5 Components of Successful Leadership Training

Effective leaders don’t demand or dictate, they inspire and encourage those around them to realize their vision. When company leaders use their influence to build relationships and align priorities, it leads to better results.

Teaching employees to understand and use these subtle qualities of leadership requires a strong, reality-based leadership training program. We’re going to look at five components that will elevate your leadership course and how one company harnessed online learning to generate better working relationships between its company leaders and their workforce.

Best Practices for Building a Successful Leadership Training

1. Clearly define your needs

Corporate leaders pave the way to success in your organization. CPP wanted to enhance communication between team members to create a more effective workplace. Partnering with AllenComm, they used their own framework called the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator to help learners recognize personality traits in their co-workers and adjust their communication patterns and style to maximize understanding.

2. Determine course goals and objectives

Defining your needs can give you a starting point to build a successful leadership training, but to create an effective training course you need to have an end goal in mind as well. The aim of CPP’s course was to allow leaders to recognize indicators of Myers-Briggs types (MBTI), know the patterns of typical actions for each type, and know how to consider other people’s preferences when interacting with them. The training course was built around three success factors: performance, knowledge, and motivation.

3. Offer engaging training content and resources

For training to work, your employees need to engage with it and complete it. Packaging your best ideas in an inconvenient and un-inspiring platform won’t get you the desired results. For CCP’s leadership training program, AllenComm packaged the information in easy-to-manage micro-learning modules that were mobile responsive and easy to access on the go. A combination of videos, motion graphics, and gamification can help enhance engagement and understanding, keeping learners on the path to success.  It’s also important to check your content for relevance. Learners are more likely to continue with and retain training they can see will help them in their day-to-day work experience.

4. Offer hands-on experience with scenarios and simulations

Good leadership qualities are often seen as abstract qualities and lofty ideals. It’s important to be able to take these intangibles and express them in concrete learning experiences that will help in real-life situations. Using scenario-based activities, CPP’s learners were able to observe a situation and learn about the combinations of MBTI preferences being expressed in the exercise. Learners were then able to discover each situation included an objective, which led to discovering the most effective method of creating communication between two people with different preferences. Finally, they could check their knowledge in a practical exercise that let them recognize preferences and choose the best way to communicate in real-world situations.

5. Make space for continued learning

After training is completed, try to foster a corporate learning culture. Give each learner the opportunity to evaluate the training and share their opinions and ideas. This will help you refine your training for future leaders. Surround them with partners who can support and encourage their development and help them to expand their skill sets by offering supplemental resources they can access whenever they like.

Effective leadership training helps your employees understand their role and how to inspire those around them to greater success. It is not only important for those newly tackling leadership positions but will benefit your current company leaders as well. When it is clear and engaging, focusing on real-world application, a leadership training program is an investment in your employees and your company that will translate into overall success.