The Ultimate Guide to Building a Better Workforce: Part Four – Crafting a Leadership Training Program

Leadership training is a major factor in achieving company and employee success. Accel5 provides key considerations when creating a leadership training program at your company.

Workforce development and leadership training for your employees are two critical elements for your organization’s longevity, but training and development require a well-rounded strategy that focuses on specific skills relevant to company needs. Accel5 from EBSCO Information Services outlines the steps required to create a program that will help your employees reach their full leadership potential.

Outline Critical Competencies

The first step to creating a corporate learning program is determining the focus and identifying 8-12 key competencies. These competencies should include critical soft skills such as project management, teamwork, communication, time management, as well as industry/company-specific competencies.

You can identify these competencies using employee surveys, which provide employee perspectives on where the company can improve. It may also be helpful to review your organization’s mission statement for a quick refresh of goals.

Curate Content

Your next step is finding content suitable for the program’s goals and audience. To ensure these goals can be met, choose content is actionable and that employees can put into practice immediately.

Use online resources to track down appropriate content (short readings and videos) on your chosen competencies. If you’re having trouble finding the right content for your program, explore curated corporate learning tools such as Accel5. Accel5 is a microlearning solution that features videos, business book summaries and articles that are applicable to a wide range of soft skills and customizable for organizational needs. It spotlights the best practices from business leaders in under five minutes, making it easily digestible for employees.

Prepare Your Audience

Prior to the program, have employees complete “pre-work,” such as reading relevant book summaries or articles or watching video clips that will prepare them for their upcoming training. Ensure that content is concise and engaging — employees should spend no more than ten minutes a day on their pre-work.

Host a Program

A leadership development program should be customized to the company’s needs, while also incorporating the general soft skills discussed earlier. You want to be sure your program is long enough to be effective, but not so long that employees will fall behind in their work. Many companies have found that two to five days is an ideal amount of time.

Pair each attendee with a counterpart, or “partner.” As partners, these employees will be responsible for holding each other accountable both during and after the program.

Finally, be sure that you are checking in with employees throughout the program to assist with any questions or challenges they may face.

Following Up

A successful program does not end once the training is complete. Be sure to follow up with attendees at various points. Immediately after the program has concluded, give attendees access to a corporate learning solution to help them continue their development, and give them suggestions on where to start.

About a month after the program, check in with employees to see if they are still utilizing the corporate learning solution and/or speaking with their partner about goals discussed during the program. Finally, once you have run your program multiple times, send out another company-wide survey and review the results to see how you can improve your next program.