Last updated: 11 May 2021
Did you know that right now, the world is experiencing its fourth industrial revolution?
This is the current trend of digital automation that uses data exchange and machine learning across manufacturing technologies. In this era of digitally-driven change, leadership development becomes crucial to sustain rapidly developing enterprises and maintain business profitability.
However, keeping up with the current industrial revolution isn’t the only reason why leadership training is important.
Developing and investing in your leadership skills is beneficial regardless of your career path. Whether your background is corporate business, socio-civic causes, education, or whether your interest is in personal growth or improving family dynamics, leadership training benefits you.
Why Is Leadership Training Important?
Essentially, quality leadership training is designed to bring out the best in you so that you get to bring out the best in your people.
Not only do you get to develop your leadership skills, such as budget planning, report writing, data analysis, presenting, or public speaking, for example, good training also helps you develop your leadership attributes.
In other words, you get to develop your leadership style – i.e. how you engage with those you lead, how to increase your negotiation, coaching, and communication skills, for example. You get to advance your key skills so that inspiring your team, colleagues, voters, peers or family becomes second nature. With these skills, you are able to unite your team around a common goal, or a bigger vision that is beneficial to all involved.
Successful leaders in any field are mentors and coaches to internal talent while offering a clear trajectory to external partners. Engaging, supporting, and inspiring; successful leaders foster an atmosphere of trust and motivation in whatever their environment.
Maybe you are at the beginning of your career path or entrepreneurial endeavor and looking to develop your skills and find your own style. Or perhaps you are well established in your career and are responding to the changing nature of leadership in the current climate of fast-paced change. Or maybe it’s purely for personal interest. Whatever your route, leadership training offers myriad benefits.
In case you’re not already convinced, or if you need some more evidence to persuade you (or your HR department) let’s check out a handful of the top benefits of getting good leadership training.
The Benefits of Undergoing Good Leadership Training
According to John Maxwell’s ‘Law of the Lid’ in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, the “lid” on the overall ability of business performance is the limit of an organizations’ leadership capability. So why not lift that lid?
Invest in training and check out all these benefits:
Identify and Improve your Leadership Style
Leadership training helps individual leaders to develop their own unique and personal styles that team members will respond to. There are various leadership styles and quality training that can assist in realizing the most appropriate style for your organization and the best fit for you.
For example, updating your leadership style to be more in keeping with the current swing towards collaboration might mean a shift in your thinking from “hero leadership” to “hero teams.” Hero leadership is a rapidly becoming outdated style of top-down leadership, where the leader at the top makes all the decisions and all the others follow suit.
Hero teams, however, is a model in which people from departments, roles, and functions collaborate with a more flattened (less top-down) hierarchy.
In this model decision-making occurs across roles and emphasises the need for varied skills and functions in the team of collaborators.
Develop Your Communication Skills
This is not only the art of speaking. It also includes the skills of listening, which is fundamental in successful leadership. And this also extends to mastering the art of negotiation, influence and conflict management.
According to The Importance of Developing Leadership Skills in An Ever-Changing Workplace, it is easier to teach and measure managerial skills such as staffing, processes, systems, planning and budgeting, than it is to teach the attributes of good leadership. And few businesses are set up for effective leadership development, which is one of the many reasons why leadership training is important.
Developing your communication skills is key to increasing your influence and impact as a leader. With the right training in fact, you get to take them to a new level – to an emotionally intelligent level of leadership. Innovative leaders with a high EQ (emotional intelligence) are natural coaches and mentors, with a focus on empathy with, and education of their people.
Such leaders inspire by example and champion greater autonomy of their workforce, allowing remote workers and lifting up those they lead to step into their own leadership roles.
Gain Confidence and Find New Ways of Influencing the Teams You Lead
As your leadership style and skills develop so does your confidence. This has multifold benefits, for example, it allows you the scope to be more innovative and collaborative in your approach. A collaborative, less top-down, more “hero teams” focused style of leadership means that more of your people are able to take on more responsibility, meaning they feel more connected and inspired.
Developing engagement and a sense of inspiration in your people, with greater confidence gives you greater influence. Because you can influence your colleagues to bring their innovative “A game” means that you get a chance to focus on vision and the way ahead. And with the network of collaborative people already in place who are inspired, engaged, and ready for responsibilities, succession is made easier. This is a massive advantage to the bottom line of the business and to the well-being of your employees.
Effectively Connect to Your People
Connecting to your people means developing the skills to be an emotionally intelligent leader, through the art of empathic listening and so on (see the above section on developing your communication skills). Furthermore, this means developing the ability to give constructive feedback.
You know how it is – it’s good to know how you are progressing in a role or on a project by receiving constructive feedback. In her article 6 Big Benefits of Leadership Training, Fionnuala Courtney reports that 43% of highly engaged employees get feedback at least once a week. Contrast that to just 18% of those with low engagement. Feedback is an essential tool in increasing employee engagement.
Giving effective feedback is not easy, in fact it is often overlooked, and yet it is a hallmark skill of successful leaders.
Formulate and Implement Effective Leadership Strategies
The type of leadership strategies appropriate for you will usually be defined by your type of business or organization. Certainly a key strategy for most lies within developing future leaders. As a leader you also need to be strategic about progressing and promoting your future leaders.
In a model that lacks strategy leadership roles tend to be given to those with the most domineering or extrovert personalities. However, says Courtney, good quality leadership is a combination of both the right qualities and the right training. Part of an effective leadership strategy is to identify those amongst your people who have what it takes and offer specific training. By doing so you are strategically shoring up likely succession and offering advancement to your employees, which increases staff retention.
Part of any leader’s role and strategy comes down to decision making. It’s a fact that leadership training means that you get to make better decisions. The reason why? Simple – because leaders with a high EQ (level of emotional intelligence) have the ability to make informed and well-judged decisions. A standalone reason why leadership training is important!
Decrease Employee Turnover and Increase Engagement
Did you know that 75% of people voluntarily quitting their jobs aren’t leaving the role, they are quitting the boss? Judging by these stats alone, says Courtney, it seems that people leave ineffective leaders. It follows then that an investment in leadership training is an investment in your whole team.
It also means your employee turnover decreases and engagement goes up. Because good leaders create great engagement. The benefits don’t stop there! A high level of staff engagement in turn make for a strong and united team, which increases your work productivity and wellbeing, which helps keep employee turnover low and morale high.
How to Find A Good Leadership Training Provider
There are particular key career stages where leadership skills training is important:
Early to Mid Career
This is a time for young managers to prepare for greater responsibilities. It also a time to accelerate your career by developing your personal leadership skills. This can be done through a programme that increases self-awareness and that offers skills for motivating your people.
Mid Career
Training at this level can help your middle-managers to add value to your company in today’s fast-paced fourth industrial revolution. Ideally, leadership training at this stage includes training on business development and business strategy as well as leadership coaching, building on interpersonal skills to lead functions and complex businesses.
Top Level
At C level, senior executive, or board level you need to further advance your capacity to find and leverage new business opportunities, push innovation and lead with confidence and conviction. A good quality training resource at this high level helps you develop the necessary skills for inspirational leadership.
The Leader’s Edge Membership Program is specifically designed for aspiring or established managers, leaders and business owners, savvy leaders, and entrepreneurs.
- If you want more out of your career and are tired of playing it safe – if you want to do great things in this world. Let us show you the way!
- Perhaps you are ready to inspire greatness in yourself and others – especially if you’re running your own business. Let us give you the right tools.
- Are you a savvy leader or an entrepreneur already rocking it? Do you want to continue learning from the best but lack the time to trawl through web content, talks and trends. Welcome along, we have got you covered.
Key Takeaways: Why Leadership Training is Important
By investing in training you are effectively investing in your whole business – in whatever field you work, be it in corporate business, education, or in the socio-civic arena. Or perhaps you are all about personal development and interested in cultivating some great family dynamics – either way – leadership training is for you.
At all levels it is clear why leadership training is important: It gives you, your people, and your organization the potential to get ahead, innovate and embrace the dynamic age of automation, machine learning, and data exchange.
Through leadership training, you will develop the capabilities needed to increase your team’s work productivity. You will increase your communication skills and master the art of negotiation, increasing your influence and impact and reducing conflict management. Building confidence you will learn how to effectively connect to people, deliver feedback and contribute towards great staff retention figures.
You get to identify and build upon your unique leadership style while increasing your company’s bottom line. Your training is a major contribution to the advancement and wellbeing of yourself, your team, and your business or family.
Training makes the difference between simply leading, or totally inspiring. Inspiring leadership begins with you.
So what are you waiting for? Join the Leader’s Edge now and get inspired.
We’ll see you there!
