Leadership Training

Leadership Training in the 21st Century: How to bring your Leadership Training Up-to-Date by Simon Oates

If you're reading this article, you're probably someone responsible for delivering an effective and value-enhancing leadership training program within your organization. Given that employee turnover can be quite high in the modern age, there is the very real risk that you star employees may undergo expensive leadership training and actually leave the company within the next year, with a padded CV ready for their next big opportunity.

This has led for leadership training courses in the 21st century to really deliver on value-for-money, as the company will want to ensure that leadership training is a profit-enhancing activity even if turnover of senior managers approaches for instance, 25%. In my opinion, the problem of employee turnover in the 21st century also presents an opportunity to really change the nature of leadership training, and structure in specific and principled approaches designed to retain the best talent, even years after the 5 day course has been completed.

What measures could be taken to increase retention you ask? Well, for starters - a key part of the training must be for the participant to see for themselves their future within the company. Teaching somebody simple leadership skills such as oratory, PR, time management, leadership theory and strategy will only arm them with knowledge and skills, and will not inherently attract that employee to your organisation, above and beyond the loyalty that delivering such a scheme would produce.

Therefore, stop arming your employees with just skills and start arming them with a dream, arm them with a goal, a specific future that they wsh to create for themselves, and that the course can help clarify and help deliver. An example of this at its most simplest would be a course with a built in module about career advancement within a company. With largest multinationals, this topic can be very complicated, and many employees would benefit from knowing in detail what their opportunities are.

If there are opportunities for working abroad, do you employees know about this? If a senior manager could possibily second over to a different department such as marketing for a few weeks, did they know that all it took was a phonecall to the right person and this ball could start rolling?

To take this a stage further, for very senior employees, e.g. senior manager below the board, and board members themselves. It may be worth discussing with their superior on an indvidual basis before the course begins such that you know the specific goals that they may be able to achieve. For instance, their boss or counsellor may be able to tell you that they wish to achieve the CEO role within 5 years, and therefore you will be able to help them structure their activities and annual planning to facilitate being able to do that.

With this sort of focus, leadership training can be as much as career planning as it is about public speaking. This type of leadership training will not only inspire and arm the employees but will also give a great vision of how they can apply those skills to help your companies bottom line in the future.—