If you want your company’s leaders and managers to transform the organization for the better, create efficiencies, increase employee engagement and inspire them, and then invest in leadership skills training. Like any other training program, this program is exclusively designed for managers and leaders—encouraging them to find new and innovative ways to develop and manage employees, thereby ensuring improved performance and productivity.

Leadership Skills Training Is Important for Managers at All Career Stages

Here’s how leadership skills training benefits managers at different career stages:

Early to Mid-Career

Young managers can benefit greatly from leadership skills training as it prepares them for greater responsibilities while accelerating their careers. For managers at this stage, a leadership program that focuses on boosting team motivation and self-awareness is quite useful.

Mid-Career Leadership Skills Training

Thorough leadership training programs that focus on business strategy development and execution are excellent for mid-career managers. These can help them create higher value for their organizations.

Top-Level Leadership training

At this career stage, training is equally important. They can help senior executives, CEO and board members develop the necessary skills for inspirational leadership. This training can help you leverage new business opportunities, maintainability to find and leverage new business opportunities and even drive innovation.

How to Create a Leadership Development Program?

If you want to create an in-house leadership development program, this section will help walk you through the steps to follow a result-driven program.

Define Your Program Needs

First things first, before you create a leadership skill development program, make sure to define leadership needs. Try answering questions like:

• Who is your target audience?
• What do you wish to achieve from the program?
• What information do you want to impart through the program?

Identify Your Audience Skill-Set

The next step is to determine and identify the skill-set of your audience. This will help you assess the skills of your target audience consistently and accurately across the board. It is needed to assess and identify the areas that need improvement and the areas they wish to excel in.

Choose Experienced Leaders as instructors

After identifying your audience’s skills and areas of improvement, choose an experienced leader as the instructor for the program. You can select them in-house by looking for an employee that thrives in that area. However, you can also outsource the instructor according to the program needs.

Use Blended Learning Strategy to Train

You can create a leadership training program with different teaching methods. Thus, employees can lean on the ways that they find beneficial. For example, you can combine leadership coaching and online training courses to deliver training through blended learning. This will give your audience the flexibility to learn at their own pace and time. You can also include leadership building activities for a more hands-on approach.

However, make sure to set measurable benchmarks for success so that you can gauge the results of the training program and determine the areas of improvement.

Skills to Include in a Leadership Training Program

In the past, there has been quite an emphasis on training leaders in a standard way. Plus, most often, they are taught and trained to emphasize increasing the productivity of the employees through monetary perks. However, if you are looking for a positive and successful change to transform the organization in the best way possible, you will have to break-free from old-school styles and focus on modern leadership styles.

The crux of modern leadership style can be beautifully described by a few lines from the book DRIVE by Daniel Pink. In the book, he states, “The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.”

In other words, paying employees what they are worth is essential to meet their basic needs, but throwing money at all problems is not always the solution. Modern leadership focuses on building a relationship with employees, creating a productive culture and, more importantly, developing employees professionally to grow with the company.

When developing a leadership training program, make sure to include the foundational leadership skills that all great leaders must possess in today’s corporate world.

Communication Skills

Make sure to offer leadership communication training. It will ensure that the leaders know how to communicate with people, other leaders within the company and partners they work with outside the company—train leaders in providing people a safe environment where they can speak freely without being judged. When people can share feedback and views, it will help leaders listen to and understand others better, thereby taking measures to address their issues and add value to the company.

Vision Sharing

New leaders need to learn the art and power of vision sharing with people. It builds a foundation for trust and respect and creates a unified culture where all employees are informed and move in one direction—striving to achieve the vision. Vision sharing culture focuses on sharing the ‘why’ with your team. This culture further helps introduce change initiatives without any friction between people because they all know the underlying purpose and how it will benefit the company.

Praise and Reprimanding Skills

To keep the morale of your team high, recognition and praise for their hard work are essential. However, at the same time, leaders may find themselves in situations where they have to have difficult conversations where reprimanding skills can come in handy. So, a leadership training program should be designed in a way that it develops praise and reprimanding skills in leaders so that they know how to handle different situations skillfully.

For more information or assistance with the leadership skills training development program, reach out to Dave Luehr. Call to schedule consultation. Remember that modern leadership training is vital for success.