Elevate Your Team summary

If you’re a business leader, you’re probably familiar with the “death valley” phenomenon. You might have observed how, after a period of exponential growth, a company stagnates. The star performers and managers that have been key to that growth move on – often to competitors. There’s no one ready internally to take their place and the remaining employees flounder under their new leadership, or become resentful that they’ve been passed over for promotion. Suddenly, a company pegged as the latest big thing is on the brink of collapse.

This scenario is all too common for companies experiencing growth. In fact, every time a company’s size doubles, half of its processes and its staff need to be overhauled. This intimidating fact represents a huge loss of talent. Plus, there’s the resources needed to recruit new hires, overhaul systems and retrain existing employees. Just think what else could be done with that time, money and energy, if a company wasn’t scrambling to reestablish itself.

Luckily, there’s a way to avoid ending up in this predicament. You can do this by incorporating a talent development strategy into your company’s culture.

“I’ve already done that!” you might be thinking. Well, you might have professional development opportunities and team building workshops. But activities like these are rarely enough to support company growth and retain talent. If you truly want to optimize performance and safeguard your company from falling into death valley, you need a strategy that helps your employees thrive in all aspects of their lives – not just professionally. That’s where capacity building comes in.

Capacity building is a holistic development strategy that extends beyond professional development. Its framework supports the growth of your business by fostering the development of all your employees at the same rate, so that everyone grows together – from the rising stars to the less ambitious players among your ranks.    

Capacity building helps people identify what they want in life, and what they need to achieve it. This fuels company growth, as employees work towards attaining their goals.

There are four core pillars to this transformative framework – which we’ll be exploring in this Blink. These pillars speak to everyone’s professional and personal lives, since the most successful employee is the one who can bring their whole self to work.

To achieve the best outcomes, all four of the framework’s pillars must be activated company-wide. That means you and your fellow leaders must embrace this new strategy by making it an organizational priority. But the benefits you’ll reap will make the time and effort worthwhile. Once capacity building is ingrained in your company’s culture and processes, you’ll retain talent, reduce turnover and have the resources you need to drive continuous growth. Let’s take a look at each of the pillars now.