Organizations or businesses have to face various challenges that require someone who can deal with them effectively. If an organization has a leader who can predict market conditions, identify indications of a possible sales plunge, and deal with distressed clients and customers, it can prepare itself to tackle such adverse situations and mitigate the risks of doing business.
A leader helps an organization sail through rough waters and withstand violent thunderstorms. During good times, a leader guides the organization on the path of success and growth.
In this article, we’ll try to understand the importance of leadership training. We’ll be answering the following questions:
- What is leadership training?
- What is the purpose of leadership training?
- What are the benefits of leadership training?
- How a learning management system can help you in providing leadership training?
- Tips for creating leadership training programs using a learning management system
Ready? Let’s dive in!
What is Leadership Training?
Leadership training, as the name suggests, is training given to employees to prepare them for leadership roles within the organization.
Through such training, employees are instilled with new values, skills, and knowledge that are imperative for them to become great leaders. It enables them to respond to challenges by weaving strategies using their intelligence and expertise.
What is the Purpose of Leadership Training?
The following is the purpose of leadership training:
- The major purpose of leadership training is to groom employees and assist them in upgrading their skills set.
- Training gives a hands-on experience to employees to deal with difficult situations which may confront them anytime.
- Mentoring employees for effective capacity building.
- To drive the success of key projects through teamwork, collaboration, and communication.
- To regulate subordinates and coach them.
- To instill necessary leadership values within the employees.
What are the Benefits of Leadership Training?
The following are major benefits of leadership training:
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Better decision-making
Leadership training improves the emotional intelligence of leaders and helps them to make informed and sound decisions that are in the best interest of the organization.
For instance, if your organization is facing immense competition from businesses in the same niche, your leaders can help create a strategy that can enable you to beat the said competition.
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Introspection
Leadership training enables employees to introspect and figure out if they truly have the traits required to become leaders. Such training programs help employees to find out their strengths and weaknesses and improve their skills by exploring courses that can boost their confidence. Before you entrust your employees with higher responsibilities, you need to train them to gauge their professional and interpersonal traits.
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Managing risk
Organizations have to continuously manage risks. Thus, the ability to manage risk becomes essential to shaping new leaders. They must be able to understand the nature of risk and the repercussions of avoiding risks and devise a plan to sail through troubled waters. The best way to allow employees to manage risk is through leadership training.
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Boost productivity
Leadership training helps in boosting the productivity of employees. As employees become new leaders they provide direction to staff and help them find a way out during difficult times. They become well equipped to evaluate problems, cope with challenges, and offer sensible and sound solutions.
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Spotting leaders
Leadership training creates an opportunity for employers to spot employees who are capable of becoming leaders. For instance, training assessments can help employers pick high-potential employees who can prove to be an asset to the organization. Employers can thus focus more on their performance and help such employees learn new skills.
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How can a learning management system help you in providing leadership training?
An LMS, or a learning management system is a web-based tool or software that helps in developing eLearning courses that help employees upskill or reskill themselves. Whether your organization is small or large, an LMS is all you need to build a productive, smart, and resilient workforce.
Using LMS software, you can create a plethora of eLearning courses and diverse eLearning content that is highly informative and engaging and helps your employees stay focussed on training.
Here are some ways an LMS can help in providing leadership training to employees:
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Self-paced learning
Self-paced learning means employees can decide on their own when, where, and how they want to learn. This approach to training is learner-centric and gives complete freedom to employees to manage their pace of training.
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Short and crisp training material
No doubt you want your leaders to be strong and resilient. You want someone who can deal with any situation, but when they’re in the training phase, you need to be less harsh and more understanding.
Don’t overburden employees with excessive information. If the training material is lengthy and time-consuming, your future leaders may feel disinterested in continuing training. Instead, you must use a microlearning approach to weave short and crisp eLearning content that is easy to consume and digest. The shorter the information, the longer employees will retain information.
If on the first day of training, you show too many risks and dangers involved in leadership training, they may simply walk out.
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Group learning
Leaders never function in isolation. Hence, your training program should promote collaboration and group learning. The best part about using an LMS is that it offers amazing features like video conferencing, web conferencing, group chats, etc, that establish a healthy learning environment where everyone can communicate and collaborate.
An LMS breaks the barriers between learners and training administrators and enables organizations to train a diverse workforce settled across different parts of the world. So you can pair up employees living in distinct geographical boundaries and let them set up virtual face-to-face meetings.
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Hands-on experience
With an LMS, you can provide hands-on experience to leaders before they encounter any challenge in the real world. Modern LMS support immersive training experiences with virtual reality capabilities.
Using VR and LMS together, you can build proactive leaders who are always ready to deal with any issue. For instance, you can create real-life situations where employees need to use their intelligence and think of tactics to deal with problems. Such scenarios can be practiced by wearing VR headsets.
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Tips for creating leadership training programs using a learning management system
Now that you’ve understood what leadership training is, what is its purpose and benefits, and how you can use a learning management system to build leadership training programs, we will now give you some amazing tips to design engaging training programs.
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Outline the purpose and goals of training
Before designing an eLearning course, you need to clearly define the purpose and broadly elaborate on the goals you wish to achieve through leadership training programs.
When you, as eLearning professionals, are clear in your head about this, employees can establish a better connection with the courses. Lack of clarity on these areas ends up confusing employees and hence, you should not ignore this aspect at all.
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Prioritize eLearning courses
There are some topics that have to be incorporated into your eLearning courses. Some of these topics are
- Conflict resolution
- Dealing with change
- Project planning
- Power and influence in an organization
- Understanding organizational networks
- Ways to become a passionate leader
No matter what topics you include in the leadership eLearning course, make sure you create small training modules that can be accessed on the go and don’t exhaust employees.
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Inculcate a variety of leadership styles
No two employees are the same and hence you shouldn’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. Try to see which leadership style would be best suited for specific employees and accordingly train them. There are a variety of leadership styles that you can introduce your employees to; for example, coach-style leadership, democratic leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and so on.
Conclusion-
Leadership training doesn’t just help employees fulfill their professional goals, it also helps them achieve organizational goals. Using an LMS, you can fill the skills gap and prepare future-ready leaders. An LMS makes the entire process more efficient, easier to administer, and more impactful.
