Investing in staff training is typical for most companies as it’s crucial for their long-term development. In fact, a 2023 survey found that companies spent between $500 and $1,400 per employee on training. While this might sound less than you expected, it equates to around 60 hours of training per person per year.
But when you have a training budget and plenty of staff to put through training, you need to prioritise the type of training you offer. Let’s take leadership training and management training as examples. They might seem like the same thing but they’re quite different.
So, which is right for your organisation, and how do you decide? Let’s take a look.
Management vs. Leadership: The Differences
To understand the two types of training, we must first look at the differences between leadership and management. Many use the terms interchangeably, but their definitions are slightly different:
Managers are people who run teams of varying sizes and focus on efficiently using resources (people, tech, budgets, etc.) to meet goals. Without making it too obvious, the purpose of a manager is to manage things to keep them in line with a company’s targets.
Leaders, on the other hand, focus primarily on getting people to do better. This might be through workplace motivation and inspiration, or it might be through setting and communicating goals. In other words, leaders help people achieve a vision for a company rather than manage their progress toward said vision.
Another way of looking at the differences is to understand that managers coordinate and organise while leaders inspire and motivate. People may be both leaders and managers, but it’s also possible to be just one. There is overlap between their responsibilities, but their ways of achieving goals differ.
Management Training or Leadership Training
So, now that we understand management and leadership are different concepts, we can look at the impact this has on training courses. Below is a summary of both management training and leadership training and situations in which they can be beneficial.
What is Leadership Training?
Leadership training programmes typically focus on developing soft skills that make someone a more effective leader. These include learning more about the way someone acts as a leader and the behaviour they use to inspire others. Some key topics include:
- Strategic thinking and planning
- Communication skills – empathy, overcoming objections, conflict resolution, etc.
- Mentoring – both being a mentor and a mentee
- Personal development – understanding motivations and actions, self-reflection
- Aspects of social science – group interactions and behaviours
- Motivation and inspiration
Leadership Training
An important aspect of leadership training is its focus on innovation from both a personal and team-based perspective. Leaders are often seen as bringers of change, which can mean coming up with their changes or providing employees with the tools needed to suggest their innovations. Either way, it’s a crucial aspect of leadership training.
So, when might you want to focus on leadership training in your organisation? Some scenarios include high employee turnover, problems with staff motivation, or regularly missing work targets. While there are other situations, it should be evident that leadership training helps with employee motivation rather than workplace processes.
What is Management Training?
Management training programmes, on the other hand, focus more on practical skills like streamlining processes and improving efficiency. This isn’t to say that managers shouldn’t have people skills – far from it. Rather, management training focuses on management as a whole, of which employee management is only one aspect.
A management training programme will likely include:
- Elements of leadership training, particularly communication
- Delegation
- Decision-making
- Proper processes for appraisals and reviews
- Setting targets based on wider company goals
- Strategies to avoid micromanaging while ensuring proper team dynamics
There are plenty of elements of leadership training that come up in management training. After all, there are plenty of similarities between the two, and many people fulfill both roles depending on the size of their company. It would be wrong to assume that managers shouldn’t be trained in communication and other leadership aspects, but their training courses also include a lot more technical and conceptual skills.
Management Training
You might want to focus on management training if you feel there’s incoherence within your teams. This might mean staff aren’t working together, you’re noticing issues in their ability to achieve goals, or you feel goals aren’t being communicated properly. Where leaders might tackle these issues from a motivational angle, managers would tackle them from a practical, resource-based angle.
Choosing Which is Right for Your Company
Deciding whether you’d benefit more from management training or leadership training can be difficult when the taught skills are fairly similar. Below are some of the main things you should consider when deciding which is right for your company.
Cost Efficiency
The first thing to consider is the cost efficiency of your decision. For example, do you have more people in your company who would benefit from communication skills over target setting skills? If so, leadership training is likely going to be the best option.
You can also look at this from a more practical angle. Figure out how many people you’d be able to send on each type of training course and see if you can get some kind of discount from your training provider for bulk ordering. This can help provide a clearer ROI simply because you’re paying less per person for a greater number of trained staff.
Cost Efficiency
Similarly, remember that managers are more likely to benefit from leadership training than the other way around. Managers will always use communication and strategy skills, whereas leaders will often benefit less from focusing on the technical and conceptual elements of management training.
In short, leadership training often makes the most sense from a cost perspective because it’s likely to benefit more people in your company. Almost anyone will improve professionally from the skills taught in a leadership training programme.
Long-Term Goals
Another important consideration is any kind of leadership pipeline you might have in mind. Specifically, are there managers within your company who you can see going on to bigger leadership roles later in their careers? Arming them with leadership training now will make a big difference to their company’s progression later.
Presumably, these people are already good managers, so won’t need the skills taught on a management training course. However, as and when they get promoted, you’ll need to fill their positions, and will you do this internally or externally?
If you Focus on external hires, you won’t know the answer until you’ve interviewed and hired candidates. If you’ll hire internally, you might already have some candidates in mind for the positions. While they might benefit from explicit training, you can start nurturing their skills now to save on this later.
Another consideration in this regard is how quickly your staff can complete the training and therefore how quickly it’ll benefit your company. Both training programmes will be similar in length, but you may see the benefits of leadership training more quickly than management training.
From a long-term perspective, leadership training likely makes the most sense. There are obviously useful skills that can be taught on a management training course, but most of their application within your company will be based on your internal processes. As such, you might find internal mentorship is a more effective way to pass these on.
Read More: How Long Should A Leadership Development Programme Be?
Workplace Motivation and Employee Retention
While workplace motivation might not be top of your list of deciding factors, it’s arguably a pretty important one. After all, motivation is directly correlated to employee retention, and having employees stick around for longer can help reduce costs related to hiring and training.
Inspiring and motivating staff are key components in leadership training that both leaders and managers will benefit from. As mentioned, managers typically focus on hitting targets and managing resources but keeping staff happy enough to hit their KPIs is a clear use-case for motivational techniques.
If you think managers would benefit from certain aspects of leadership training but there are some parts you’d want to leave out, consider looking for a training course that offers modular elements. For example, a course might include seminar weekends on certain topics, which you could then pick and choose to benefit your staff.
While workplace motivation is a great example, this could also apply to strategic thinking or mentorship techniques. As such, finding a training provider that lets you drop in and out of certain elements of the overall course could be of great benefit to your wider employee training programme.
Final Thoughts
The bottom line is that it’s not possible to say whether leadership training or management training is best for your organisation. The answer will depend on your goals, workplace structure, and any areas of improvement you identify in your management and leadership teams.
However, generally speaking, leadership training will have the greatest level of benefit for the greatest number of people. Both managers and leaders will learn useful skills from a standard leadership training syllabus, so consider reading through one to see what advantages it could offer your organisation.
