How Leadership Training Can Benefit Your Business

As a business owner, you’re automatically a leader, whether you like being in a leadership role or not.

You must lead all of your employees through the ups and downs of a volatile market and make crucial decisions about the present and future direction of the business. In addition, you may have leaders within your business who oversee different departments, and you trust these people to be responsible and diligent.

Have you ever considered leadership training for yourself and the other leaders in your business? If not, you could be missing out on major opportunities for growth and innovation. There’s a reason why leadership training is becoming a priority discussion topic at conventions like ACC XChange and the World Business Forum.

In this article, we explain how your business can potentially benefit from leadership training.

Increase productivity overall

When you and your leaders are well trained, you can all motivate your employees to do their best. As a result, you’ll increase productivity throughout the company.

It’s even been shown in multiple studies that leadership has a direct effect not only on how employees feel but also on how they perform — and the impact is significant. A study of nurses and their managers showed that positive leadership behaviors from the nurse’s managers increased not only productivity but also commitment to the organization and overall job satisfaction. That, in turn, led to greater patient satisfaction. A similar study showed that leadership behaviors were responsible for 29% of an employee’s job satisfaction and 22% of their organizational commitment.

Your current leaders may not have the most current knowledge of today’s productivity or collaboration tools, or they may have been trained by their previous employers.

How much more work would your team members get done if they were trained to work efficiently and had the support of technology?

And remember, your leaders don’t even have to make big changes to increase productivity overnight. Sometimes, microadjustments can steer your business without overcorrecting. Proper leadership training will teach you and your fellow leaders how to make small adjustments, measure the effect, and then adjust further from there.

Match your leadership style to your corporate culture

As mentioned in the previous section, your current leaders may have been trained by previous employers, and their leadership styles may all be different. Or, worse, the current leaders have been stuffed with possibly unhelpful wisdom or have passed on the same bad habits that have been dogging the company for years.

The solution to this has to start with you. First, determine what kind of leaders you want in your company, what traits they should have, what their goals should be, and, more importantly, how they should communicate these leadership styles to create the kind of culture you want in your business.

What if you could streamline your leadership so that it matched corporate culture? For example, if your company prioritizes community service, then your leaders can also give employees time to perform community service and integrate the idea of service into everyday interactions. Train your leaders to lead by example — have them start community service, even if it’s something as simple as cleaning up a local park. Have the leaders post to the popular #trashtag on Twitter and Reddit, and have them tag friendly and competitive employees. Make a challenge out of it!

These kinds of big culture changes often occur right when a new leader (or newly trained leader) starts making decisions. When Zach Kirkhorn, the new CFO of Tesla, came into his new leadership role, he focused on his team above all. If you want to create a culture in which people come first and team members are valued, that attitude has to flow from leadership first. So, when engaging in your leadership training, remember that you’re not just making your business run smoother; you’re also setting the tone for the entire future of your company.

Whether you’re trying to change the entire culture of your company or just the culture of code review for your developers, it all has to start at the top.

Empower your future leaders

Leadership training doesn’t have to be for only your current business leaders. In fact, you may want to consider offering this type of training to your most ambitious employees who dream of becoming leaders one day.

Not only will this training increase employee engagement and improve employee retention, but it will also ensure that these people will be great leaders for your company if they choose to stay for the long run. You never know: your current intern may be your future CEO!

Always embrace and encourage employees who want to become leaders, even if it seems unlikely or surprising, given their current performance. This could be the sign of a person who knows how to adapt, who has seen an opportunity or a role they can fill with their specific skill set. It’s been proved that successful businesses have a higher number of adaptive leaders than unsuccessful companies, so lean into those employees who want to shake things up, who have an eye for change.

Have you been thinking about offering leadership training to your leaders? If so, what’s been holding you back? Giving your employees opportunities for continuing education will only make them more engaged overall and more dedicated to doing good work for your company. It will also future-proof your company against impending challenges and changing markets.