Training top-notch leaders isn’t just important from an employee development standpoint. It can also determine how engaged and motivated the rest of your workforce is. In fact, just 15% of workers say their company’s leadership makes them feel enthusiastic about the company’s future.
Who you train on leadership and how well you train them will determine how productive and enthusiastic the rest of your workforce is. Unsurprisingly, our own research at Asure Software has found that leadership training is strongly correlated with achieving fast growth as a company.
Who Should Businesses Give Leadership Training to?
As you design your leadership training, it’s essential to clarify who you are going to train. While each company is different, you’ll likely want to train workers who are in the following groups.
Current Managers: Leaders are catalysts of change, and your managers should understand strategic planning, organizational change management, and employee motivation.
Future Leaders: It’s important to prepare your future leadership team before they are thrown into managerial roles. Look at your go-getters and highly skilled employees. By training them today, you aren’t just giving them the skills they need to lead. You’re also showing them that they are valued and have a future at your company.
Employees Who Are Part of Your Succession Planning: Succession planning is an important aspect of strategic people management. It helps you fill vacancies, improve your organization’s capabilities, and help key workers improve their skills.
When choosing workers for leadership training, it’s important to be consistent. If there are two go-getters on a team who have similar experiences and skills, give them the same training. When it comes to selecting leaders, consistency is important in preventing favoritism and discrimination concerns. Because of this, it’s a good idea to be mindful about how you implement training programs and who you offer them to.
Types of Leadership Training
Leadership training can take many forms. Often, leadership training happens in internal development programs, on-the-job mentorships, and leadership courses. Once you’ve determined the method you want to use, the next step is figuring out what you want to cover in your training program.
Tactical Leadership: A tactical leadership course will focus on strategic planning and tactical operations.
Practical Leadership: Practical leadership courses tend to focus on hands-on learning and real-life applications. For example, they may cover team dynamics and the people skills employees need for managerial success.
Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence: By improving their emotional intelligence, leaders can communicate better and empathize more effectively. Problem-solving, active listening, and teamwork are just a few of the soft skills necessary for success.
Conflict Resolution: By learning about conflict resolution, leaders can notice when there are escalating tensions and understand how to defuse them.
DiSC Assessments: DiSC stands for dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. These assessments are easy to do and are a type of personality profile. They can be used as the basis for personality-based training at your workplace. With training, your team can develop better workplace communication and teamwork skills.
Communication: Good communication can guide outcomes and persuade listeners. Through communication training, your leaders can have an easier time motivating employees and leading their teams.
Leadership Styles: Performing assessments and learning about different leadership styles is important for your company’s leaders. This kind of style assessment helps them identify and understand their weaknesses, helping them become better leaders.
Decision-Making Skills: Decision-making courses focus on how organizational and team decisions are made. Often, they include sections on personal bias and other factors that can impact decision-making.
Change Management: Change management revolves around how an organization’s goals and ongoing change are controlled and put into effect. As leaders, managers are in a position to prepare, plan, and coordinate changes. This is a particularly important topic since around half of organizational change initiatives are unsuccessful.
10 Tips for Providing Leadership Training to Management
To make the most of your leadership training program, consider adopting these simple tips. If you’re a small business and can’t offer sessions on your own, you can use executive coaching instead. In this type of one-on-one environment, you can see positive results in as little as three sessions.
1. Educate Managers on Their Roles and Challenges
It can be challenging leading former peers and taking on a management role. To help with this transition, give your workers role clarity about what it takes to be a manager and help them learn about common managerial challenges. Additionally, you should provide them with constructive feedback.
2. Teach Managers How to Coach Subordinates
Whether the employee is a new or experienced manager, they must know how to manage their subordinates and coach them to reach a higher level of performance. For example, it’s a good idea to teach them how to offer performance feedback, handle employee reviews, and give one-on-one coaching sessions.
3. Assess Opportunities for Skill Development
Each person has unique abilities and challenges. During your performance reviews, assess the skills your current and future managers have. Then, offer specialized training programs to each manager that help with their current challenges.
4. Pair Managers With Experienced Mentors
Studies show that 75% of executives credit their job success to their mentors. However, current managers are far more likely to mentor employees who are the same race and gender as they are. Because of this, it’s a good idea to pair up managers and employees with experienced mentors so that everyone has equal access to high-quality training opportunities.
5. Teach Time Management Skills
Time management training helps managers learn how to use their time efficiently. This helps to lower their stress levels, boost productivity, and give them more time to do other tasks.
6. Offer Practical Tools for Ongoing Support
After the training session has ended, managers will still need ongoing support. For example, you may want to give employees access to virtual training videos, HR manuals, or notes from the original training sessions. Time management tools and project management tools can also be incredibly helpful for your managers.
7. Support Communication Skills
Good managers are also good communicators. Like any skill, communication abilities must be learned. With communication training, managers can improve working relationships, encourage employee involvement, and learn good ways to praise top performers.
8. Explicitly Train on Compliance
One of the most important things to train your workers about is legal compliance. This ensures your management team understands and follows the laws. Besides giving compliance training, you should document who has received it so that you have a record for the future.
If you need help with compliance training, Asure has a digital library you can use. Our HR compliance library can be accessed anywhere, so you can easily use it to train your workers.
9. Discuss Conflicts of Interest
Before employees begin their first day of work, take time to discuss what a conflict of interest is and how to deal with it. Ideally, you should have an HR document that guides workers on how to avoid conflicts of interest and who to report them to.
10. Ask for Feedback
At the end of any management training season, ask your attendees for feedback. The best management training programs are customized to match your unique workplace. Your employees’ feedback will help you hone your sessions until they are as useful and effective as possible for your workers.
Do You Provide Leadership Training to Managers?
Providing leadership training to your current and future managers can help your workplace become more effective. At Asure, we recently completed our 2024 HR Benchmark Report and survey. In the study, we asked 1,065 small businesses 40 questions about eight HR topics.
In our development and training section, we asked small businesses if they provided leadership training to their managers.
51% of zero-growth firms offered leadership training to managers.
81% of fast-growth firms offered leadership training to managers.
These results were significant enough. When you break the numbers down to just small firms with less than 25 people, the spread jumps from 30 points to 42 points.
Take the Next Step in Becoming a Fast-Growth Company
While small businesses might not have a large budget for training workers, your company can’t afford to miss out on leadership training. Our recent report shows that management training is strongly correlated with achieving faster growth, especially for small businesses.
If you want to take the next step toward business success, Asure is here to help. Reach out to one of our small business HR and payroll experts today for more information on becoming a fast-growth company.