How AvePoint Prioritizes Leadership Development
Leadership development is one of the most pressing issues facing organizations today. According to Microsoft Work Lab, employees desire continued development opportunities and are willing to leave their current roles if they aren’t learning something new: 66% of upper/mid-level managers and 69% of executives surveyed believe they need to leave their current company to learn new skills. In fact, it’s the top driver of great work culture.
Unfortunately, many businesses haven’t caught up to implementing dedicated leadership development programs – 83% believe it’s important, but only 5% have implemented leadership development at all levels.
At AvePoint, we believe that developing our people managers will help us to effectively scale as we continue to grow, enabling our collective success.
As we continue to evolve and act on the feedback our colleagues share with us, we recently launched our new leadership development series for all of AvePoint’s people managers worldwide, TakePoint.
What is TakePoint?
Our new leadership development series focuses on a specific skill every month to help our people grow as people managers and successfully lead their teams. It includes a one-hour session followed by a practical application to put what they’ve learned into practice.
TakePoint is supported by three pillars:
- Communication: Both giving and receiving guidance
- Ownership: People managers are responsible for their teams and their results
- Adaptability: To achieve different results, people managers need – and are empowered – to think and do things differently
We know that learning doesn’t take place in just a one-hour session or in a vacuum. To continue the conversation and provide a holistic learning experience for our people leaders, we’re using our SaaS (Software as a Service) modern learning platform, MaivenPoint, to host TakePoint. MaivenPoint integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams, which enables us to create a dedicated channel for our people leaders to share and access learning resources as well as communicate with one another.
We recently kicked off TakePoint with our first session led by Chief Operating Officer Stuart Robertson, where we covered what it takes to thrive as a people manager at AvePoint, introduced our development resources, and shared our plans for the months to come. It was exciting to see colleagues join from around the world and gratifying to experience just how engaged and enthusiastic everyone was to participate.
AvePoint’s Management Code
A study by Gallup found nearly half of all employees (including managers) in the United States don’t know what’s expected of them at work. As part of the first session, we shared explicitly what AvePoint expects – and seeks to develop – in all people managers:
- Executor: Having the ability to make plans and put them into action.
- Planner: Set effective team goals.
- People Developer: Take the time and effort to build the next generation of leaders.
- Talent Manager: Engage and develop today’s talent.
- Personal Proficiency: Taking the time to fill your own cup by continuing to learn and develop your skills.
We then provided our people managers with practical applications and exercises to pinpoint the qualities they believe they’re strong in as well as areas for opportunity. After completing the exercises, they’ll meet with their managers to discuss the results and develop an action plan to address the areas of the management code where they believe they have room to grow. We have also partnered with LinkedIn Learning and all participants get full access to the LinkedIn Learning library as an additional resource to support their development. We’ve curated courses for each topic, and the recommended courses are integrated into our playbook for each session to make it super easy to engage.
Going forward, TakePoint will dive into each facet of AvePoint’s Management Code, providing a clear path to enable our people leaders to understand, learn and develop their capabilities in each of these areas to help our teams – and company – be successful. We know that in today’s dynamic job environment, this is more important than ever.
If you’re interested in having opportunities to thrive at work, own your future and truly make your mark, visit our careers website.
