Any organisation that’s promoted employees to leadership positions will know that it’s both a time and financial investment. But like all investments, there’s potential it won’t pay off – whether your chosen candidates don’t make good leaders, or you invest in training that doesn’t serve your needs. As such, it’s worth finding Examples Of Leadership Training that are proven to deliver results.
Sending your up-and-coming leaders on these courses at least puts you in better standing for a long-term payoff for your investment.
So, let’s look at 7 examples of leadership training that work in the real world.
What is Leadership Training?
The short answer is that leadership training develops the necessary skills in people to make them good leaders.
The impact of leadership coaching can transform how managers approach their roles. This can be as broad as “communication” or something more specific, such as motivating teams in the context of your organisation. The best Examples Of Leadership Training program will teach a mix of general and specific skills and will tailor their learning to the people taking it.
leadership training develops the necessary skills
Although all leadership development programmes do the same thing (develop people into leaders), they go about it in different ways. Just as you’d find in any school of thought, there are different ways of achieving such a large objective.
How Do We Measure Results?
So, it’s easy to define what we mean by leadership training, but how do we quantify its results?
In business, sending someone on a course and them getting a certificate isn’t enough to justify the investment.
Similarly, personnel development courses are difficult to put into financial terms, because how do you figure out that a course is worth the money?
Well, here are some of our top suggestions for how to measure the results of effective leadership training.
Employee Satisfaction
You can measure employee satisfaction in many ways, but a simple survey is often good enough. If someone in your organisation wants to move into leadership and you send them on a training course, they’re more likely to feel satisfied. This is a good measure of your investment.
Employee Retention
Similarly, employee retention is a good way to measure your investment in staff. While you’ll never get a 100% retention rate, it’s fair to say that offering your workers opportunities to develop and listening to their needs, will improve retention rates.
As with the point above, if you send someone on a leadership development course and they move into a leadership role, you’d expect them to stick around for a while. How long this is will depend on their wider career goals, but expect a couple of years.
Idea Generation
Training leaders isn’t just about having them manage teams. It’s also about them generating ideas to help move the company forward and overcome objectives. Although you can’t “teach” some of the fundamental aspects of creativity, you can certainly teach someone to come up with more business-focused ideas.
Therefore, if you invest in training leaders and you start to see them contribute more to idea generation meetings, you know your investment is worth it. You might not use their ideas, but having more voices can help with wider plan formulation.
Examples of Leadership Training that Deliver Real Results
Not all leadership training courses are created equal, and not all of them will offer the results you might expect. Along with identifying your leadership candidates, it’s worth spending time figuring out what kind of development will work well for them.
Even so, here are 7 Examples Of Leadership Training that are known to deliver effective results across the spectrum.
1. Mentorship
Mentorship may be one of the oldest learning styles. It pairs less experienced people with experts to learn the fundamentals of whatever subject they’re being taught. You can assign mentors within your organisation, or send your mentees elsewhere if you have business connections.
Mentorship
Of course, there are some potential drawbacks to mentorship. First, your trainee is only ever going to learn as much as the mentor knows, meaning you may end up with knowledge gaps within your organisation more widely.
The second issue is that if your mentor is lacking in one leadership area, your mentee may end up lacking too. To overcome these drawbacks, it’s best to combine mentorship with external training programmes, as this covers organisation-specific learning and education in useful soft skills.
2. Leadership Retreats
A leadership retreat is typically a training course that takes place over a week or so in a relatively remote area (or at least one unconnected to the workplace). They combine education with team-building exercises and relaxing free time. For example, you may find a leadership retreat happening in a country hotel to take advantage of the establishment’s amenities.
Leadership Retreats
Retreats include loads of learning methods, often with a focus on a particular area (or areas) of leadership training. As such, they may have guest speakers, group activities, workshops and more.
Read more: Are Leaders Born Or Trained? Understanding The Path To Exceptional Leadership
3. University Courses
This isn’t to say you need to send your leaders on full degree courses – or even that the courses need to happen at a university. Rather, it means sending them on courses that focus on particular areas of leadership but are taught over several weeks instead of being an intensive retreat.
University Courses
Similarly, you could include the idea of strategic exposure here by asking your trainee leaders to speak at courses. This could be to deliver a guest lecture on something they know or could simply be to expose them to public speaking.
4. Real-Time Simulations
Another term for this could be old-school “role-playing”. Put simply, it involves immersing your trainee leaders into situations they’d encounter in their everyday working lives. This could be a business-focused scenario or one that deals specifically with team needs.
Real-Time Simulations
The purpose should be fairly obvious: it teaches them to think on their feet and to apply theoretical learning to actual situations. For example, your leaders can test their critical thinking, decision-making, and crisis management as well as their communication. The benefit of using simulations is that it allows people to make mistakes and test their skills in a controlled environment.
5. International Immersion
While this type of leadership development applies mostly to international organisations, it can be used by smaller organisations that might have international connections elsewhere. The purpose is to send trainee leaders to other branches around the world, where they can then take part in mentorship or external education courses.
International Immersion
Unsurprisingly, this helps people understand how to work with different cultures and in different environments. It can help people to understand diversity in the workplace and also apply it to their own thinking.
Plus, working in international environments can help those working for dynamic global companies, and can even help the organisation itself. For example, if the company plans to open up offices in a new area, internationally-trained leaders can be invaluable for employee education.
6. E-Learning Workshops
E-learning is more popular than ever before and can be a great asset for leadership development. There’s no need to explain what e-learning is, as we’ve likely all used it by now. In the context of leadership development, though, it has several advantages.
First, it helps keep costs down because you don’t need to pay to send your trainees somewhere. While this can be useful in some contexts, it gives you greater flexibility in the number of people you send and the type of information they access.
E-Learning Workshops
Another advantage is that it allows you to outsource more easily to a leadership development company. If it has all its learning materials developed as e-learning courses, you can license them for a short period to get your leaders trained.
Plus, e-learning courses can still offer all the benefits of in-person courses, including guest speakers and workshops. However, some in-person learning is still useful because leadership is a person-focused business after all!
7. Cross-Functional Team Projects
A cross-functional team project is, in short, one that involves several teams working towards a common goal. This might be different departments or similar teams in different locations. Either way, it’s a great way to put someone’s leadership skills into action.
Cross-Functional Team Projects
Think of this as a step up from the real-time simulation example above. It tests the same skills while managing diverse teams, potentially across several sites. Of course, it does come with a level of risk (i.e., the leader having difficulty managing teams), but you can overcome this by putting them on fairly “easy” projects to help them level up their skills.
Final Thoughts
Leadership training programs are arguably as diverse as people’s learning styles. Similarly, there are industry trends that can dictate how courses are organised and whether there’s a focus on in-person or online learning. Either way, though, there are constants within training that always deliver results.
To get the results you want in your trainee leaders, it’s worth spending some time figuring out what you want to achieve from their development. Speak to them, figure out their learning styles and career goals, and use this information to decide what kind of training programme will work best for them (and you).
