One quote I keep coming back to is from business theorist, Arie de Geus. “A company's success no longer depends primarily on its ability to raise investment capital. Success depends on the ability of its people to learn together and produce new ideas”. While Sirius Real Estate is driven by good business processes and strong results, that is by no means the only driver for the company. I believe that the continued success of Sirius is due in part to collaboration and team-building throughout the whole of the company. This is why we have put in place extensive development programs that involve learning, training and coaching opportunities for all levels of the Sirius business.
Creating loyalty through development
As an employer, we have a responsibility to develop our employees’ experience - including both theoretical knowledge and practical skills designed to serve people for the rest of their careers. While people who are starting their careers move jobs more quickly than people who are further on in their working lives, it is also important to provide development for people throughout every stage of their career so that people can continue to perform better in their jobs. This concept of constant development also helps build a connection between employee and employer at a deeper level. By seeing the time and investment demonstrated by Sirius in contributing to growing peoples’ skills, a profound connection is made which helps to drive motivation for both parties to succeed; a kind of win-win feeling in which both employee and employer gain, not just financially but in other, longer-term areas as well.
Developing leaders, not managers
Our approach to people development runs through all levels of Sirius. Managers are incentivised to spend time developing and training people within each team. The danger is when everyone is busy, training can fall by the wayside, particularly at year-end when focus on work is at its most intense. This is especially the case when it’s a manager’s job to do their own daily work, while also ‘line managing’ their own teams. To help first-line managers to juggle and commit to both important tasks, the focus at Sirius is to ensure directors, managers and team leaders lead by example, with directors developing managers, managers developing team leaders and team leaders developing their teams.
One example of this is our ‘Top 30 Programme’ for our 30 key managers, where we create customised training and development programmes for them. This helps them not only become better leaders of people, but to also to gain knowledge and skills which will help people at the next stage of their careers. Leadership is key here – anyone can be taught varying techniques to manage people, but to lead a team requires a number of additional skills, many of which require high emotional intelligence rather than by-the-book processes. Developing people to become effective leaders within the context of a fast-moving business environment is part of the bedrock of Sirius’ success to date.
A culture of leadership
In my experience observing other companies and structures, people can be promoted into managerial roles, even when they don’t have the skills or training to actually do a good job of managing people. Sirius is a highly structured business. However, the structure is very flat for the size of the company with no more than three levels of management. This focus on developing first-line management and leadership skills has a significant impact on the way the company runs as well as the results we achieve. But it doesn’t stop at developing the first-line managerial level. We also run the Sirius Academy, developing our employees’ soft skills which are valuable in their lives outside of work such as wellness, mental resilience and self-protection.
Our company ethos focuses on the fact that training and leadership development is key to the human capital that exists in the organisation, driving better performance and morale from the individual, which in turn drives the success of Sirius as a business.