When a leader takes on this role, he has to ensure an excellent performance from his team members. Leadership training is essential because leaders need to encourage employees. The employees need to have the proper motivation, which can make them reach their highest productivity levels. This kind of motivation is instrumental to success when the company has to start a new business, project, product line, or take in a new client.
A leader must provide his team members with the right resources. For example, if the sales team is making sales, but the numbers are not right, they must be provided with the course to find apt prospects. This way, employees can get an idea about increasing their sales by pitching in the product to the interested prospects.
How should employees be trained for leadership?
The employees should be taught through games like drag-and-drop and labeling for leadership training. The managers can also give audio reviews about what is lacking in the employees’approach as a leader. The learning materials can also be created to take care of different prospective leaders. Leadership training is needed for the following skills to be ingrained in leaders:
- Soft skills: empathy, and coaching:
- Coaching:
Leadership training can also teach managers how to provide coaching to their employees.
For this, training professionals can provide simulations to managers to help an employee who needs their advice. Once all the managers have provided their responses, the training professionals can check which manager has included all the critical points while helping the employee.
- Empathy:
Leadership training can help managers handle situations that involve consoling an employee who has faced the death of someone in the family, or pacifying someone facing problems at work. The managers should understand how to deal with each of these situations. Managers require skills such as communication and empathy to become influential leaders.
But, measurement of these learned skills is an implausible task and the managers have to be taught how to use these them. And the training cannot replicate every situation a manager might face and prepare him for the skills required.
- Setting up team norms:
Handling teams is also challenging for a leader. Team management is a critical task, ensuring that the members collaborate. The team members should also follow some discipline which involves adhering to the team norms. There must be some rules established for team members to communicate to get the work done. Establishing some ground rules is necessary to know how they are supposed to contribute to a project. When such rules are clear to everybody, there is no scope for miscommunication resulting in delayed deadlines. Such team norms have to be specified by the team members, and the team leader has to make sure that they are not unambiguous.
While setting such regulations, the team members have to jot down their experiences of working with the worst and the best teams to know what they should expect from their current team members. Creating the team norms should be a trust-building session so that every member knows what his colleague has encountered in the past and won’t like to see repeated. When all the team members have agreed that specific behavior isn’t permissible, it’s time to decide some acceptable behavioral team norms with mutual consensus.
There could be genuine problems with why this member is flouting team norms. Although a team norm was agreed to, this member can’t follow it, e.g., he can’t attend the conference call because he is a member of different teams, which takes up his time. When the team norms are decided, a unanimous decision is a must because any rule that can’t be adhered to must not be brought into existence.
- Making team members more efficient:
The primary responsibility of a team leader is to ensure that the team members are effective and are contributing their best. Hence, he has to encourage them to expedite the job by following time management and prioritizing. The job of a team leader is to ensure that the members feel satisfied with their work and feel important, even when they are encumbered with more duties.
In leadership training, the leaders get the right idea about how to help the team members in establishing these norms. For example, there can be a deviant team member who does not go by the norms. In that case, there must be a protocol established to rectify this team member’s behavior. The team leader’s responsibilities are minimized in this situation, since there is a procedure in place for dealing with such team members.
- Dealing with surprising situations:
Team leaders also face challenges when an unanticipated situation arises out of nowhere. For example, the business might lose a significant employee, or a worldwide situation affects the finances due to low sales. So such situations create roadblocks for companies to attain their goals, and the leaders must have strategic plans to ensure that everything is restored to normal. Hence, when such situations arise, the major task before a leader is to ensure that the goals are followed. Set these goals beforehand so that the outcomes are not modified despite the contingencies.
- Handling delegation of tasks:
A team leader has to delegate his task correctly and ensure that it is carried out rightly. Therefore, he has to take feedback from his juniors about the tasks delegated to them. A leader has to take the responsibility of delegation quite seriously because otherwise, the desired results won’t be there. So anybody selected for delegation must have the requisite skills and knowledge. Also, the same person must have an impetus to carry out the task delegated by the leader because doing the task can lead to the former’s personal growth.
- Creating a positive image for his team:
A team leader must ensure that he has created a favorable image for his team members in the company and different departments. Thus, he can get the senior managers and other departments to contribute when a situation warrants.
