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A strategic leadership development program will benefit your workforce and your business.
If your organization doesn’t have a defined leadership development program, employees don’t know how or who to ask to help them live up to their potential.
Organizational development doesn’t often happen organically. HR must take an active role in identifying future leaders and giving them tools to succeed.
Leadership training is a critical component of succession planning at every company.
How we define leaders and what type of leadership training managers need has drastically changed in the last decade.
One of the biggest expenses for a business in any industry is hiring and training new employees. Most companies want to improve their retention rate, but they often don’t know how to keep employees for the long-term. If you’re in an industry with high turnover rates, such as the health care field, you may just think it’s par for the course. However, a defined leadership development program within your company will benefit your workforce and your business.
Some employees are happy to simply have a job. They just want to come to work each day, do their required tasks and go home. However, many employees have goals to take their careers to the next level. They may dream of promoting up and learning new skills that will make them feel like they’re contributing to the success of the organization. However, if your organization doesn’t have a clearly communicated leadership development program, employees don’t know how or who to ask to help them live up to their potential.
You can increase employee loyalty and decrease turnover when you develop leaders from within the business. If a person knows they can get a promotion which not only comes with increased pay but more responsibility and a feeling of accomplishment, they are more likely to stay with the organization. Another reason to focus on developing leaders within your organization is to reduce the costs of training. While you may need to train a current employee for a new position, they will already be familiar with the company and your culture. Training will take less time and expense which means you can continue with your processes with fewer delays.
You may wonder how you can tell who will make a good leader. You’ll learn to recognize the character traits necessary for leadership as your staff members go about their everyday tasks. You can create leadership development programs that employees can enroll in if they’re interested in promoting. This will tell you who is interested. As you develop these programs, you can include tests to determine skills and aptitude for leadership roles.
Some employees may already have a strong background in leadership while others will need to develop those skills. Training programs can help those employees work towards their goals and enable them to move towards roles of more responsibility.
Your HR department can help you build leadership training programs and courses that are customized to specific positions as well as those that are relevant to all supervisor and manager positions. For instance, every leader needs to know how to communicate with staff, so a course on communication would be essential for all leadership positions.
In other cases, you may need to develop courses for specific departments or positions as part of your leadership development programs. For example, managers of sales must know how to inspire their team members to increase sales and how to monitor the efforts of sales staff. With a little effort and research, you can build programs on leadership training for all departments in your company.
A learning management system or LMS will help you with your leadership training programs. It offers numerous benefits that will save your company time and money and allow you to focus on the core aspects of your business.
One reason to use an LMS for your leadership training is to save time. Instead of creating new courses and training classes for each person who wants to be trained on management, you can build a single course that everyone can use. With an LMS, you can keep all your training in one place and give access to the employees who need to learn those skills. For instance, all managerial trainees could access the communication course. You could give access for the sales training courses to staff members who are going into sales management.
You can easily update and add to the courses with an LMS. If policies and procedures change, it’s a simple process to send a message to those who have completed the training and let them know they need to review the updates. If you add a position, you can include relevant courses from other positions and create a new program for that role.
Another benefit of an LMS is the ability to use online and offline learning. If you choose the right LMS, you can add online courses which allows the employee to study on their own time. They can take the class from anywhere at any time. This flexibility encourages more staff members to sign up for the leadership training.
At the same time, you can include offline courses such as seminars or in-person training. You can create a report that shows who has completed the training to find out who is ready for a promotion to a leadership position. If you have testing for courses, you can check to see if they passed or issue certifications.
You can improve the retention rate of employees and increase your company’s productivity by promoting employees into positions of leadership instead of hiring outside the company. A learning management system makes it easy to create these leadership development program and to manage employees who are taking the courses. It’s easier and more efficient to focus on developing leaders from your current employee list than to find qualified applicants who don’t have the familiarity with the company culture and a stake in the company’s success. Check out InfoPro Learning to see how it can help you build tomorrow’s leaders from today’s employees.
