Taking the wheel of a team, department, or company and leading people is not easy. Sure it gets easier over time, and some aspects of the job are teachable. But what aspects are those? The answer lies in this guide on leadership training topics.
It'll pinpoint all the training you need to include in your leadership development plan and how to deliver it. And it'll set you up to plant the seeds for the right competencies to grow in your leaders.
The purpose of training leadership is plain and simple:
Successful organizations plan leadership training with great care, and they should!
Training leaders is immensely strategic. Plus, it pays off in the long run. After all, leaders have a significant impact on employee motivation and performance, and that's what leverages a company.
Plus, highly-skilled, inspiring, and supportive leaders are like an oasis. They're rare but vital for employees crossing market or organizational change deserts, uncertainty, and ambiguity.
And truth to be told, any employee wishes to cross paths with one of these leaders for many reasons.
By teaching top leadership training topics to your managers, they'll do this for your company (and customers):
Outstanding leaders give the appropriate push to employees who need clarity or a word of incentive. It's like they give motivation boosters at decisive times to employees in need. And this is why these people managers know how and when to do it:
Leadership training changes the mindset of leaders. It opens their eyes to the aspects that drive employees towards the expected outcomes. But not everything is a bed of roses, even for highly-trained managers.
Some employees—or any employee at some point—might run into productivity issues. And turning lack of productivity around is one hell of a challenge!
That's when leaders' training kicks in.
So, you can't just pick some random leadership training topics to teach your leaders.
Choose the topics that enable them to:
A true leader draws plans to achieve goals, points employees in the direction of those goals, and appreciates their contribution. The list of great leaders' traits goes on, but the point is that these leaders have a monumental impact on an organization.
Now, when a remarkable leader quits a company, it's common for employees to feel disoriented. Why? Because they fear that the event might disrupt their installed, fine-tuned, and efficient routines. And sometimes, employees even start quitting one after the other causing a waterfall effect.
On the other hand, a poorly-trained leader can damage an entire team, department, or even entire organization! Poor leadership competencies disturb the work and morale of team members. For instance, employees frequently quit because of micro-controlling managers or toxic cultures established by directors, VPs, or C-suite executives.
Yet, gifted, well-trained leaders raise employee engagement levels, which translates to high employee retention. And we know that voiding employee turnover costs is a delightful idea.
Let’s think of a rowing team: it’s made up of a coxswain (i.e. the person in charge) and the athletes doing the rowing work. In a work environment, you might compare leaders to coxswains and the teams, departments, or companies they lead to rowing boats.
A coxswain knows precisely what the rowers must do to cross the finish line first.
But it's not just a matter of what each crew member must do. It's also a matter of what they must do together as a team. The coxswain is aware of the impact of each rower's actions individually and all rowers' actions combined.
These boat leaders read not only individual strengths and motivations but also group dynamics. That's how they explore team synergies and influence behaviors, improving teamwork.
If your current people managers don't exhibit these capabilities, well, it's up to you to train them. Oh, and include your future leaders in the training program too!
For instance, teach them to shield their teams from interferences such as:
With the finest selection of top leadership training topics, your leaders will keep misalignment and miscommunication away from their teams.
Consequently, team members will focus more on executing their tasks in the spirit of teamwork.
With startups popping up here and there, organizational change, uncertainty, and ambiguity are business as usual. Additionally, modern markets shift in the blink of an eye, which also brings instability to the table.
These are just a couple of reasons why highly-trained leaders are fundamental in today's corporate world.
First of all, they stay calm no matter how harsh the twists are.
And then, they reassure employees with a carefully designed strategy and a track record of walking in the hot business sand.
Those who go through leadership training become better strategists. And a strategy is the best compass for making decisions.
Besides that, training leadership involves teaching your leaders the techniques they need to manage risk. For instance, they rely heavily on key risk indicators—such as staff satisfaction or new regulations—to make decisions. And that brings clarity, speed, and confidence to their decision-making process.
Ultimately, risk management and strategy combined originate better, more sustained decisions. And those decisions solve problems more effectively and efficiently.
If one of your executives quits, retires, or dies before a successor is ready, you'll find yourself in a difficult situation. You'll have to call in someone with the competencies to step up to the plate in no time, which can be hard.
That's why when it comes to succession planning, it's better to be safe than sorry! And putting a leadership training program in place must be a part of those planning efforts.
Also, you couldn't implement the vision for the company without leadership training. Leaders concentrate on the company's future, and the vision is a statement of that future.
You know the motto "lead by example," right?
But your leaders might need to learn precisely what example that is. And whereas you can't teach some traits of outstanding leadership, you can train most relevant competencies.
On that note, we outlined the top 9 leadership training topics for your convenience.
This is probably the most important topic to include in your leadership training program. Without mastering communication, there's no effective leadership at all!
Regardless of the channel, a strong leader is a strong communicator. They use words for many purposes: elucidate, guide, influence, motivate, encourage, support, and reassure. They're also active listeners. Otherwise, they couldn't satisfy any of the purposes we just listed.
In addition, a leader's acumen for reading a room is impressive. Their ability to pinpoint everyone's superpowers, action triggers, and difficulties is very sharp.
Now, guess what? This is all teachable. And it's your job to train your leaders to:
For instance, what would happen if the executive chef in a commercial kitchen didn't communicate effectively with the cooks? Hard time seeing them as a Michelin star worthy team. And they wouldn't deliver on the restaurant's mission, which is to feed and please diners.
Note this: No authentic leader is a one-person show simply because one person can't do it all! Leadership does not exist without delegation.
Similarly, there cannot be delegation without a team and teamwork.
Summing up, it's safe to say that leadership and teamwork walk hand in hand.
Despite most leaders wishing they could do it all for the sake of control, that's impossible. Companies must grow, and businesses must expand. And your role is to train leaders to:
Leadership training will teach your leaders to abandon or not fall into the temptation of micromanagement. It'll make them feel confident and comfortable delegating.
And the benefits are immense, from higher employee engagement to higher productivity down the line.
Here's an example: Would a real estate agency grow if the owner didn't delegate listings to agents? And would they evolve without handling this task with a CRM designed for real estate? Of course not.
Ideally, team members would work well with all their peers and supervisors at all times. They would trust and respect each other, communicate effectively, and cooperate.
But we all know that's not always the case whether we're working on-site or remotely because we're human! Our moods, feelings, and egos sometimes get in the way of our work relationships. Besides, stress and poor communication potentially originate misinterpretations and escalate interpersonal conflicts very easily and quickly.
It's a well-trained leader's responsibility to detect and soothe interpersonal tensions timely. And if necessary, it's also their job to solve interpersonal conflicts or even terminate contracts to protect the team's operation.
Imagine if one of your team members wouldn't insistently invite another for meetings they should attend. This could indicate that there was some interpersonal conflict in the making. But a well-trained leader would identify the signs of trouble and act preventively before the conflict arose.
Do you know a leader who doesn't have much on their plate most of the time? Exactly! And because it's common for leaders to have many problems to solve, decisions to make, and strategies to design, they need to manage their time impeccably.
Of course, leaders' workload should be sustainable so they don’t burn out and underperform. Nevertheless, because of their busy agendas, training leaders to become more efficient while fulfilling high-quality standards is a must do.
For instance, when putting your leadership training program together, keep Parkinson's law in mind. Teach your leaders to focus on completing each task at hand in the absolute minimum amount of time they need. That'll allow them to deliver while freeing time for other tasks (instead of overworking).
Effective time management is vital for managing stress by preventing overworking. Leading a team, department, or company is highly stressful by nature. It involves great responsibility, and the cost of failing is tremendous.
Sometimes, one unsolved conflict, wrong decision, or poorly-designed strategy is all it takes to ruin a business. Other times, a single profoundly unengaged employee sits between a leader and a team that starts falling apart, dragging the rest of the organization.
On top of time management and other management skills, teach your leaders:
Train your leaders to prevent stress as much as possible and give them the tools to cope with stress when it does appear. Stress in limited amounts can indicate a challenging job with high stakes. However, chronic stress harms mental health and performance and can lead to burnout. So, you want to prevent burnout at all costs.
Would daily newspaper editors be successful if they couldn't handle stressful situations? Not in a thousand years. Their profession is inherently stressful. From writers who deliver articles late to photographers who lose their files, these editors manage stress very well.
Most school curricula disregard this kind of intelligence, yet it's paramount for leaders. In other words, there's no way out of it when it comes to choosing your leadership training topics.
Now, you've probably concluded that leadership training topics are intertwined, and you're right! In this article, we have already mentioned a few characteristics of emotionally intelligent leaders, such as
Some leaders were born with these characteristics, whereas others need support to develop them. And leadership training is what gives them that helping hand. They'll build the capability to notice and interpret social cues, thoughts, struggles, and worries and act accordingly.
All in all, a leadership training program teaches leaders to manage emotions intelligently so they can:
For instance, can you picture a wedding planner that freaks out when their photographer gets suddenly sick a few days before a wedding day? You could, but it certainly wouldn't be one of the best wedding planners on the market. Instead, an emotionally intelligent wedding planner keeps calm under pressure and focuses on figuring out how to get another photographer on short notice.
A leader is a coach. Usually, when one of their team members has a problem, leaders have the solution. And when they don't, they search for one until they find it.
Leaders recognize each team member's contribution to the team and the good results the team gets. And when the team underperforms, they analyze what went wrong, discuss that with the team, and define preventive measures.
Highly-trained leaders emphasize continuous improvement. They praise in public and give constructive, actionable feedback timely in private.
Including coaching in your leadership training will help your current and future leaders do all this. Just like attending doctors in teaching hospitals who guide, value, and help resident doctors and med students improve daily.
It's easy to claim the results of your actions when everything goes well. But it's hard to own the consequences of your actions when things don't go as expected.
Leadership training teaches your leaders to take responsibility for their decisions and outcomes. And this is step number one to demand the same level of accountability from their team members. Also, a leader is a role model, and you must clarify this during training.
Think of luxury charter yachts. Their crews have rigid hierarchies composed of interior and exterior staff, a chef, and a captain. The exterior team is responsible for helping the captain dock the vessel. But if a deckhand miscalculates the distance between the ship and the dock and the ship hits the dock and causes damage, the lead deckhand's head might roll.
Whether the lead deckhand didn't train the direct reports to calculate distances or the lead doesn't know how to calculate distances, it's their responsibility before the captain, and they should own the accident.
Some teams are naturally collaborative, but some others are not. And it's their leader who must promote collaboration among team members.
Effective leadership training equips leaders with techniques that facilitate team collaboration, such as
A collaborative team reaches higher as a group than its team members could individually. For example, would a fire brigade work to put out a fire if they didn't work together as a team? Definitely not! The fire captain enables collaboration among the brigade, and the firefighters follow their lead.
We recommend that you combine different training methods to deliver your leadership training.
Freeletics uses Zavvy to automatically send bite-sized lessons, challenges, and tips to its people managers' Slack channel. The goal is to prompt behavioral changes in those leaders and build an environment of motivation between them.
Those weekly pokes are quick and easy to consume, and they're also:
For instance, you can use Zavvy to send out instructions to your people managers before their first one-on-one meetings.
Freeletics calls their peer learning activity "People Manager Roundtable." It's a set of sessions to discuss leadership challenges and share best practices among Freeletics' people managers from different departments.
The exchange of knowledge and experience takes place every six weeks. And facilitators prepare each session by following a stepwise process on Zavvy.
Freeletics developed a self-paced leadership orientation and onboarding program for its leaders. Multimedia training content is disclosed to learners over a few weeks.
It teaches principles, tools, processes, and resources for effective leadership. Our client relies on Zavvy to automatically enroll new people managers in their leadership onboarding program upon promotion.
➡️ Check out the full story of how Freeletics combined various methods of training for their managers.
Leadership isn't a position. It's about inspiring team members to overcome themselves and row towards shared goals while supporting them.
Use this guide and Zavvy to develop your current and future people managers into true leaders.
To some, leadership might come naturally, but even those will grow their leadership skills with proper development plans and training.
Ultimately, you don't want to end up with people-friendly yet unprepared leaders or leaders with the wrong mix of competencies.
Book a demo now and discover the best ways to develop your next generation of leaders.
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