Make Leadership Training a Priority
Becoming a better leader should be your top priority. Leadership training for managers is one of the top priorities for growth-oriented companies, but so is leadership training for employees. Now, there are many types of leadership training courses out there. It’s important that you find the right one for you or your employees. Moreover, you need to focus on developing the right skills to ensure top-of-the-line leadership in your organisation.
In essence, everyone can benefit by becoming a leader in one form or another. Through sound leadership, you ensure that your business makes an impact internally and externally. Having the right skillset will show leadership at work and empower your employees to achieve better results. Leadership is also imperative for your company culture, team morale, and long-term happiness in the workplace. This is why your company needs to focus on leadership training.
Let’s talk about the in-demand skills and leadership tips you can use to take your company forward as a whole.
1. Master Your Ideal Leadership Style
The objective of leadership training is not only about upskilling you or your employees, it’s also to help you discover your ideal leadership style. Some of the best leadership courses in the online world will focus heavily on this question in order to set a strong foundation for future leaders.
To that end, it’s important to discern between leadership styles, which include:
- Autocratic style. Autocracy is frowned upon in the modern workplace, and this leadership style may harm your business. The ‘do as I say approach often fails to motivate people or nurture a creative culture in a company.
- Authoritative style. Executive leadership training will often focus on authoritative leadership. This approach incentivises the employees to follow the leader while inspiring and empowering them in the process.
- Agile leadership. Also, know as pacesetting leadership, this style encourages the employees to follow at the pace of the leader. The leader sets the pace for the team and leads by example.
- Democratic style. Democratic leaders are heavily involved in the employee collective. They care about the opinions of others and use their employees as their ‘war council’. Furthermore, everyone gets a chance to contribute.
- Coaching style. Leadership and management training courses can often focus on the coaching style. Consequently, this style incentivises the employee to consider other options and avenues to learn, grow, and make better decisions.
- Affiliative style. This leadership style is all about people and their needs. Thus, the people come first, and you would need to focus on their needs and goals.
- Laissez-faire style. Also known as laid-back leadership, this is the complete opposite of autocracy. While it can be useful sometimes, leadership training generally steers away from the laissez-faire style.
You have to think carefully about your preferred leadership style. You may, however, consider blending different styles to create your unique approach.
2. Motivating and Empowering Employees through Leadership Training
Regardless of the style you choose, every good leadership skills training course will have you work on your motivational skills. Being a great leader means motivating your employees and empowering them to achieve higher results.
If your team members are not motivated, they will fail to meet certain standards and their performance will suffer. Accordingly, to motivate your team, you have to know the foundational pillars of motivation:
- Sincerity and openness.
- Genuine and encouraging feedback.
- Gratitude and acknowledging the individual.
- Recognising and praising progress.
- Setting realistic and attainable goals.
- Giving people the freedom to make decisions.
- Listening and acknowledging the individual.
These are the pillars that will help you improve team management considerably. They will also motivate your employees to do more, achieve more, and be loyal to you and the brand. Therefore, your leadership training should focus heavily on motivation, but it should also emphasise good communication.
3. Improving Your Communication Skills
Good communication skills are by far one of the most important elements of effective leadership. You need to be a great communicator in order to:
- Resolve conflicts and issues.
- Get your message across.
- Influence people and minimise pushback.
- Motivate your employees.
- Maintain steady progress.
- Avoid communication bottlenecks.
- Communicate vertically and horizontally without a hitch.
That said, it’s not just about communicating in your own language anymore. Leadership training nowadays also focuses on communication in different languages to boost international teams.
For instance, if one of your goals is to learn French to communicate with your team in France, you can take French lessons online and learn it as a part of your leadership development and education. Learning a language that allows you to communicate in the native tongue of your international teams is one of the best ways to showcase good leadership.
Combined with your soft skills, developing these communication skills will allow you to connect with your team members. Consequently, this will help develop a trusting relationship and boost productivity and teamwork across the board.
4. Leadership Training for Proper Delegation
One of the most important leadership training topics is, of course, delegation. To manage your projects effectively, you have to delegate tasks to the right people and the right teams. You might think that this is easy, but in reality, this is a complex process that demands professional leadership training.
In essence, delegation is at the core of people management in the modern workplace. As a leader, you can’t do everything yourself, so you need to delegate by:
- Defining the task.
- Setting SMART objectives.
- Identify the ideal employee for the job.
- Communicate effectively to set expectations.
- Explain the objective.
- Set the pace of the task.
- Discuss how the employee should achieve the goal.
- Set a realistic deadline.
- Guide the employee and provide support if needed.
- Provide and accept feedback when the job is done.
5. Making the Right Decisions
Decision-making is at the very core of the best leadership training programmes in the online and offline worlds. To become a great leader, you need to make sound, data-driven decisions. You also need to minimise errors and the risk of making a bad call.
To make good decisions, you have to consider the following decision-making pillars:
- Analytic decision-making. You rely on facts and actionable, reliable data.
- Behavioural decision-making. Focused on the team, you always consider how the decision impacts your employee collectively.
- Conceptual decision-making. These decisions are based on creative thinking and collaboration.
- Directive decision-making. You make decisions quickly and consider your experience and expertise only.
It’s important to combine these pillars to come up with your ideal formula for making decisions. Sometimes, your leadership training will tell you to be direct and quick, but other times you might need to take the collective’s opinion into account.
Wrapping Up
Leadership training is imperative for the success of a modern business. Whether you or your employees are undergoing leadership education and development, be sure to focus on these skills to take your career and your business to the next level.
Action: For even more useful content on leadership, check out our ultimate guide on Leadership Skills.
