@ Leadership Training

What is leadership training about? 
Is leadership training effective? 
If my company isn’t presently investing in any leadership training for me – what can I do about it? 

These will be the questions I will be investigating, evaluating and more importantly – solving for you.

Whether you are a top performing CEO or someone who is considering (or being considered) for their first junior management or supervisory role; providing you with the right tools to do the job effectively is essential. 

After all, you wouldn't want someone who knows nothing, or very little about plumbing to come and install a new bathroom, complete with energy efficient boiler, power shower, expensive tiles etc into your home would you? Unfortunately, however, this is exactly what most organisations do. They take a good employee and then throw them into the deep end of management under the auspices of ‘career development’.

Pro-active, innovative and forward thinking organisations do have whole suites of tried and tested, highly effective management induction and learning programmes. Over the course of the next few months I will be researching and interviewing some of these organisations HR Directors and Staff Development managers to see exactly what they do and how they do it. If you currently work somewhere you feel is amazing at leadership training and support I would love to hear from you.

Many of you are telling me that, sadly, you were either thrown in at the deep end, or that you feel your training has been inadequate. The fact is that most of the greatest leaders I have ever come across embarked on a relentless drive for their own self-development, regardless of what their companies offered. It is in this respect that I also plan to investigate the most cost effective and life changing learning programmes that are available to you.
I am currently researching leadership training courses in the following subjects:

• Transformational leadership
• Situational leadership
• Global leadership
• Leadership verses management
• The accomplished executive
• Leadership training for new managers

I will be investigating up to 10 different leadership training companies to see what they provide and how effective their training has been. The list is not exhaustive so let me know what king of leadership training you currently need and I will guide you accordingly. Just so you know, most good leadership courses cost up to £3,000.

One leadership course I would definitely recommend you should take a look at is called Best Year Yet®. What is so good about this programme is that it is goal orientated and behavioral. It is also value based and blended with on-line tracking, audio programmes, webinars, and for those who want it, one-to-one coaching.  It is also one of the cheapest and yet most effective (life changing) programmes I have ever come across. To take a closer look – see my full review.

One of the most effective ways to learn to become a leader is through coaching. 

Coaching can add so much more value compared to attending a course, because it is more personal, in-depth and can unlock peoples hidden potential in amazing ways.

There is currently an explosion in leadership coaching, because people want to be able to find their own path to success, independently to what their company offers them, or at least, with the ability to discuss real issues with someone from outside the company. This can have major benefits for both the individual and the organisation. 

External coaches are being accepted in greater numbers into organisations and as part of peoples continuing professional development planning.

For details of the three different types of coaching programme available directly through Leadership-expert™ 


Action : Asked yourself how can I become a better leader? 
First  – Self-Awareness

Action: How To Be A Leader - To answer the question how can I become a leader, it’s important for us to begin with an understanding of what makes a leader, and indeed what makes a great leader?

In order to fully understand how to be a leader, you must first make time to train yourself in both the art and science of leadership. There are fundamental principles upon which you can develop leadership skills, but you need to know what they are and how to employ them to best effect. The world (and the people within it) is also constantly changing, so it’s important to stay up to date with leadership innovation in order to adapt. Self-development is the key to learning how to be a leader and unlocking the potential within you. This is the cornerstone to your future success.

Action: Ask yourself is ‘trust’ one of your core values? If so, consider who in your team you need to be more trusting of. Find out what motivates them. What can you trust them with by delegating or giving them greater responsibility?

The third is to clarify purpose. Great leaders involve their people in the communication process to create the goals to be achieved. If people are involved in the process, they psychologically own it and you create a situation where people are on the same page about what is really important—mission, vision, values, and goals.

Action: Ask yourself “More often than not, do I communicate at my team, rather than engage with them?” Think about how you like to be involved and consider how you can engender that ethos in all your dealings with your team. Do you hold regular ‘short’ team meetings focusing on involving your team in setting parameters and guidelines to bring to life ‘mission, vision, values and goals’? Many teams I’ve met don’t even know what these are.

The forth is to align systems. This means that you don’t allow there to be conflict between what you say is important and what you measure. For instance, many times organisations claim that people are important but in fact the structures and systems, including accounting, make them an expense or cost centre rather than an asset and the most significant resource.

Action: Consider what systems you and the organisation has in place to recognise and reward people’s efforts. Create a simple reward system. For example, the CEO of a company I recently coached, decided to rule out just half an hour every Friday afternoon to phone 3 people in the company who turned in a great weeks performance, or where he had been ‘tipped off’ that they had gone the extra mile for a client/the company. Word soon got round, productivity went up and he eventually found himself phoning up to 10 people every Friday afternoon, because what he had inadvertently created was the beginnings of a high performance, high value culture.

The fifth is the fruit of the other three—unleashed talent. When you inspire trust and share a common purpose with aligned systems, you empower people. Their talent is unleashed so that their capacity, their intelligence, their creativity, and their resourcefulness is utilized.

I would add that these are based upon principles that build upon each other rather than techniques or steps that have to be taken independent of each other. These aren’t “management tricks” but real principles that guide a true leaders character.

Action: Consider what you can do differently from today to unleash the talent of your team.

The world is vastly different today and ever-changing. If we can develop leaders who can withstand and embrace the changing times by deeply rooting themselves in these principles of great leadership, then we can develop great people, great teams and great results.

http://www.leadership-expert.co.uk/