I’m Amy Brann from Synaptic Potential.com and we’re looking at some of the challenges with introducing the idea of new leadership training into an organization. Some leaders can feel that they’ve heard it all before. They can feel that they’ve been into lots of leadership trainings and by now they know what they’re doing and they really don’t have anything more to learn. This can be one viewpoint that leaders come from. Another challenge that leaders may have is that they feel that they just don’t have time to take out their normal responsibilities and how they’re too busy doing things to attend another leadership training. The idea of having to implement new things if they think that they will learn new things can also be overwhelming to already overloaded leaders. The busyness and the fear of taking time out and not getting a good return for that investment of time can be another challenge. Another challenge that they may face might be that the last time they did a leadership training and they didn’t get anything from it. This bad experience has made them a little wary about what whether or not to take another leadership training.

There are several things that you can do to help move people forward from this place when considering having a new leadership training implemented in your organization. The first is to get really clear on what your goals are as a team. What are the goals, what are you working towards? Make sure that these are the goals that stretch you and that involve the key leaders, ideally the older leaders, in how you’re going to achieve those goals. What are the gaps that you can currently see? If you’ve got a goal of X, what do you need that you’ve not currently got? Who isn’t performing in the way that they need to perform? What needs to be different overall? What shifts do we need as a whole in the organization in order to get these results? There are lots of different ways of doing that and the key thing is to have people involve, people contributing and people taking ownership of the decisions. There may be a situation where the gaps can be seen but sometimes the challenge is that you don’t know what you don’t know so it’s difficult to see what the gaps are through being in the situation of not knowing exactly what you’re looking for!

The biggest thing in the overall setting is to engage your team in the decisions that you’re going make. Give them the opportunity to be on board and to look at what the best solution is for the directions you’re heading and the way you want to go. The final thing that is worth looking at is what style of leadership training is going to be the best for you. What is it that would actually make a difference? What do you want to get from leadership training? Perhaps you didn’t learn much from your last leadership training and some individuals absolutely know a lot but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else that they could learn. Do you know inside out how people work and how to get the most out of people? If not, then it’s probably a scope to learn more. The question then becomes, will it be a worthwhile investment of your time? That’s something that when you’re clear on the outcomes that you want from the training and if you could reach those outcomes then it would be worth the time investment. If that’s the case, then it’s become an easy decision. That’s what you’re looking to get to and it’s a good decision, one way or another whether the leadership training is right for you and would help move you forward and help you achieve the new goals that you want.

Amy Brann, Synaptic Potential.com