The Secret to Leadership Lies Within the Training
The success of leadership training depends on how it is conducted. Several organizations are implementing different strategies to advance their leaders. However, most of these training programs tend to be general and not applicable to all leaders. Each organization has a different mission and vision. Most leaders tend to lead in their unique style. There several types of leadership, such as authentic, servant, transformational, charismatic, and transactional, just to name a few.
The primary objective of leadership training is simple—to build quality leaders. According to the American Society of Training and Development, US businesses spend more than $170 billion on leadership-based curriculum, with the majority of those dollars being spent on “Leadership Training.” Are these trainings effective? The real challenge is determining whether these leadership trainings are building the leaders of the future.
To be completely honest, after attending several different leadership trainings, workshops, and seminars, I realized it is not the training that matters. Leaders need time to develop, and attending a two-hour training is not going to build quality leaders. It might enhance their skill set, and they may learn new material; however, it takes years of experience to become a leader in your own right.
As an organization, if you are seeking to develop your leaders, they need to take the initiative, rethink their success, and cultivate a sense of purpose as a leader. Leaders need to think about their prosperity, practice mindfulness, and attain an ability to wonder and rejoice in life. They need a learning space to create, explore, strategize, and most importantly, think. Arianna Huffington once said, “great leadership and creativity don’t come from the place of exhaustion and burnout.” In order to make leadership training effective, leaders need to grow within the organization and cultivate their own unique approaches to lead their organization.
Certain elements can encompass developing a successful leadership training program. Leadership trainings should be inspiring, uplifting, and bring out the best aspirations of leaders. Deepak Chopra, MD, once said, “There’s a general myth that leaders are born rather than made, that somehow Nature produces a peculiar species of human being who is bigger, more powerful, smarter, braver, and more charismatic than the rest.”
Waiting for the natural born leaders is not practical. We need successful leaders in today’s ever-changing world. Organizations need to center leadership training programs around well-being, cooperation, nurturing, belonging, values, creativity, and job fulfillment. Try to avoid the one-size-fits-all and “20 best practices to become a great leader” mindset. Each leader has their own individual strengths. As an organization, develop strategies that can grow the expertise of each leader. As Tom Peters once said, “True leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”
At SGEi, we create motivating, memorable, and effective training programs to help your leadership succeed. Connect with us to learn how we can partner with your organization to create your customized training program.