Unfortunately many organizations treat concepts such as leadership development, change management, management training, and employee engagement as catchphrases or buzzwords.
These terms get thrown around at the company meeting or trotted out in the CEO’s annual speech then get forgotten as soon as everybody returns to work.
To make matters worse, many organizations take a look at these concepts after they have failed or are facing a changing environment. To survive and succeed in today’s world, an effective organization must adopt these concepts before the crisis occurs not during it.
Leadership Training can Lead to Effective Employee Engagement and Change Management
Part of the reason why organizations fail at employee engagement is that they do not understand it. Many people believe that employee engagement means everybody in the company auditorium clapping their hands and singing the company song.
Nothing could be further from the truth, employee engagement means that everybody in the organization understands what the mission is and knows how to achieve it.
An engaged employee is not a fanatic or a cheerleader, instead an engaged employee is hard working and committed.
The only way to make people hard working and committed is through effective leadership. Workers must have more than managers they must have leaders that they trust and believe in. This can only be achieved through effective leadership development.
Leadership development is an ongoing process in which managers are turned into leaders by showing them what leadership is and how it works. Leadership training programs are only the beginning of this process.
Successful companies emphasize leadership training rather than management training. Management training means mastering the technical skills needed for management such as understanding technical processes.
Leadership training shows managers how to motivate and inspire other people. Leaders create engaged employees, managers tell others what to do. Almost anybody can function as a manager, only a few people can function as leaders.
Leadership development consists of three stages:
- Identifying those who are capable of leadership. This does not just mean those who are proficient at their jobs but those who can inspire others. Many organizations make the key mistake of promoting employees simply because they are good at their jobs. In many cases all this is turn a good worker into a half decent manager.
- Management training to give those individuals the basic skills necessary for management.
- Leadership training programs to give the individuals the tools they need to inspire and motivate others.
Ongoing help and support so that managers develop into the leaders they have the potential to become and achieve employee engagement.
