Leadership Workshops: The Last Guide That You Will Ever Need

83% of businesses say it’s important to develop leaders at all levels — and they are looking for solutions. Companies are investing in leadership workshops, but they aren’t getting the results they expected. Or even worse, they aren’t measuring and tracking the results at all.

CEOs are struggling to find workshops that fit their needs. They buy-in on pre-built workshops and hire consultants to implement off-the-shelf tactics, and continually find themselves underwhelmed with the end results.

Your employees are unique individuals with unique skills and personalities that need to be considered. Your company has unique goals, business needs, and customers that it likes to work with.

So it’s no surprise that you can’t get the results you want with “one-size-fits-all” training. 

Instead, you should look at programs that are customized to your needs. Customized training programs allow you to provide the specific skills and knowledge that your employees need on a case-by-case basis.

Let us show you how you can customize a training program for your team.

Step One: Identify the Group That Needs Training

The first thing you need to do is identify the group of employees who need training. Are you looking to train employees who are already in leadership positions? Or are you hosting workshops for entry-level employees that you want to promote?

The best candidates for leadership workshops are self-motivated and excellent communicators. They don't give up, and they strive to produce the best quality of work possible.

Continued education is important to them — they are motivated to learn and grow. Don't send employees who lack the necessary personality traits or skills through leadership workshops and expect great results.

Not everyone is cut out to be a leader, and you should take the time to properly screen employees beforehand using skills and personality assessments.

Step Two: Have Employees Take a Pre-Training Skills Assessment

Pre-training skills assessments allow you to identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses for each of your employees. 

Assessments help you see what their pain points are, what areas they can improve on, and if they would make a good fit for a leadership position.

Look for individuals that demonstrate some basic traits of a good leader, as mentioned above, and have them take your assessments to confirm they are a good fit before sending them through training.

Another benefit of having them take assessments is that you can make sure they are a good fit for their current job. For instance, you might find an employee that is in a position the assessment shows that they aren’t a good fit for, and they’ve been struggling with their work or feel unfulfilled in their job.

You can reevaluate their position with the company and potentially move them to another department with a new job role they would be much better suited for. 

Step Three: Decide On What Topics to Teach

What topics you decide to teach in your leadership workshop depends on what areas your employees need to gain the most improvements in. 

You’ll know what those are based on the results of the assessments you conducted. Some examples of topics you could include are:

• Constructive communication skills.
• How to improve employee performance with coaching.
• How to increase the engagement of your employees.
• Setting realistic goals and holding employees accountable.
• Conflict resolution techniques.
• How to manage their time and plan strategically.
• Ways to improve productivity by motivating employees.
• The importance of honest feedback and communicating expectations clearly.
• How to be self-aware and have empathy for their employees.
• Team building tactics.

Step Five: Ensure Training Materials Are Varied and Interactive

Remember the days when you were in school, and you fought to stay awake against the monotone and droning voice of a boring teacher? What about the stacks of outlines and worksheets you had to read and fill out that seemed to never end? 

These methods of learning didn’t help you in school, so don’t rely on these same methods to train your employees.

Your training materials need to be created with the different learning styles in mind, and they should be interactive. Include materials such as guided scenarios. 

The best training materials stimulate all the senses at once and force their focus.

Materials that require them to see, hear, and interact with something will stick in their memory much longer and be easier to understand.

Step Six: Choose Facilities That Are Quiet and Conducive to Learning

Where you host your leadership workshop has an impact on its success. You don’t want to try to teach your employees in an area that’s loud, with a lot going on around them.

Distractions make it impossible for your employees to remain focused and can cause them to miss crucial information you need them to learn.

This is especially important for your leaders. They can be easily distracted by phone calls, text messages, emails, and interruptions that naturally occur in their day. It’s up to you to make sure they get the time away from daily work to absorb the training.

Host your workshop somewhere quiet that’s away from the everyday hustle and bustle of your workplace. For example, choose meeting rooms that don’t have glass or windows to see out into the office.

Step Seven: Conduct Post-Training Assessments and Surveys

Have you invested in leadership workshops in the past? Were you disappointed by the results? 

Conducting post-training assessments and surveys is a vital part of every leadership workshop. You need to know that your employees gained the knowledge and skills you paid for them to get.

Use the same assessments you used to test them before the training. Compare the results from before and after to see if they’ve made improvements.

If you notice any employees who did worse or didn’t make much improvement, sit down with them one-on-one and find out why. Ask them for their thoughts and opinions on the training.

Did they find any of it helpful? Why or why not? Is there anything they feel they need clarification on?

Step Eight: Don’t Stop Teaching

Don’t be one of those companies that pays for training and expects it to be a “one-and-done” experience. 

Leadership workshops are only beneficial if you follow up with what they learned and take steps to help them practice it on the job.

We often see employees returning to their jobs and unable to practice what they were taught. This can be because the processes currently in place don’t allow for it, or they aren’t encouraged to keep learning.

In order for leadership workshops to produce the results you want, you need to schedule follow up workshops routinely, provide exercises for employees to use what they learned, coach and encourage them, and track the progress to see what’s working and what’s not.