Your people are your business. Simple as that. As good as AI is getting, nobody is running entirely AI-powered businesses – and with good reason. So supporting your people – especially your leaders – with the right personal development opportunities is essential for building innovative, loyal, high-performing teams.
But personal development has a bit of a branding problem. It’s considered a nice to have, or too fluffy for busy leaders. Until now, the soft skills found in personal development have been almost impossible to measure, leaving L&D teams unable to prove ROI and seeing personal development budgets slashed as a result.
The good news is that that’s no longer the case. We can finally measure the soft skills our leaders are demonstrating at work, helping us prove ROI and show why investing in personal development for leaders is one of the smartest moves a business can make.
Technical skills are easy to measure. Someone is fluent in Spanish or they’re not. Someone can successfully code an app or they can’t. Someone can operate a machine or they can’t.
Soft skills? Not so much. It’s a lot more nuanced and subjective. You can’t hand someone a certificate in teamwork or leadership and expect it to paint the full picture. L&D teams know these skills matter, and so do leaders, but managers often rely on gut feeling to judge skill levels or progress. This leaves leaders open to bias, and one manager’s opinion doesn’t really tell us how effectively a business leader communicates, listens or coaches others.
Relying on gut feelings, assumptions or notoriously biased self-assessments makes it virtually impossible to prove ROI, secure budgets and show senior stakeholders that personal development really does move the needle. So what’s the alternative?
Soft skills are what hold teams together. Strong communication, problem-solving and leadership skills ripple out into better engagement, higher retention and stronger performance across the wider team. The missing piece? Clear visibility to connect personal growth to business outcomes – or in other words, ROI.
Gut feeling doesn’t allow us to measure learning ROI. A manager may say ‘Robin has improved their communication skills this year’, but why would that make your senior stakeholders allocate more budget to personal development?
What L&D teams need is a way to put that missing piece in place. ‘Robin has improved their communication skills this year, and I can prove it with real data’ is compelling. ‘Robin has improved their communication skills this year, I can prove it with real data, and here is how it’s improved their performance’ is the kind of statement that gets stakeholders to sit up and take notice.
Enter Helix, 5app’s AI skills intelligence platform. Think of Helix as your personal development compass, which shows leaders and employees exactly where their strengths lie, as well as highlighting opportunities to level up.
Helix doesn’t add an extra time burden to your overstretched leaders. It passively measures their skills in the background of their day-to-day meetings, whether that’s one-to-ones with direct reports, weekly team meetings or strategic planning sessions with other leaders.
Once it’s measured these skills, it sends a personalised analysis to the leader to show them exactly where they can improve their skills. In this analysis, the leader will receive a score which quantifies the skills demonstrated (using 5app’s 3Q Engine), alongside feedback referring to real quotes and behaviours.
With Helix, personal development for leaders stops being abstract and starts being tangible, trackable and impactful.
Small changes add up. When individuals improve, teams get stronger. Helix lets you see patterns across departments: who’s rising as a leader, which skills are growing and where more leadership development is required.
These ‘micro-wins’, over time, lead to a big impact. If each leader improves their strategic vision by even 2% each week, within six months, you’ll have a much more strategic, forward-thinking leadership team. Multiply these micro-wins across multiple skills, and dozens of business leaders, and the impact suddenly looks very impressive indeed.
Over time, focusing on personal development for leaders results in better business performance, stronger retention (of both leaders and their teams) and a pipeline of skilled, highly engaged future leaders who feel fully supported and in the know about their strengths and growth areas.
When leaders can take ownership of their personal development and watch their skills grow before their eyes, it’s a lot more meaningful than telling them they need to complete a course or attend a workshop.
This ownership helps leaders feel motivated and more connected to their own development, which then trickles down into the company’s overall learning culture. For this reason, supporting personal development isn’t just good practice – it’s a strategic move.
AI skills intelligence solutions like Helix make leaders’ growth visible, measurable and meaningful, turning your investment in your leaders into real business impact – not just today, but long into the future.