What Are The Benefits of Leadership Training

While external recruitment can introduce fresh perspectives and new management into an organisation, promoting from within is often much more rewarding. How can businesses identify this internal talent and realise their potential? With 42% of respondents to World Economic Forum (WEF’s) survey of 10,000 employees; under 28 noting that they’re actively looking for careers that will offer them leadership training, attracting and retaining future candidates will require the answer to this question. 

Facilitating the transition from an employee to a leadership role can help your workforce to recognise and realise their potential. Giving them this confidence, however, requires inspiring them. Leadership and management training courses are among the most successful ways to reach these motivated individuals and teams. 

This article will explore how you can empower your workforce through management and leadership training. We’ll detail the difference between management and leadership and what both look like in the modern workplace. Additionally, we will look at how leadership and management training works, how to pick the right course for your workforce, and how the skills built through these courses can benefit your organisation. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how leadership training can make an impact on your business, see our guide on how Pareto elevates female leaders to the top for specific insights into how female sales leaders can drive business productivity and profitability.

The focus of leadership and management training

The most successful organisations combine leadership and management skills to innovate continually, attract top talent, and motivate their people to be the best. But how can businesses ensure they’re taking advantage of the leadership and management training offered by different providers? 

Leadership and management training can and should focus on employees other than your top performers. Successfully implementing what is learnt from a leadership or management training course will require ensuring everyone in your organisation benefits. 

Often, leadership training fails when businesses fall back on old habits, so ensuring that all of the interlocking elements of your company are on the same page is the key to success. 

Leadership training will focus specifically on some essential skills that all leaders ought to possess:

• Developing your communication skills and learning how to encourage colleagues
• Identifying or improving your leadership style and building emotional intelligence
• Focusing on encouraging collaboration between employees and teams across your organisation
• Learning how to navigate conflict and manage expectations
• Clearly defining your business values, overall vision and goals

It’s crucial that leadership training doesn’t just focus on passing down skills to staff. Good leadership training will also focus on communicating the cultural changes you want to make to your organisation, ensuring that this culture connects with colleagues and is lived by everyone involved with your business activities.

Management training courses, alternately, will focus on helping employees to develop the skills which are in demand for management positions: 

• Enhancing your project management and direction expertise
• Learning how to quantify, measure and coach employee performance
• Discovering the process of customer relationship management and recognising retention risks
• Developing an understanding of operations or departmental management
• Building a cadence plan or rhythm for training and meeting with performance-driven teams

As the modern workforce embraces virtual and remote working environments, senior staff and managers must continually focus on building and reviewing the skills that will allow them to remain confident, agile and thrive in business. 

Leadership and management training are not just investments in the future of a workforce but can allow businesses to address urgent problems, whether in their products, their relationship with clients and customers, or their broader culture and values.

The difference between management and leadership

Although they’re often used synonymously, particularly when describing the upper ranks of an organisation, there is a difference between management and leadership. 

While we could describe the difference in a simple sentence—leadership is about motivating people to believe in your vision, and management is about ensuring day-to-day business activities are completed to the highest quality—this would miss some of the finer points of the differences between the two, and why they’re equally important.

What does a leader do?

Leaders are crucial to the overall success of a business, although leadership skills have no relationship with the job title held by that leader. They measure their impact not by how successful they are but rather by how they enable the others around them to be successful. 

In short, leaders empower their people to perform at their best. This isn’t a result of simply asking employees to do something but rather by making people believe in their vision. 

This leadership characteristic is often referred to as a high emotional quotient. Leaders are experts in sensitively resolving conflict in their relationships with their teams and clients. In addition, they want to inspire employees to take pride in—and custodianship of—their work.

Leaders will take the initiative to influence those around them to work toward a common goal. They put great effort into their long-term achievements, meticulously planning and strategising their activities so that they can understand what is possible through hard work. 

This focus on planning and strategy means that leaders will emphasise sustainable solutions: they’ll focus on the why of an internal or external business challenge that presents itself so that they and their followers can turn that issue into a learning experience. Having that learning experience means they can address future challenges with the knowledge they’ve gained. 

What is management?

On the other hand, a manager will focus on developing their employees’ organisational, administrative and technical skills. In short, they emphasise the measurable and trackable aspects of their workforce’s expertise. 

Where leaders will set out the paths to long-term excellence, managers will implement the processes that will get their employees to that point on a day-to-day basis. They’ll tactically plan on how to achieve the goals which leaders will set out and arrange for the necessary resources to be in place to reach that outcome. 

Many managers will also be good leaders and practice the communicative and encouraging aspects of leadership. However, unlike leadership, management is a role within the workplace that comes with a title and a set of duties that were a formal part of the job description. Their impact is quantified through metrics such as KPIs and SLAs. 

The manager’s chief focus is on hitting business goals, and they are responsible for ensuring the objectives set for their team are met. 

Making sure business goals are met often entails setting out the standards and processes around the work their employees carry out, anticipating any delays which might impact the delivery of a project, and catering for the needs of their workforce so that they can maintain a high level of productivity.

The benefits of leadership and management skills

From early to late career, leadership and management skills are helpful for employees working in any functional capacity, from marketing and finance to IT and customer support.

Early career

At the early stage of an employee’s career, they may have a vision for where they’d like to specialise or what trajectory they’d like to follow. Still, it can often be difficult for them to understand how to get to that place or to prepare for the responsibility more senior roles entail, and impostor syndrome is common. This is where something like self awareness training can make a significant and positive impact.

Developing an understanding of leadership and the self-awareness required to be a good manager can be a great start to career progression. It will familiarise employees with managing time and resources and how to effectively learn from and lead others.

Management courses can also give early-career professionals a taste of what seniority might hold if they continue in their current career track and become departmental managers. 

Additionally, it will allow them to improve their decision-making skills and recognise the importance of project management and thorough planning for client retention. Whilst this skill might seem superfluous at the early-career level, a strong foundation and confidence in their abilities are crucial to empowering employees to succeed.

Mid-career

As an employee enters the mid-career stage, leadership and management training becomes essential to further success. Mid-career staff will receive more questions from their colleagues as their experience and expertise are more easily recognisable, whilst the projects they assist on—and sometimes lead—will become more complex. 

As a result, a course on coaching for performance or team leadership can often make the difference when it comes to these candidates supporting their colleagues and driving business productivity.

Continuous professional development and lifelong learning will keep mid-career staff in good stead since the skills that got them into their current role may not remain relevant when they gain the experience to move forward into a position with more responsibility. 

Leadership and management skills training will encourage mid-career employees to embrace this attitude towards lifelong learning whilst also allowing them to discover how they can boost their team’s well-being and confidence in their abilities. 

Similarly, management training courses evidence a mid-career staff member’s investment in developing as a senior employee. By pursuing these courses, they can highlight their desire and motivation to progress their career to a high level. 

Late career

At the late-career level, employees are looking to you to lead the company to the highest possible standard. Although getting to an executive or c-suite position shows that you’re up to the challenge of driving innovation, maintaining that position means you must continue building your skills and learning the most up-to-date management and leadership techniques to lead successful change.

At this stage, leadership training will focus on communicating your organisation’s vision with key stakeholders, clients and other senior executives, encouraging them to get on board and invest their time and effort in your overall success. 

While the demands and pressure on late-career staff are great, taking time out to focus on skills development at this stage means that you will be able to leverage the latest practical and theoretical developments in management to assist you in handling your workload, delegating tasks and utilising the solutions used in other industries to address the challenges facing your sector effectively. 

Alongside this, management training will allow late-career executives to be aware of the latest compliance, environmental, social responsibility and legislative standards, meaning that your organisation can meet its legal obligations and continue to operate sustainably.

Organisation-wide

Leadership and management training skills are crucial to develop across the entirety of an organisation. Training courses such as these aid in helping to build and communicate a strong culture and company values throughout the workplace, providing direction and guidance at all levels, from new entry-level hires to established and long-serving board members. 

Additionally, leadership training can help companies that are growing quickly, particularly as change becomes inevitable through increased revenue, higher staff numbers and organisational restructuring.

Managers and leaders can work in tandem to increase their company’s overall productivity and efficiency through the valuable engagement and motivational lessons they will learn from a leadership or management training course. This will, in turn, boost the overall morale of the workforce as opportunities arise for them to progress in their careers in the future.

Leadership and management training courses: picking the right one

Many leadership and management training courses are equivalent to degree-level qualifications such as HNDs and foundation courses, meaning that careful consideration is required before you choose the right programme for the people in your organisation. 

Whether it’s operations management that will empower your employees to lead and manage staff and plan for contingencies or a general management toolkit course to equip your senior staff with the key skills they need to set targets and nurture internal talent, a leadership and management training course can make a difference, but you need to be certain they’re right for your staff to ensure engagement and success.

Many top professional training providers will advertise each of their course's key outcomes, whether that is understanding the elements that feed into developing a high-performance sales team or the effects of organisation-wide change on morale and productivity. When looking at courses, pay close attention to these outcomes. What do you want to achieve by investing in your people through this course? 

At the same time, many leadership and management training providers will list the modules that will be covered in their courses so that you can target specific, sales-driven or communication-driven courses for relevant teams. 

Similarly, it would help to consider where the course content will be delivered and how it will impact your staff. For example, since these courses can sometimes take weeks, months or even years, would you like the training to be carried out on-site or off-site? Which days of the week would you dedicate to the programme, and how will you check in with the employees currently completing a course to see how they’re getting on and how you can implement what they’ve learnt?

You can increase engagement with these training opportunities by highlighting the connection between your chosen professional development programme and the potential for internal career progression. Indeed, in Adecco’s 2022 Global Workforce of the Future report, it was found that a third of respondents listed career progression—or the lack thereof—as a reason for changing jobs. Therefore, focusing on the learning and development of your workforce is key to retaining talent.

Enhance your workforce through Pareto’s leadership training

Pareto’s leadership and management training team offer several highly rewarding courses. With a focus on on-the-job learning and tailored skills development for the modern workplace, organisations can address current and future needs and invest in the progression of employees' careers at all levels. Please contact us to learn more about our courses, how Pareto can customise course content to meet any additional concerns you may have, and their entry requirements.

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