How to Begin Training Your Future Leadership

Training is vital for the smooth functioning of any organization that aspires to grow. However, discussions around training focus on the widest denomination of learners, i.e., not leaders. Understandably so as most people you’ll train will not be leaders, but regards, leaders need to be trained eventually and the quality of that training will shockwave throughout the organization.

The continuous impact that leaders have on your organization means that they must have informational training, but also cultural, and organizational (the latter two are the biggest difference in leadership training). While it’s important to teach non-leaders about the organization’s culture and structure, leaders are responsible for fostering these things.

Roadblocks In Leadership Training

Training leadership may not be discussed as much because it has roadblocks that non-leadership training doesn’t. For example, leaders are often well established in the organization with multiple different responsibilities—how do you train around these responsibilities?

Leadership training has four considerations: time, start, information, and relationships.

Time

Time is the most apparent problem when it comes to training leadership, as most leadership positions are going to be filled by people who already have responsibilities inside the organization. If, for whatever reason, they are not from inside the organization, then you’ll still want to give them those responsibilities as soon as possible to prevent strenuous workloads or unguided teams.

Leadership training must be mixed into a daily schedule rather than being the daily schedule. The most optimal way to do this is by identifying potential leadership before they’re straddled with extra responsibilities and integrating their learning into their existing workflow.

Start

Start refers to a lot of things, but to make it simple, where did the leader-to-be begin? If the leader came from inside the organization, what do they already know? The spot from where the leader is beginning greatly impacts their learning experience. There are so many different levels that a leader can come from and to assign a broad, one-size-fits-all training regiment would ineffective or, at the very least, demeaning.

Information

This goes hand in hand with where the leader starts. Unlike most learners you’ll teach throughout the organization, leaders often have a wide range of knowledge about the organization. Therefore, information should be tailored for the various paths of becoming a leader. This might not feasible now but later we’ll cover different tools that can help you cut down on the workload.

Relationships

Again, relationships relate to start, but they are the more personal side of it.  Or, to put it another way, who are the leader’s connections within the organization? This may sound odd at first, but being an effective leader depends mainly on how one can form and utilize their relationships with people. As a result, consider the leader’s standing inside the company. Do they know everyone that they need to? Are they respected? Do they need to develop their interpersonal skills?

Like any other skill, developing relationships takes time and practice. Yet, it still can be taught in a traditional way.

Tools for developing a strong leadership program

After talking about some of the common roadblocks faced with training leadership, this will cover some of the tools and techniques that you can use to overcome those roadblocks.

Learning Paths

A common through-line that you would have noticed above is that every potential leader has a completely different set of perquisites and, therefore, needs completely different training. Well, the training does not have to be completely different, as typically all that is needed is a careful selection of existing courses. Learning paths allow you to personalize important content to a learner without having to make courses specific to them.

Microlearning or budgeting

Dealing with time constraints can be exacerbated if the learner is already fulfilling a leadership or semi-leadership role. It is necessary to give your learner enough time to consistently make progress on their learning, as it is very easy to keep falling behind. One possible solution is to structure your content into a microlearning format (or small bite-sized chunks) that can be completed in under 10 minutes. However, microlearning can take a much longer time for full, traditional courses to be completed so use this approach if the learner doesn’t desperately need the information.

Alternatively, just be sure that the learner has a specific budget of time that they can use to complete their training.

Make parts of the course happen in the real world

A massive mistake whenever training leaders is to keep the information mostly conceptual and online. This, of course, has massive repercussions when it comes to the relationships part of being a leader. Be sure to include into your content spots where the learner is made to interact with those around them, try and have them meet everyone in the office for example. Doing this ensures that the future leader will at least have the seeds planted for future relationships.

Leadership training propels your organization forward

Training is essential to any organization and training leadership is no less important. Properly training your leaders will allow you to shape the future of your organization to whatever you need it to be.

Leadership training can prove difficult especially with all the roadblocks like time, where the potential leader is starting from, what information they might already know, and what their standing is in the company. However, most of these problems can be remedied if one keeps them in mind.