engineering leader at a time.
It’s no secret that retaining a top engineer is far less costly than hiring and training a new one. The real secret is in building a culture of engaged and interactive employee development, one that plays to an engineer’s strengths and also creates opportunities for collaboration, shared learning, and growth.
I see it all the time in engineering companies that:
- Senior staff leaves or retires—and takes all of their knowledge with them.
- Staffing shortages pressure companies to promote early and often—and often before an engineer is ready (or even willing) to take on the full scope of new responsibilities.
- Critical talent leaves because they need more from their leaders—from mentoring and growth opportunities to appropriate workloads and team support.
- Companies invest in one-size-fits-all training that tends to overlook what engineers really need to complement their current skillsets and inspire them to learn, grow, and, ultimately, stay.
It’s a conundrum that rivals the chicken-or-egg scenario. Do you promote an engineer to give them leadership experience—or do you provide them with leadership opportunities so they can be promoted?
Either way, the answer comes down to experience. If you want to accelerate the growth curve of your company—and the growth curve of your critical employees—the sooner you can expose your teams to a wide range of real-life experiences, the better.
This is experiential leadership development in a nutshell—the purposeful engagement of emerging leaders in first-hand, real-life situations to increase knowledge, big-picture awareness, engineering skills, and leadership readiness. It works by creating an organizational environment where there are plenty of opportunities to explore new experiences, job functions, and team dynamics.
Here’s why it works.
Experiential leadership development shaves decades off development.
Actionable and immediately effective, this learn-by-doing approach offers engineers the ability to execute and improve their skills in real time, often alongside those who are further along in their careers.
Unlike some leadership development programs that offer a one-directional view of leadership, experiential leadership development creates real-world, hands-on situations for modeling, mirroring, and magnifying. Leaders gain a wide variety of experiences in real-life environments that otherwise would have otherwise taken years—and roles at different companies—to acquire.
This opens the door to key leadership markers: improved confidence, self-awareness, decision-making, and emotional intelligence. These not only enhance an engineer’s performance and satisfaction in their current role (and in their life outside of work!) but also lay the critical groundwork for leadership roles to come.
Experiential leadership development increases a company’s knowledge base by osmosis.
One of the barriers to organizational collaboration and knowledge-sharing is the silo effect, the invisible (and very real) boundaries that tend to form around a company’s departments, project teams, and performance circles. (Gillian Tett has an interesting book on this subject).
While silos can create efficiencies and even accelerate innovation within them, without the occasional crossover, the organization ceases to be bigger and better than the sum of its parts. An experiential leadership development approach creates a network that strengthens the communication, collaboration, and connections between these (sometimes literal) divisions, allowing knowledge and information to be more evenly distributed.
The byproducts of experiential development include increased confidence and know-how, stronger and faster decision-making, and collaboration skills. Each is accelerated when experiences are also immersive and engineers are intentional, integral, and active members of each group they join. (Stay tuned: I’ll go deeper into the immersive engagement framework in my next post.)
Experiential leadership development puts “success” in succession plans.
When deploying experiential development as part of a leadership framework, companies—and their leaders—get what they need to succeed without having to go outside their organization to get it.
As senior leaders retire or move to other opportunities, they can take decades of organizational knowledge and leadership acumen with them. Experiential leadership creates the space for current leaders to impart their knowledge of the data, the science, and the industry and also their approaches and all the lessons learned to arrive at them. These anecdotal opportunities allow future leaders to start where their leaders left off—instead of at the beginning.
When combined with immersive engagement, collaborative learning, and rotational exposure, experiential development deepens an engineer’s situational awareness and leadership readiness.
Every engineer has the potential to lead, especially when their companies support their development by creating a culture of leadership that continuously and consistently stokes them beyond their current skillset and comfort zones.
Take the Engineers to Leaders Company Assessment to see what untapped engineering leadership development opportunities exist in your development efforts—and what specific shifts are necessary to create a culture of sustainable performance.
At Minett Consulting, we help companies transform high-performance engineers into high-impact leaders through real-world, hands-on, on-site leadership development. We build on your existing systems to empower, equip, and effectively retain and promote emerging leaders while creating a powerful flywheel of collaboration, immersive engagement, rotational exposure, and experiential development throughout your entire organization. Find out where your company should focus first —take the Engineers-to-Leaders Company Assessment.
