Making Leadership Development Training Work

Business leaders know that an investment in training and development will yield a return.  There are all types of training that an organization could benefit from; but, one of the most important training and development programs has to be leadership development training.  In fact, almost all successful companies that lead the market in their industry have some type of leadership development training program.  Whether they do it in house, outsource, or a combination of both, leading companies invest in their leadership to help them improve their skills.

Let’s face it, the difference between winning and losing in business often rests with the capability of the leadership team to get the job done.  Leaders have to establish the direction, get buy-in from others to go in the determined direction, implement strategies to attain the desired results, and deal with any barriers that stand in the way.   Achieving business goals is no accident.  They are achieved because the leadership drives the outcomes.

Therefore, well trained leaders are needed in every business.  The question is how do you train your leaders?  Often businesses will train their leaders by having them attend a leadership training course.  But, is this the best course of action to train and develop your leaders?  One of the reasons that businesses take this route for their leaders is because they don’t understand training and development.

What Makes Leadership Development Training Work

Training is the process of teaching someone a new skill in a manner that allows them to learn the skill.  Just because someone learns a new skill does not mean that they will use the new skill.  So many times businesses will invest in training because a leader is not performing.  Consider that just because a leader is not performing does not necessarily mean the lack of performance is a training issue.  If they know how to do and don’t do, there is something else going on with that person.  Investing in training would be a waste of time and money.

Development is the process of having someone cultivate a learned skill to use it effectively.  Once a skill is learned it has to be developed.  That is why the terms training and development go together.  The development follows the training.  In real life though, there is often just the training.  When there is just training and no development, the training is rendered useless.

Let’s look at an example to illustrate this point.  Let’s say you have a leader that is not communicating well with the team.  You recognize that this is a training issue because the person just simply doesn’t know how to effectively communicate.  So you send them to a leadership training course on communication and they learn leadership communication skills.  Do you really think they are going to come back to the workplace with some radical transformation?  Not likely.  You need to have a follow-up plan to help the person develop the leadership communication skills learned.  This could be as simple as reviewing with you weekly some communications they had during the past week.  You ask how they applied what they learned from the training in those communications.  This type of follow-up strategy will help the person develop the habit of using the new skills.

If you want to have leadership development training that works, make sure you have both training and development.