Leadership Competency Training: Part 1

Do You Want to Lead Your Company to Success?

Many employers are finding that leadership competency training holds the keys to successful and continuing growth. They adopt this training to help develop their employees into leaders and their current managers into even stronger leaders.

Historically, business owners and managers have understood the significance of competencies in areas such as financial analysis, marketing, strategic planning and decision-making, etc. Skills in these areas are important and necessary; however, in today’s global and highly competitive world, it takes more than just those areas to lead people in the 21st century.

Leadership competency training applies to any industry or service area. Whether you run a manufacturing company or a service-related business, you can apply acquired leadership competencies.

If you are looking to train and develop leaders, the following four areas are strengthened as a result of leadership competency training (my future insights will cover four more areas):

1. Vision: involves the ability to see the short and long-term goals for the organization. Increased abilities in this area allow you to:
   1. set and communicate goals to your team;
   2. make adjustments and corrections to firm up areas of weakness;
   3. enhance managers’ abilities to motivate and develop the team; and most importantly,
   4. reinforce the goals and make any necessary changes.

2. Leadership: involves inspiring others to follow your lead or risk getting behind you. When I was with a former employer, we used this expression, "Get on the train with the conductor." You have to build a feeling of trust and when the going gets tough, you want to raise morale and keep the team motivated in order to succeed.

3. Coach and train: involves taking time to sit down with the inexperienced or the unsure team member. You invest the time to help train this individual so they clearly understand the objectives and the skills they need to be successful. You want them to meet the goals with the utmost quality. Coaching and training is also important for preparing your team for the future. Companies should have a mentoring program in place. The seasoned executives should work with key managers to share insights and trial-and-error experiences so they can get through the learning curve much quicker. Most importantly, you want the more skilled and seasoned middle managers to help run teams and meet the company objectives.

4. Employee involvement: in the decision-making process. The key word is "empowerment." When you communicate the goals and objectives, involve your team in the goal-setting process. What are their ideas? How do we fine tune these ideas and produce the highest quality product? If your employees are involved with the process, you will also get their buy-in. Then when the final results are successful, you make it a team success---rather than just all your own.

Any business environment has conflict and certain situations foster it. It is important to also foster resolutions. You want to see conflict end positively and as a "win-win" for all parties involved. To be a successful manager, you need to be empathetic in helping your employees work through their problems. It is also vitally important to have good listening skills. You must hear them out so that they can feel and say that they have been heard. Even more important, you want to be decisive in your responses going forward for two reasons:

• To bring closure to the situation
• To inspire your team’s confidence with your decisions and for following your lead in the future.

Check out my next "Insight" posting to learn about four more areas of your business that can be strengthened through leadership competency training. My future insights will also review how managers can accomplish more when they lead by building community into their decision-making process.

Many employers find that leadership competency training holds the keys to successful and continuing growth. Leadership competency training applies to any industry or service area.