Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. In a business setting, this can mean directing employees and colleagues with a strategy to meet the company's needs.
In today’s business arena, challenges can arise at any time, and to be an effective leader you need to be able to respond to those challenges with intelligence, strategy, and expertise. Business success requires agile leaders who can skillfully lead through change, drive performance, and cultivate a people-first culture of engagement and accountability.
In any organisation, leaders usually provide the direction towards the achievement of its goals and objectives. Leaders influence the attitudes and behaviour of their staff. Great leaders are secure in their role and in their ability to do their jobs. They communicate well with their teams and mentor their employees. They make sure they know what their teams need to do their jobs, and meet their own goals. They challenge their staff and hold them accountable, but they also take responsibility if the team fails at something.
“No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it” Andrew Carnegie
Millennials in particular consider leadership training a job perk. PriceWaterhouse Cooper’s (PwC) report on Millennials At Work found millennials were more interested in learning and development than in other kinds of benefits, including cash bonuses. They are also interested in moving into leadership positions, and fast; 52% of respondents said they’d choose a job that would let them advance through the ranks quickly over one with a higher salary.
So, why are great leaders so scarce? It’s not because most managers are incapable of leadership. It’s simply that most managers aren’t getting the guidance they need before they’re placed in leadership roles. To be consistent with the visions, values, and strategies of most organisations, managers need to receive information on how to strengthen their capability to meet their organisation’s goals. Accordingly, if those skills and capabilities are left unattended, managers will not achieve the desired impact and effectiveness. Therefore, providing leaders with training will bring them one step closer to reaching organisational goals.
Can you afford the costs of poor leadership?
Disengaged talent, high employee turnover, low productivity, bad decisions, unhappy customers? No you can’t. It’s more cost effective to develop your existing employees into leaders than to hire leaders from outside hoping they will be the right fit for your company.
Also, effective and efficient leaders have to continue enhancing their skills and abilities through leadership training programmes to meet the organisation's goals and develop their people.
“Leadership is really all about learning, and learning is really all about leadership”. Marshall Goldsmith and Sam Shriver
If you’re having difficulty responding to unanticipated business challenges, or if you’re simply interested in improving your leadership skills, you should strongly consider enrolling in a leadership training course.
Top 10 reasons your business needs leadership training
Not only is leadership training of benefit to the employees, it is also very beneficial to the company. By promoting your employees to leadership roles, you already understand their abilities, work ethic, and professional drive to succeed. However, if employees lack the necessary skill sets and training, promoting them to leadership roles can be risky and potentially result in their downfall. Your staff members might excel above expectations in their current roles, but they might be less successful in leadership roles.
Leadership development programmes are crucial to the long-term success of every organisation. Whether you believe leaders are born or made, in order to build a high-performing team, optimise your people’s expertise and prepare the next generation of well-rounded leaders, you have to invest in leadership development
Here are our top 10 reasons why your business will benefit from investment in leadership training for your managers:
1. Increase Productivity
By training your managers in effective leadership skills, you can increase the productivity of your workforce. Leaders are there to provide direction to staff and ensure they are performing at or above expectations. They will have the ability to assess problems, manage situations, and provide sensible solutions.
The right consistent leadership can increase the productivity of your people.
Leadership training creates an opportunity for employees to reach new heights and achieve set goals. With this, performance is enhanced as employees strive to develop their skills through the invested training. This allows employers to identify high potential employees who aspire to unlock their full potential. Employees are more likely to stay focussed and increase their performance levels when they are working towards their goal.
“Most employees are disengaged, want more training, and want to know their employers care about, and are invested in their future. They want to know that there are opportunities to advance and that their career path isn’t just a dead end.” Training Industry
2. Increase employee engagement and reduce staff turnover
When you give employees a role in your company’s future, they respond with loyalty. Developing your own people also is less expensive than bringing on new recruits, as it doesn’t require you to spend money on advertising, recruitment agency fees, HR costs, travel and relocation expenses, etc. In terms of turnover, the most common reason for employee exodus is a bad manager, that is, poor leadership.
3. Nurture future leaders
You need to be strategic about developing and nurturing future leaders. Without strategy, leadership roles are often given to the most forward candidates with dominant personalities. Quality leadership is a combination of the right qualities and the right training. Identify those who have what it takes and provide them with targeted leadership training. Nurturing future leaders supports succession planning and offers career pathways to employees, further increasing retention.
4. Improve their managerial skills and abilities
Training programmes will ideally teach employees new strategies that will improve their performance, and in turn the performance of the business.
By learning new things, employees can find themselves growing their skills, which can help them to become better aligned to their role as a leader.
Employee engagement therefore increases as they can feel motivated by implementing new strategies and skills into their roles.
It should develop among all the managers a sense of responsibility for active participation in making improvements. As they develop their talents and abilities in management, they strengthen their needs of improving performance.
“Good leaders have a plan! They analyse the circumstances surrounding their leadership opportunity, cultivate and refine awareness regarding their influence related triggers and impulses, then thoughtfully establish measurable objectives that will ultimately determine the degree of their success and effectiveness.” Marshall Goldsmith and Sam Shriver
5. Improve Risk Management
Companies know that when conducting business, an element of risk will always be present. You therefore need to train your future and current leaders in risk management. If you do so, they will gain strategic vision and risk management skills. Improving leaders’ risk management skills will add extensive value to any business.
6. Achieve better Project Leadership
Without sufficient project leadership skills, leaders will likely struggle to handle all aspects of a project. This might cause the project to go off course and end in substantial losses to the business. Staff morale is also likely to decrease due to incorrect guidance and magnified stress.
By teaching effective leadership skills, your leaders will be able to better manage their teams and complete projects efficiently and on schedule. This increased efficiency will boost your overall productivity and result in greater profits.
7. Improve corporate culture
Investing in leadership development sends a message to your people that you care about them and inspires them to meet and exceed performance expectations. Programmes that include mentoring and coaching can boost employee morale and transform your company from a workplace to a great place to work. Leadership development programmes also reinforce a company’s vision, mission and values by setting an example.
8. Effectively manage change
Leadership development helps companies navigate challenging times by increasing people’s ability to respond rapidly in unpredictable business environments. Effective leadership is essential during critical times such as drastic change, workforce reductions, corporate restructuring, political upheaval and new competition.
9. Build effective work teams
Leadership programmes benefit the followers as much as the leader. A leader with greater clarity, direction and effectiveness enables those traits to trickle down to those she is leading. Followers will have a great sense of direction and purpose, which leads to greater motivation to accomplish their tasks and produces greater organisational effectiveness. Leadership programmes focus on teaching leaders how to produce satisfied followers.
10. Enable better decision-making
Leadership training can result in better decision-making. How? Because leaders functioning at a high level of emotional intelligence have the perspective to make informed, intelligent business decisions. For that reason alone, you can consider your leadership training investment returned.
The investment you make in leadership training will return a very impressive Return on Investment for your organisation. According to a Global Coaching Client Study by ICF, 86% of the companies able to provide figures to calculate ROI from leadership training indicated they had at least made their investment back: 19% showed an ROI of at least 50 times (5000%) the initial investment, while a further 28% saw an ROI of 10 to 49 times the investment. “The median company return was 700%, indicating that typically a company can expect a return of seven times the initial investment,” ICF reported.
Top 10 reasons how you will benefit from leadership training
Learning is a process that never ends — you’ve probably heard this before. When it comes to management and leadership skills, this philosophy holds true. A person does not have to be born a leader to become one and with the appropriate training and understanding, anyone can become an effective leader. Here are our top 10 reasons why you will benefit from leadership training:
1. Ensures you use the most effective leadership style
Leadership training will assist you in implementing the most appropriate leadership style in the work you do. There are several leadership styles, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. Leadership training can help individual leaders identify the leadership style that ensures they will have a positive influence on others completing different tasks.
2. It will help you clarify your vision
Successful leaders have a clear, sound vision of where they want to go. Training gives you the chance to step back from your daily responsibilities, to examine your organisation, and to think about how the future may unfold. You will be able to communicate your vision in a way that truly motivates the people around you.
3. It will improve your career prospects
Landing your dream career has a lot to do with marketing yourself to potential employers. Businesses are looking for someone with skills and accomplishments that far surpass those of all other applicants, and they will look for leadership skills to shine through during job interviews.
Leadership training gives you a thorough overview of the qualities of a good leader, while also allowing you to put these skills into practice in classroom and business settings.
4. Empowers you to succeed
If you think great leaders are born and not made, think again. Leadership training uses various techniques and examples to emphasise the point that with a little hard work we all have it in us to be great leaders.
Most entrepreneurs have never had training that teaches them how to run a company. Because of this, you might not have a clear idea of where you want to go. Maybe there are expansion opportunities that you haven’t considered, or maybe there are business relationships you haven’t fostered. The next level is about progress, and one way to achieve that progress is to add to your skill set.
5. It will boost your confidence
Self-confidence is a vital skill, both in the working world and in your social life. Through leadership training, public speaking, group activities and similar exercises will force you to be confident in yourself and your opinions, even when you’re faced with opposition.
Leadership training programmes can help teach you the essential skills and techniques you need in order to look at challenges from a different perspective. Doing so can add clarity to a difficult situation, and also promotes wisdom and facilitates self-confidence.
6. It will teach you new, valuable skills
Leadership training can teach you the skills you need to lead effectively, including the often-tricky skills needed to persuade and influence people — even those over whom you have little direct authority.
Leadership training widens thinking abilities to help leaders think in innovative and creative ways. Looking at a problem within an organisation from every possible angle and coming up with new and better ways to solve it helps you to add value to your organisation.
Peer-to-peer learning can occur often in a leadership course. By watching one of your classmates attempt the day’s exercise, you can see what things worked and what things didn’t. You can then shape the good things into your own performance, and just like that, you have improved your leadership skills just by watching another student.
7. Helps you communicate better
Leadership training teaches leaders to communicate better with their team. Untrained leaders may expect their team members to think and act just like the leaders themselves do, which may not be possible.
When leaders are taught to realise that different people hear, respond, accept and act very differently to a single situation, they become more skilled in the manner in which they communicate. Leadership training will aid you to communicate well across ages, backgrounds, traditions, cultures and other factors so as to raise shared agreement and motivate your team members to work together to succeed.
8. Develop Better Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is one of the main personality traits that makes for a great leader. Understanding how emotions affect others ensures that people lead efficiently and considerately.
In his book 'The New Leaders', Daniel Goleman states that emotional intelligence is critical to the success of a leader. Emotional intelligence involves being smart about emotions and using empathy effectively to empower and engage employees. Leadership training that encompasses emotional intelligence can make you a better leader.
9. Teaches you how to influence people
Part of leadership training is about teaching you the power to influence those around you. You will learn how to motivate your team and how to discriminate between good and bad sources of power, and between strong and weak methods of influence.
“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one who gets people to do the greatest things” Ronald Reagan
You’ll gain insights on how to pick a good team, how to build a team capable of delivering your vision, and how to give orders without coming off as either too weak or too overbearing.
10. Teaches you how to avoid mistakes
Training will give you a glimpse of the worst mistakes you can make as a leader. It will also teach you how to help map out a plan for avoiding the traps and pitfalls that can end your leadership career.
Why do companies choose GBS Corporate Training for their leadership training?
GBS Corporate Training is the authorised global Affiliate of the Center for Leadership Studies in the UK and Ireland and provider of a curriculum of the renowned Situational Leadership® training courses.
The Situational Leadership® model is arguably the most recognised, utilised and effective leadership and influence tool in the history of the behavioural sciences.
GBS provides a range of training courses associated with Situational Leadership®
- Situational Leadership® Certification - a three day course which equips an organisation's internal trainer to deliver the licensed Situational Leadership® programme within their own organisation
- Situational Leadership® Taking Charge - a half day workshop designed to help frontline employees develop a thorough understanding of the leadership process
- Situational Leadership® Leveraging Your Power To Influence - a one day workshop which explores the seven bases of power and how you can use these to influence others
- Situational Leadership® Leading With Emotional Intelligence - a one day workshop which provides an in-depth understanding of the impact that emotions have on thoughts and actions
- Situational Leadership® Leading With DiSC - a one day workshop which guides participants on a path of self-discovery to develop their own leadership style
- Situational Coaching® - a one day workshop which blends coaching with the Situational Leadership® model
The desired outcome of leadership training is for participants to feel prepared for higher levels of management and equipped with a strong leadership strategy. The most important thing to remember is that a training course should serve as a starting point or continuation in the leadership development process, rather than a one-time event.
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