The 3 phases of leadership training and development
There are three stages to the leadership training and development continuum.
- Employee development – to build functional skills and to introduce soft skills and leadership skills development.
- Management Leadership Training – to develop functional skills, management skills and team building, as well as to introduce manager to executive leadership training and building emotional intelligence habits.
- Executive Leadership Training – which develops leadership skills, emotional intelligence maturity as well as vision, branding and architecting a future path that builds enterprise value.
A smart business, enterprise or organization will focus on all three stages in order to:
- Maximize effective leadership
- Continually develop a strong leadership “bench”
- Cultivate and maintain a distinct workplace culture that attracts talent
- Aligns your leadership team to your business strategy
Maintaining a robust leadership training and development plan sustains your competitive advantage and maximizes shareholder value.
This leadership development training Venn diagram gives you a visual view of how leadership skills overlap in each phase.
How to structure your
leadership development strategy
to train leaders early on
The Venn diagram illustrates which skillsets to develop, depending on where you are in the leadership training continuum. From employees to managers to executives, you can apply the appropriate leadership development strategies.
- For example, executives, should focus on intangibles skillset development such as vision, architecting the future path of the organization and emotional intelligence maturity.
- Managers would focus on both leadership skills and functional operational skills.
- Line employees typically require most emphasis on job skills and functional hard skills. And with my smart employee development training, you can cultivate the distinct workplace culture, corporate brand values and leadership approach you want early on through soft skills.
By developing your workforce starting in the employee development stage, your leadership development becomes much more effective and robust, across the entire enterprise.
As a leadership development strategy, it also makes sense to start leadership training with employees, as it makes implementing leadership training easier later on.
Find out more about a strong leadership development strategy here:
Starting your leadership training and development with employee development
Employees have a more functional duty than an executive leaders, who have larger responsibilities and manage more abstract issues such as vision and brand.
So most of the skills development templates in my employee development plans focus on job skills proficiencies, which are mostly functional skills. I include soft skills training templates as well, to professionalize employee communications, emotional intelligence and leadership. This is because soft skills can contribute as much as 70% to the effectiveness of employee’s functional duties.
You’ll notice on the diagram that employee development overlaps somewhat with management training in the arena of soft skills.
Find out about how to structure the ultimate employee development plan here.
Leadership soft skills training
I’ve found that you can include, as part of the employee’s development, some training in leadership soft skills and emotional intelligence.
I show this in the following employee development plan examples. They illustrate how to use soft skills training templates to build emotional intelligence habits.
Soft skills training is an excellent way for employees to improve their:
- Communication skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Time management skills
- Emotional intelligence social skills
- Behavioral skills
- Emotional self management
- Dependability
Unfortunately, most employee development courses sidetrack employees with long term goals and comparative metrics instead of skills development.
It is my belief that you don’t want to judge or compare employees, you want to generate performance improvement through skills development.
Let me introduce myself and my passion for talent development.
Leadership skills examples
This resource provides some leadership skills examples and templates. It shows how to break down leadership proficiency categories into individually developable leadership skills.
About the Author and Course Creator
Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and founder of The Modern Leadership Center at WorkerMotivation.com.
He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable talent development concepts. This provides clients with streamlined leadership skills training and employee development solutions they can implement quickly.
After 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Larry turned to his passion: leadership development and talent development. The core of his course creation approach is customized self-assessment and skills development templates. No psychometric tests or psychology assessments are ever used.
Larry has authored numerous courses including: Employee Development Plans, Career Change Planning Programs, Employee Rewards Programs and most recently his innovative Leadership Development Program with Skill Development Templates.
Larry’s mission at The Modern Leadership Center is to better humanity through innovative talent development strategies. His continuing efforts in talent development keeps him in the forefront of thought leadership in the industry.
Leadership training for managers
You can see the importance of managers by looking how central they are in the leadership training continuum Venn diagram.
Management leadership overlaps over all 3 phases of leadership. They are responsible for functional leadership, management leadership and executive leadership. They are a key link in the leadership chain.
This means the best management training requires functional leadership training, as well as executive leadership development.
This will include soft skills training to build emotional intelligence, vision and the development of other abstract and intangible skills.
Regrettably, most off-the-shelf management courses get bogged down with psychology theories, leadership styles or psychometric testing for personality.
Find out about my modern, back to basics approach to leadership training for managers below.
Leadership skills instead of leadership styles
Because of this psychology training aspect of most management courses, you learn a lot of interesting psychology concepts about how the human mind works, but not the hands-on skill you need to lead with emotional intelligence.
You may end up learning a bunch of theories and concepts you won’t be able to apply in a practical way with your constituents. And trendy leadership styles can constrain leaders who have a diverse workforce.
Leadership styles may sidetrack you from the practical benefits of leadership skills.
Also, the mechanical approach of reactive psychology-based leadership will have you second-guessing yourself about employee motives instead of forging ahead as leader.
This is why I recommend leadership skills over leadership styles any day.
Though the leadership styles concept may work for certain teams such as tech and creative arts, they don’t work well for cross-functional leadership. And beware because leadership styles rarely work for your organizational leadership as a whole.
Skills training for managers vs. the typical psychology approach
Leadership training and development focused on skill training for managers provides numerous advantages over a psychometric approach. This includes:
- Developing only skills that need development. A secret of leadership is you don’t have to know everything. You just have to develop skills in areas that need strengthening. In fact I’ve found its usually just one or two skills that make a big difference.
- Proactive management. Leadership skill development trains both your mindset and your skillset. Like a Kung-Fu sensei, you remain calm, aware and proactive in your management, but are skilled to be ready for any scenario that arises.
- Leadership traits. Leadership skills, once ingrained as habits and rituals, become leadership traits that are permanent.
- Emotional intelligence. Soft skills develop emotional intelligence and self-management skills, leading to greater emotional maturity in your management style.
- Confidence and self-assurance. By developing targeted leadership skills and soft skills you can remove feelings of inadequacy and other false perceptions you may have. Growth through solid skills development brings you stability, confidence and self assuredness.
I can go on, as there are endless benefits to skills based training, especially that it’s a fast, concise and steady way to develop your leadership.
The key benefit of leadership skills development
The core benefit of leadership skills development is that you are breaking behavioral concepts into individual skills that are developable.
Before we talk about executive leadership training, lets bridge management and leadership
Management vs leadership: what is the difference in skills training?
As you saw in the leadership training continuum Venn, there is an overlap between management and leadership, with certain skill sets such as vision and brand reserved for senior executives.
The 3 main differences between managers and executive leadership are:
- The constituents they are responsible for: leaders are responsible for the entire enterprise, mangers typically run certain silos or departments. (Ilustration of this follows.)
- The levels of responsibility and accountability each has: leaders are accountable to all 6 constituent audiences, managers only are accountable to a few.
- Time focus: present vs. on the future. Leaders are focused on both the present and long term future, where managers are more focused on the present productivity outputs with some mid to long term considerations.
Find out more about the differences between leadership and management here.
Effective leaders continually cultivate their 6 constituent audiences
To maximize the organization’s value and growth opportunities, executive leaders need to properly manage relationships with all 6 constituent audiences as shown in this Venn illustration.
Neglecting an audience can create leadership vacuums.
We saw this with Boeing. They looked to cut costs and neglected their quality control. Planes lost doors in midflight and landing gear failed to open. They lost almost 30% of their stock value in 2023 -2024.
This is why audience development is the first skills template in my leadership development programs. They are a huge opportunity if grasped, and huge potential danger if not properly managed.
Many executives get so caught up in their functional and managerial duties that they neglect the intangible relationships they must maintain with each of their constituent audiences. Strong leadership training will prioritize identifying and developing each of your constituent audiences.
Find out more about what training and development drawbacks executives need to look out for here:
Executive leadership training requirements
In order to best manage what they are accountable for, leadership skills training for executives must include:
- Assessing and establishing each constituent audience and their values. This helps executives to determine how to best to apply leadership and what vision will motivate those constituents to best effect.
- Training to build leadership traits that establish their executive presence and gravitas, such as soft skills training to build self management and emotional intelligence.
- Management development strategies such as skills development, vision, mentoring and motivating managers, and building a bench of key employees.
- Developing the leadership qualities that work best to maintain their own health and wellness, including emotional control techniques and time management.
A sample audience assessment template is illustrated here.
For more on how leadership soft skills build emotional intelligence, try this resource:
What a manager is responsible for
Management’s focus on the now
Managers are the premier productivity engine of the organization. They are present focused with some attention to near term future.
Unlike senior executives who are responsible for all audiences, managers are only responsible for certain silos of constituents under their authority. (As shown in illustration.)
Managers are responsible for functional productivity and people quality development. Some of the ways they can do this are:
- Maintaining productivity and profitability
- Employee training and growth development
- Quality control
- Vision transference: integrating executive leaders vision as employee’s mission
- Maintaining the distinct workplace culture that attracts and retains top talent and maintains morale
- Raising the quality standards of their workforce
- Peer relationship development with other managers
- Putting out fires in an expedient and professional way
Management training courses requirements
Management training program should include at a minimum:
- Leadership skills to help them meet their functional productivity goals
- Strong skills training in the 4 components of leadership
- How to structure their leadership role for maximum effectiveness and confidence
- Defining and establishing their constituent audiences and their values so they can best motivate them
- Emotional intelligence and soft skills training
- Skills and tools to maximize productivity and increase overall departmental value
- Develop the leadership qualities that work best to maintain their confidence and emotional security
Find out more about what attributes to look for in the best leadership training programs here:
How employee skills development is the gateway to leadership
Focusing on skills development allows you to grow not only your employee’s functional job skills, but their more intangible leadership soft skills as well.
As they advance in their development of soft skills development, employees will grow in both emotional intelligence habits and management leadership skills.
Ultimately, soft skills development is how you develop permanent leadership traits.
You can find out more about how to develop leadership training for employees early on in my Employee Development Plan Template Kit.
Other leadership training and development resources
Here are more leadership development and management training resources:
- How to structure effective leadership roles using the 4 components of leadership
- The top 3 ways to develop leadership training topics
- How to develop emotional intelligence habits through soft skills training
Summary for this guide on the 3 phases of the
leadership training and development continuum
The 3 phases of leadership training all center around employee and leadership skills development, while maximizing the value of your constituent audiences. The leadership training and development continuum Venn at the beginning of this guide gives you a clear illustration.
- Start with employee development that includes leadership soft skills.
- Follow through to leadership training for managers that includes both functional leadership skills executive leadership skills.
- Executive training should center on developing presence, gravity and emotional intelligence maturity, as well as developing leadership team quality control.
You can accomplish all three phases of leadership development training with my new Leadership Development Program. Find out more below:
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