5 Helpful Tips to Get Your Leadership Development Budget Approved
Getting Your Budget Signed Off!
At Tosha, we UNDERSTAND getting approval for your budgets is key!
Sure, we want you to work alongside us and start digging in the work (or continue where we left off!), but we understand that the struggle is real when getting numbers approved to get the scope of work signed.
After years of strategizing with clients on promising ways to ‘get to the YES!’, we’ve devised this “cheat sheet” for you.
We hope these five prompts will spark some creative ideas in you!
…And maybe you will use these for things outside of DEI, too!
Make DEI Part of Your Leadership Program
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are not supplementary to overall Leadership Development, in fact, it’s 100% necessary. When wanting to put your program together for DEI, start shifting the narrative within your company that this is at the crux of what’s needed for all leaders. When you make DEI part of your leadership development and overall training, it naturally becomes built-in. Again, this does not need to be a separate line item.
2. Compare the Cost to the Investment Lost
Investing in your employees with high attrition rates can become costly. We’ve placed in a graphic below to make this more concise, pulling from this Work Human article here.
For example, if you’ve lost 3 from senior management and 10 from entry level, multiply the costs below using a guide for the average annual salaries to depict the cost to replace.
Using this method, you can place similar (usually lower) numbers parallel to the cost of Leadership Development and DEI training to ensure that the supports will be in place to mitigate more loss or losses that are currently at risk.
3. Ask for a Pilot
Depending on the needs of your company, there is always a way to test out the measurable aspects prior to fully implementing company-wide. This will depend on a number of factors, of course. However, if your company does not have too many urgent needs and if there are budget cuts all-around, asking for a pilot might be the way to go. For example, you can use a prompt like this,
How about we give our [insert level within organization here] an opportunity for the next six months of next year’s Q1 and Q2 and survey them afterwards to measure improvement in their leadership skills within DEI?
Ensure to measure different parts of your company’s cultural improvement throughout the pilot when asking for a bigger budget, once the initial pilot has successfully completed.
4. Get Buy-In from the Decision-Maker through Sponsorship
This is a great tool to use if you have any or all of the following at your company:
A great or pretty long-standing relationship with and understanding of the Founder/ Owner/ CEO
The F/O/CEO has made their mark on their company and likes to have input in major decisions
The F/O/CEO likes to be involved in key decisions that impact the company culture
Ask said key decision maker to send out the initial email/s to the company, so that they are optically leading the charge, with you alongside them.
5. Make a Case by Aligning with Company’s Values
Before we send proposals to a client that we work with, we always go to see their company values first. This means that if you’re reading this page, your values are in alignment with some great DEI work.
Take a good look at your company’s values and use these as a jumpstart for the work that you want to continue doing within your company.