Developing skills based leadership training for managers
The best Leadership training strategy for managers employs a proactive, skills based approach.
Unfortunately, if you choose the typical one-size-fits-all management courses, skills training may not be the case. Many off the shelf management training programs are centered around on psychology theory, psychometric testing and leadership styles.
You end up learning leadership knowledge and leadership styles rather than usable hands-on leadership skills. Worse, you learn a ton of concepts that you may never use.
The benefits of training for management skills instead of a psychology approach
Leadership and management courses that provide management skill training give you many advantages for team leadership, including:
- Proactive leadership skills: Management leadership skills training helps you permanently integrate leadership skills, so they are automatic and proactive, making you a much stronger leader.
- Leadership traits: Developing skills as habits is exactly how you develop permanent leadership traits.
- Focus only on where you need skills development: Skills development can help you to focus in on the specific areas of development you need, so you don’t spin your wheels training on topics you don’t need .
- Confidence and stability: Developing leadership skills can be continually developed. This continually heightens your effectiveness to provides you with confidence and stability and ease your growth transition into your role.
- Self-management skills: A big part of management skills training is self management so you grow as a person as well as a manager.
- Build emotional intelligence: You can build emotional intelligence maturity through leadership soft skills.
As you can see, there is a huge benefit to skills based development. It is why I employ skills development templates for all my employee, career and leadership development programs.
But lets start at the beginning, by working out your leadership development strategy.
First, I’d like to briefly introduce myself and my background
About the Author and Course Creator
Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and the founder of modernleadershipcenter.com and defineyourcareer.com.
He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable 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 is the author of: Employee Development Program, Career Planning program, Employee Rewards and now his new Leadership Development Program.
Larry’s mission at The Leadership Development 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 strategies for managers
Your leadership development strategy needs to ensure you are confident in the role you play as manager.
Before you can dive into deciding on the right leadership training for managers, there are 3 main questions to consider:
- Leadership vs management – what’s the difference?
- Where do managers fit in the overall scope of the organization?
- How do you structure your management role?
Once you understand those 3 questions, you can proceed with your manager training strategy that answers:
“What leadership and management skills should a management training program include?”
Let’s start by clearing the blurry lines between leadership and management.
(You can find out more about the 3 phases of leadership training and development here:)
Executive leadership vs. management: what are the differences?
This is a hotly debated topic, however from the perspective of leadership training within a business, team or organization, it’s pretty straightforward.
Leaders and managers each have different levels of responsibility and functionality. Though they do overlap.
There are 6 constituent audiences that need to be lead and managed in any organization.
- Customers/clients
- Employees
- Shareholders/stakeholders
- Peers
- Suppliers
- Media:
An executive leader may be responsible for all 6 silos or in the case of a CFO or CIO, one silo that is organization wide.
Managers are typically responsible for one (or several) audience silos.
The 6 audiences of executive leaders
Executive leaders number one goal is building shareholder value and the maintaining operating integrity of the overall organization.
Their titles would include C-level executives, such as CE , CFO and CTO or Director or other senior titles.
They may have responsibility and accountability for multiple silos, lines of business or departments.
Neglect of any one silo can cause a leadership vacuum.
Executive leadership is responsible for both the hard numbers as well as more abstract concerns such as vision, mission, branding and perceived value.
The selective audiences of managers
Managers use a mixture of functional leadership and executive leadership. Their responsibility is typically to one silo or department.
They do require leadership skills, but mostly to properly carry out their functional duties to their audience silos.
For example, to insure productivity, revenue growth and work quality are maintained.
While a C-level executive needs to cultivate all 6 audiences, managers may need to only focus on a selective audience of 2 or 3 audience silos as shown in this Venn diagram.
Leadership training for managers should concentrate on functional skills, as well as team building skills and emotional intelligence.
Where do managers fit in the overall scope of the organization?
Leadership training for managers should prepare you for your role within the hierarchy of the organization.
For example, I might even recommend a manager in training or new manager training to start with an employee development plan for a good foundation. This will make sure they have functional skills and soft skills down cold.
Your role as manager, and some of the leadership skills training you will need, are shown in this leadership skills training continuum.
It highlights what skills need to be developed, ranging from functional to executive.
- Employee development – mostly functional skills development, soft skills and emotional intelligence
- Management training – both functional and leadership skills
- Executive leadership training – mostly leadership skills and abstract skills including vision, emotional intelligence maturity and position power.
Functional leadership vs. executive leadership Venn diagram
How do you structure your management leadership role?
How you structure your leadership roles can be determined by your functional title job description and your constituents audiences.
- For example a sales manager needs leadership skills to keep the sales team motivated and confident. They may need negotiation skills to close deals, etc.
- If your role is fulfillment manager, the audience you are responsible might include employees, suppliers and the delivery dept. The management and leadership skills you need to apply might include safety consciousness in transporting finished goods and time management skills to make sure everything runs smoothly and on time.
As seen in the Venn diagram, management is unique in that it straddles both functional leadership and executive leadership. Make sure your management role is structured to employ both.
How you structure your manager role is a key determinant of your organizational success
The balance you set between functional leadership and executive leadership will determine your success.
A lot of management skills that you can develop will NOT be in your job description.
As a manager it is up to you to be proactive to the extent you can :
- You are not really managing people, you are managing emotions
- You set the pace and you maintain the pace
- Your effective leadership will attract higher quality talent that in turn is easier to manage
- Morale is affected by both your leadership and the executive’s vision
- You can enhance employee retention by increasing their job satisfaction
- Maintain productivity as one of your key metrics
- To some degree you are the face of the business to the employee
- It is up to you to strive to maintain and express the vision of your organization
- Effective leadership is #1 way to employee satisfaction and retention
- Communication is a top key soft skill to develop: Employees value it highly: 51% say supportive communications with manager, 49% say recognition, and 47% cite access to management are important.
- Sometimes the company does not have everything in place for you to execute your management plan. Staying steady and doing your best with what you have develops your maturity.
What management skills should leadership training for managers include?
As you saw on the leadership skills training continuum chart, your management training and development should include functional leadership skills, executive leadership skills and emotional intelligence habits.
You can develop emotional intelligence through soft skills training.
Skills for functional leadership
There are several sets of functional leadership skills for managers. They include basic organizational training, specialized organizational training and job related leadership and management skills training.
Basic organization-specific required training
Depending on your organization, this could include:
- Safety protocols
- Cyber security training
- Harassment training
- Compliance training
- Employee security awareness training
- Employee onboarding training
- HR policies for sick days, vacation days
- Facilities escape routes
- Emergency management protocols
- Fire safety
- Etc.
Specialized management training
Depending on your industry, location or organization, a manager may need to be trained for advanced or specialized training such as:
- crisis management training
- conflict management training
- risk management training
- project management training
- change management training
Job related leadership and management skills training
For the leadership skills required for your managerial role, many are included in the management leadership – skills training continuum.
They will include:
- Functional skills related to your job role, such as motivating sales team, negotiating deals and time management
- Job support skills, such as properly entering customer details into Salesforce or HubSpot CRM, typing at 30 wpm or above, time management, etc.
- Leadership soft skills such as communication skills, paraphrasing and active listening, timeliness, dependability etc.
- Emotional intelligence habits, such as empathy, tact and respect in all communications
Advanced management skills
Advanced leadership skills are where the overlap between management and executive leadership occur. They would include:
- Vision transference – integrating the organization’s vision as your team’s mission by expressing it in verbal and written communications
- Brand – maintaining the unique market perception and reputational integrity of the organization
- Media communications skills – carefully crafted product, brand and corporate communications
- Position power: using title power to influence, motivate and impel action
- Mentoring skills: Spending one-one or one-on-group time to develop key employees individual skills
- etc.
Leadership skills training through templates
I use skills development templates in my leadership development plan.
- Templates even the playing field so that everyone can develop from the same set of skills.
- They provide a way for continual skills development each quarter
- Templates allow you to grasp the entire scope of management skills you need to develop
- Templates allow you to develop management skills as habits, which is how you build permanent leadership traits
- Templates are ideal for soft skills and emotional intelligence development
Emotional control: the underlying component of leadership training for managers
One final consideration about leadership training for managers is the underlying importance of emotional control.
Especially the huge advantage you can gain by building emotional intelligence habits through soft skills training.
It’s a simple fact that when you know how to control your own emotions, you can better manage and communicate to the emotions of others.
Lets talk about your own emotional control and self management.
Depending on your background, experience, education, cultural upbringing, family size, the neighborhood you grew up in etc., you may have insecurities about your personal limitations to manage yourself and others.
Take heart, because the whole idea of skills training is to address and resolve this.
Many managers, especially new managers, may have feelings of doubt, worthiness, inadequacy or insecurity about their capabilities.
Skills training helps you to quickly overcome this:
- Skills development can give you purpose, stability and composure.
- Strong skills help you ease your adjustment and stress of transition.
- Through a properly structured leadership role you better understand your decision making authority and your range of influence.
- You can develop influence beyond formal authority, to deal with difficult employees when position power doesn’t work
- Soft skills training builds your emotional intelligence and self-management skills, which can help you to increase your composure
- When a manager knows their role, employees will know theirs as well
With the right leadership and management skills training, I believe anyone can become a capable manager.
Summary for leadership training for managers: a focus on skills development
The best leadership training for managers will focus on leadership development skills.
This is because job role skills, management skills, leadership skills and emotional intelligence skills all work together.
If you break out functional skills, executive skills and soft skills training separately, you can zero in on the exact management training program.
Skills development is guaranteed to build your confidence, maintain stability and increase your emotional self management.
For a complete leadership skills development course, get my new Leadership Development Program. It helps you command effective leadership skills in only 3 minutes a day.
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