As a leader in your organization, you’re all too familiar with the amount of work it takes to climb the company ladder. While some may be born leaders, others require a little extra cultivating and nurturing. Implementing a comprehensive leadership development program within your organization will provide employees with the necessary skills to drive your company forward.
What is a Leadership Development Program?
Leadership development programs are an investment in the future of your employees and your company. Building a strategic leadership development program within your organization will help you identify employees with leadership potential and build on that foundation to further develop their leadership skills. Leadership programs vary by organization, but all involve building a custom learning path that will not only train employees in the skills needed, but also provide opportunities for mentoring and shared learning. A good leadership program also understands that not all individuals learn the same way and remains flexible to allow for personalization.
5 Benefits of Developing Leaders
A leadership development program not only benefits the employees enrolled in the program, but also provides many benefits to your organization.
- Attract, develop, and retain talent: A lot of time and money goes into attracting and hiring good employees. Once you find the right talent, you hope they’ll remain with your organization and provide a return on your investment in them. A leadership development program provides employees with evidence of your continued investment in their careers, which improves employee loyalty and retention.
- Improve the bottom line: As mentioned above, a lot of money goes into recruiting, hiring, and training new talent. By investing in your employees and providing them with opportunities for advancement if they stay, you’re creating more engaged employees who are loyal to your company, therefore reducing your organization’s costs related to turnover. Additionally, loyal and engaged employees tend to be more productive employees as well.
- Drive strategy execution: By developing leaders early, you’re also developing a core group of employees with the skills needed to set benchmarks and objectives that will guide their teams in meeting company goals. These leaders-in-training will also be more invested in reaching the company’s goals in return for the company’s investment in them.
- Build strong leaders: Your company needs strong leaders, and the current leadership will not be around forever. A well-planned leadership development program utilizes peer coaching and mentorship to provide employees with exposure and access to the current leadership in order to learn from them, and eventually lead your company into the future.
- Succeed in change management: Change happens. When it does, you need the right people in place to be able to see it through successfully. The better-trained your leaders are, the more likely they’ll be able to lead the company forward through any shift in the industry they might experience.
Leadership Development and Your LMS
Creating a leadership development program can be as easy as building a custom learning path in your Learning Management System (LMS). With the features built into your LMS you can incorporate leadership training, on-the-job instruction, and mentoring into a blended learning strategy that benefits your employees by accommodating diverse learning styles. Your LMS will also increase efficiency for your training administrators by making it easier to schedule, track, and report on employee training.
Explore Leadership Development with trainingGrid®
The trainingGrid® LMS delivers online training and blended learning strategies through learning paths that are customized for your organization. Its intuitive design makes learning management simple and allows employees to begin training with just a click. This flexible system comes with a variety of robust features customizable to fit your needs in addition to built-in reporting and certification tools to help maintain compliance.
