Key team members at your organization are responsible for bottom line results, effective business processes, productivity, and driving consistent skills and knowledge across their teams. Every day is noisy and lots of people are vying for the attention of your top performers, yet even with those distractions, they must be successful in achieving repeatable and reliable results.Even though they are meeting organizational goals, you wonder nonetheless, are your team members viewed as effective leaders? You want them to be seen as someone who can deliver predictable results, but also as someone who can vision, inspire and motivate across silos to make change happen.
Leadership training can help enhance skills in leading change, but you need the assurance that an investment in this kind of leadership training will bring immediate, meaningful results. So – why should you strongly consider leadership training for your team?
The curriculum of leadership training is meant to focus in on key skills by learning and practicing in a safe environment with other like-minded peers. Here are examples of key leadership training topics:
- Emotional Intelligence: is a skill set to help you create positive environments and collaborative relationships and learn how to overcome resistance and negativity. Those with a high level of emotional intelligence perform and manage emotions with confidence and positive results. The building blocks of emotional intelligence are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management, and team leadership. Those with a high level of emotional intelligence can accurately read situations and empathize effectively to gain trust and a better perspective. Leaders who manage their own stress and reactions become a positive example to the team.
A key component to this level of emotional maturity is being authentic. Being authentic means being able to articulate well in a reactive situation, saying “no” when necessary, and being trustworthy (doing what you say you will do). Individuals who can successfully focus on others emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank, and building relationships is dependent on having a strong sense of social awareness.
- Problem Solving and Decision Making: The quality of a leaders decisions is an indication of his effectiveness. It’s critical that leaders know how to define the nature of problems, manage conflicts and maximize the use of brainstorming and creative thinking. Leaders know when to be directive (crisis management) or collaborative in making decisions. Since business change is less about crisis and more about future planning, the most effective leaders use a collaborative approach to solving problems and making decisions, striving for diverse input to help them make the best decision possible. They are also not afraid of constructive conflict, encouraging debate and varied viewpoints. The goal is to get behind positions to generate options, and get to a solution that is a win-win for all.
- Influencing for Results: Influence is the ability to have others take a desired action while building and maintaining the relationship. Influencing power increases by knowing what tools to use and when. For instance, giving an unsolicited gift as a way to gain obligation, asking for commitments and enforcing them, being easy to work with, and being able to stand out as the person willing to do the right things in the right ways. The ability to set an overall influence strategy, which takes into consideration both task objectives and relationship objectives, is just one outcome of influence training.
Being a great manager ensures results, being a great leader ensures transformation. Invest in turning your team into a group of transformational leaders.
