Being a great leader doesn’t mean just being great at the day to day tasks you’re responsible for executing on. It means being able to motivate, inspire, and organize the people you work with around a common goal. While excelling at the “doing” parts of your role like setting budgets or strategizing the quarterly plan may come a little more naturally with time, the “being” part of leadership may require more intentional effort to develop. With the right leadership training, people at every level of an organization can prepare to be leaders.
What does good leadership training accomplish?
Whole person development
Studies show that the more you focus on developing the whole person, the happier, more productive, and more loyal your teams will be. By developing your employees as whole people, you’ll find yourself not just with great managers who have the professional skills needed to do their jobs, you’ll find yourself with great leaders who can motivate and inspire the people who work around them.That’s why it’s important to not only focus on professional skills training, but also soft skill development training.
A leadership-ready employee pipeline
When companies train their employees to act as leaders regardless of the role they’re in, they find themselves with a more qualified pipeline of leadership-ready employees when new roles open up. This saves the cost of hiring from outside candidates who aren’t as intimately familiar with the inner-workings of the company and motivates internal employees by showing them that they have a clear career trajectory.
Employee fulfillment
Employees want to feel like more than just a number. In fact, it’s been proven that employees perform better when they feel like they can bring their whole selves to work. Developing your employees leads to high productivity and more loyalty to the organization (read: lower employee turnover rates).
5 questions to ask when finding the right leadership training
1. Does your leadership training have a point of view?
While throwing a bunch of uncurated educational content at your employees may technically check the box of “having learning and development,” you won’t create actual change within your organization with this type of leadership training. Your learning platform should have a point of view and enforce behaviors that are important to your team’s development.
2. Does your leadership training integrate into your existing platform?
It’s unlikely that your employee training platform will be the only tool your team uses on a regular basis. It’s also unlikely that your team is going to be excited about adding numerous new platforms into their toolbox. Finding a training platform that integrates with your existing platforms can be a huge win for employee engagement with the training platform.
3. Does your leadership training encourage learning agility?
Being a great leader means being able to learn and comprehend in situations that aren’t your ideal learning format. For example, if you’re a visual learner but your team is better at presenting information in an oral format, it’s important for you to be able to flex your learning style in those situations and comprehend effectively through spoken means.
4. Can your team apply your leadership training to their day-to-day?
Employee training that can be practiced as your team completes their day-to-day responsibilities is the most effective way to create change. While most of us can take a course and feel inspired to make changes in our behavior for a few days, it takes continuous reinforcement and opportunities to apply learning to create lasting change.
5. Can your team fit your employee training into their regular schedule?
All-day seminars or hours-long video courses simply aren’t realistic for employees who have a full plate. Making time to complete employee development and manager training doesn’t have to be hard with the right micro-learning principles in place.