As more and more people return to the office, leadership has been put back into the spotlight. Your team’s managers and supervisors will need to shake off the rust and get back to helping your company’s workers generate as much value for the business as possible. But that’s tough to do without the right skillset. That’s why many firms are turning to leadership training. It offers a variety of benefits that may make it a good fit for your company as well. We’ll talk about those throughout the sections below.

What is leadership training?

Leadership training is the purposeful process of helping your company’s managers and supervisors gain the skills they need to get more value out of the teams they oversee. It can encompass a variety of training modules, including topics on:

• Coaching and mentoring
• Decision-making skills
• Time management and prioritization
• Conflict resolution
• Strategic thinking
• Innovation and creativity
• Stress management
• Feedback and continuous improvement

It can also sometimes be helpful to put your leaders through training covering the tools that the team they oversee uses on a daily basis. This can make the leader a more effective educator in the workplace so that the entire business unit can start getting more value out of the tools you’re paying for.

Why leadership training matters

Now that we’ve taken a look at some of the different skills leadership training can encompass, let’s consider why it’s worth it for your company to start pursuing this type of training. Consider these advantages of leadership training.

Improve the efficiency of your employees

The first advantage to consider is that leadership training often has a positive return on investment. When you help your leaders become more effective at what they do, it often leads to efficiency gains across your organization. This is because you’re essentially able to get more done without paying for more labor.

Plus, leadership training is often a one-time cost, but the efficiency gains you get from having better leaders internally will be ongoing. That makes it much easier to generate a positive ROI over time.

Create a better workplace culture

Investing in leadership training could also help you improve your workplace culture. Part of the leader training process often involves helping leaders understand the best ways to keep different types of employees positive and engaged. When your leaders are better at cultivating positive team dynamics, everybody benefits  – including your bottom line.

Help leaders become more adaptable

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that workplaces need to be prepared for anything. Leadership training can help with this. It gives your company’s leaders the skills they need to respond effectively in any situation.

For example, a leadership training course could help your team learn the skills they need to become more effective leaders remotely. That way, if something like the COVID-19 pandemic were ever to happen again, your team would be prepared to make the transition to a fully remote workplace so you lose as little productivity as possible during the process.

Bring new digital skills into the workplace

Leadership training is also a good way to bring new skills and technology into the workplace. When your leaders complete training, they learn how to use a variety of digital technologies that can enhance the work not just they do but everyone on their team does as well. Your leaders will then be able to bring these skills back to the workplace and share them with others to increase organization-wide performance.

Retain more employees

Finally, leadership training can also have an impact on employee retention. When you take the time to train your internal leaders, they tend to do a better job of keeping their teams engaged.

Leadership training can also help team leads respond to issues employees are experiencing more effectively, which can have a meaningful impact on how likely a valued employee is to look for work elsewhere if they experience a problem.

Internal vs. external leadership training

If you think your company would benefit from leadership training, the next decision to make is whether to pursue that training internally or externally. In other words, do you have the internal expertise needed for leadership training? Or do you need to bring in someone outside the company to help?

That answer will depend on the type of training you wish to conduct. It’s possible that you have leadership expertise within your company. If so, leveraging that could be a way to improve the effectiveness of managers and supervisors without having to spend money on an external consultant in the process.

However, even if you do have the internal training needed for leadership training, you also need to consider the opportunity cost of having a senior leader take time out of their schedule to complete training. This can disrupt the person’s productivity. It may be a sacrifice worth making, but it’s a potential disadvantage worth considering all the same.

The hidden value of external leadership training

Internally-led leadership training can be a way to save money and take advantage of internal resources. But using it exclusively instead of at least supplementing with external leadership training is rarely the best solution.

This is because external leadership training offers a variety of benefits you typically can’t get from someone who’s already on your team. We’re going to take a quick look at some of these below.

Tap into industry-leading expertise

The first advantage of external leadership training is being able to put some of the top experts in the field in front of your team. This can introduce your employees to new ideas, concepts, and tools they might not have learned about from an internal employee who has a job outside of leadership training.

This means your team may be able to improve in ways that internal leadership training can’t match. It could lead to more impactful productivity gains for your company.

Accelerate leadership development

External leadership training can also help you accelerate leadership development within your company. It does this by giving your employees access to the leadership support they need now instead of forcing them to wait for it.

You can also bring in a variety of external trainers covering various topics. That way, you can provide your internal leaders with a comprehensive, diverse training plan within a much shorter time frame than what would be possible through internal training.

Retain flexibility for future training needs

Another advantage of external leadership training is the flexibility that this style of training offers. You can pick and choose different trainers based on your employees’ shifting needs.

For example, if you want a team to get better at using a specific technology, you can hire an external trainer who is an expert at it to share key lessons with your internal leaders, which they will pass down to your team members. Then, as soon as the next day, you could schedule another external trainer who helps the leader learn how to provide better feedback and coaching to increase employee engagement and satisfaction.

There’s also something to be said for partnering with an outside company as opposed to hiring for the role of leadership training within your company. If you hire someone, you’re stuck with their limited areas of expertise. But if you partner with external trainers, you can freely move back and forth between trainers with different areas of expertise as your needs evolve.

Open up new opportunities for networking

Another potential advantage worth considering is the opportunity for networking that can open up when you partner with an external leadership training firm. These companies often run classes and workshops that bring together leaders from various industries and companies.

Your leaders could take advantage of that to start building relationships with leaders in various positions across your industry. This could open up new opportunities for deals that you may not have ever discovered otherwise.

Train your next generation of leaders with The Cattalyst

Leadership training is often not the first thing on your mind when running a company. But, when done correctly, it can help you improve your business’s productivity, increase employee satisfaction, and provide other benefits to help your company thrive.

If you’re looking for leadership training services in the areas of sales or customer support, consider contacting The Cattalyst. Our team has decades of experience and can provide your internal leaders with the guidance and support they need to get more value out of your company.

But you don’t need to take our word for it. Get in touch with us directly and we’ll tell you exactly what we can do for your team with a free consultation.