Leadership Competency Training: Part 2

You are reading Part 2 of my Leadership Competency Training series. If you haven’t read the first part of this series on HRTools, I invite you to take a few minutes and read Leadership Competency Training: Part 1.

Part 1 reviews the first four of eight behavioral areas that are strengthened by leadership competency training: (1) vision, (2) leadership, (3) coaching/training and (4) employee involvement.

Leadership competency training applies to any business or industry, and I’ve seen it help improve employers’ growth and success rates.  For example, after participating in this training, leaders learn how to effectively resolve conflict and earn employee buy-in to their vision and company goals. By reducing employee conflicts and inspiring employee commitment to your vision, your business can only grow stronger.

Developing leaders should be a priority in any business organization. To gain a competitive edge, businesses must capitalize on the potential of their most talented and high performing employees. If you are charged with grooming the “up and coming,” you will want to have an understanding of all eight leadership training tools. To conclude this series, here are the final four:

1. Succession Planning: It’s very important for businesses to prepare for the future. One way to approach this objective is through mentoring programs. Such programs provide opportunities for the more seasoned and skilled executives to work with key managers. Mentors can provide broad insights and share lessons learned—through those trial and error experiences that help the inexperienced managers navigate the learning curve more quickly and efficiently.
2. Project Management: Managers, to be effective, must take a lead on starting projects, setting deadlines and, most importantly, ensuring that the critical goals or aspects of the project are completed on time. In addition, manager-leaders need to proactively look ahead to foresee what issues, “barriers or potholes,” problems or concerns that can surface. That way, they can work with the management team and staff to quickly find solutions to problems. Again, the most important part of this process is monitoring timeframes to make sure schedule deadlines are on track. This is the quality control objective you are looking to satisfy.
3. Cohesive Teams: High-performance teams are cohesive; a strong coordination enables them to successfully achieve their goals. Manager-leaders develop cohesive teams by first inspiring “buy-in” to their goals. Once employees’ buy-in is earned, you’ve increased your success chances by 50 percent. Even further cohesiveness is accomplished by empowering the team members to act on those goals.
4. Performance Phase: We call this the “Stormin’ Norman” tactic or the charge forward to put a plan into action. An effective leader knows how to quickly move a team into this performance phase so that everyone is moving forward to finalize the product or project development.

Most people are not born possessing leadership skills. While someone may possess the knowledge that their business function requires, subject knowledge alone does not guarantee successful leadership performance. Since leadership is a behavior, and not a position, leadership competency training helps potential leaders acquire the communication and interpersonal skills necessary to be successful.

Developing leaders should be a priority in any business. Effective leaders can help reduce employee conflicts and inspire employee commitment.