Training permeates every aspect of every business. Whether you are a one person CEO or the head of a 10,000 worker conglomerate, you are using training, in one form or another, for just about everything.
Think about it, when you apply for a position and get it, a person who has been trained to help you will impart their knowledge to you in order to get you up to speed on what is needed. At every turn whether it is the forms you have to fill out, to the tools you you’ll be using, to the rules and regulations of the organization, it is a person who has been trained to assist that helps you to feel a part of the organization.
Whether it is past training, current training or even future training, no organization can survive without using training to accomplish its goals. It can be argued that of all the training that is going on, that leadership training is the most important training you can bring to the table. It is not enough to just train a person well enough to get the job done, because that usually results in average workers doing average work and, in those organizations, turnover is always an issue.
What you are looking for is engaged, problem-solving, tough-minded workers who feel like what they do is important, and that what they say is taken seriously and only professionally trained leadership can accomplish that. Growing personnel does not just happen in a vacuum, it has to be planned, executed, overseen, held accountable and re-planned on a regular basis.
It also involves leadership meeting with their people on a regular basis to learn things like how they would like to be addressed, what methods work best in training them, how would they like to be disciplined/rewarded, etc. If leadership is trained to find out how to treat their people in order to get the most out of them, that organization will always outperform a competitor that either doesn’t train their leadership well or at all.
Forbes magazine estimates that between $450 and $550 billion are lost due to employees being either under-engaged or disengaged. That is the direct result of leadership abdicating its responsibilities.
Let’s remember who is responsible for the culture of the workplace. It’s leadership! The rules and responsibilities, as well as the rights of individuals are written down at your organization, but those words only come to life and become real if they are backed up by the actions of leadership. It’s those actions that form the culture of the workplace.
If a leader only supports some rules but not others, your people are watching. If a leader allows respectful disagreement, your people are watching. If the leader is lazy or intense, a finisher or a poser, respectful or disrespectful, your people are most definitely watching.
In the case of weak leadership, they will take steps to take care of themselves first and foremost. They will be watching to take advantage of any break they can take, any misdirection they can manage that takes the focus off them and puts it on someone else. In short, they become under engaged and eventually disengaged. It is why leadership needs to be professionally trained.
You shouldn’t be put in leadership because you are the best engineer, nurse, machine operator, firefighter or homebuilder. You should be put in leadership because you are the best leader. You have acquired a set of skills that separates you from the rest. You know how to build and maintain relationships, you know how to use proper metrics to measure your workspace, you can positively resolve conflicts, you can teach your people to be problem solvers not time wasters.
There are a myriad of skills that are needed in leadership and they all make a difference to the bottom line of every organization and yet, when times get tough, what is the first budget to go? Of course, it’s training.
You have it backwards. The training is what will get you through the tough times and coming out smarter, stronger and more resilient. It is the only way in this world of increasingly faster change and technology, You Must Train Your People. Give us a call, let us show you how quickly things turn positive, when leadership is trained properly!
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