Selling Skills | Building a Successful Business | Employee Wellness
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Best Leadership and Management Skill Training
A program of continuing leadership development and management skill training is critical to the success of any organization aiming to grow, prosper and reach for the top.
I graduated from West Point and taught at the Air Force Academy. The United States service academies have premier leadership development programs. Why? Because success in warfare demands exemplary leadership.
Leadership and management are closely related. Their unique attributes interwoven with the other management core competencies constitute the fabric of organizational success. My own experience since serving 20 years in the United States Air Force confirms that the leadership and management principles needed for military success apply also to business. The world's leading organizations have corporate universities that focus on the development and nurturing of leadership and management skills. These same skills are needed by smaller companies and entrepreneurs as well.
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Upon serving as the President of the
Rotary Club of Charleston, Earl Walker, Dean of the Citadel
School of Business, gave this book to each member of Board
(I was one of them). He said it was the best book on
Leadership he had ever read.
He quoted from the book two passages: (1) "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a server and a debtor. This sums up the progress of an artful leader." and (2) "Leaders must abandon themselves to the skills of others." |
Several years ago just before the dot.com implosion a venture capital company contacted me and asked if I could put together a management skill training program for startup companies. The venture capital company was starting a technology company business incubator. They would find entrepreneurs with great ideas and help them on their way to become successful in the marketplace. However, the biggest challenge that startup entrepreneurs had was not ideas or raising the initial funding to move their ideas to fruition. It was keeping their company when they entered the marketplace. An essential skill to raise the final round of funding is that the management had the requisite management skills to protect the investors.
Best Managers on the Net® evolved from that effort. Our original website was designed as to be the central means for scheduling delivering and managing a management skill training program to be given to the principals of companies going through the incubator. The management skill training agenda developed then is presented here. Training was to be a combination of self-paced and facilitated management skill training. The idea was not limited to developing the requisite leadership and management skills. These entrepreneurs also needed to understand that the only way they would be able to turn their startup efforts into a quarter of a billion dollar enterprises would be though cloning, so to speak, their own developed management skills into others -- along with the technical know how to grow and diversify the technology products and services which had given them their start.
At the time I was conducting facilitated management skill training sessions of a the leading worldwide leadership and management skill training organization. One of my associates head a leading online leadership and management skill training program. Both programs were founded on the success principles presented in my Introduction to Management Training.
That training required upper management commitment and support, would be continuous, would be given in small doses and would be nurtured (facilitated) through direct supervisors and applied in the workplace to current workplace challenges and furthering company objectives.
During my manager training days I learned that the leading candidates for facilitated management training were companies with 50 to 200 employees. Larger companies tended to have training departments or a Human Relations (HR) managers who also had training responsibilities. Some of the more insightful larger companies understood that for management skill training, it made economic and practical sense to have an outside company conduct the training. In many other cases, the heads of Training and HR Departments were in a continuing mode of trying get/sustain upper management commitment to management skill training. This put the heads of those departments at odds with outside training organizations who required the attention of upper level management.
My associate's experience was a bit different. He had been the the HR Director for a large company who recognized the need for an effective leadership and management skill training program. Based on his own experience of trying to manage effectively an in-house management skill training program, he vowed to find a better way. Because of his background, that better way would include a Learning Management System (LMS) and a way to track/measure results.
The training delivery methodology of my franchise company centered on monthly facilitated sessions on two core management skills each session. The format was to use a 30 minute video featuring a leading video personality and follow up with exercises keyed to the leaning points in the video. The idea was to let the video personality be the center of expertise rather than the live facilitator. Such an approach makes it easier for a learning session attendee to be able to return to his company with the materials and share the learning experience with others.
However, business practicalities and time constraints sometimes dictate that higher-attendee company sessions become the final company learning experience, potentially losing the significant value to be gained from the directly mentored professional growth of a manager's direct reports.*
To maintain a successful leadership and management skill training program requires the direct involvement and commitment of the organization's leadership. However, the structured nature of a facilitated leadership and management training program conducted either by in-house staff or by external trainers tends to separate leadership from leadership and management skill development.
In contrast, an online, enterprise wide training program approach involves everyone. Assuming outstanding content and technology that does not "get in the way" of learning, such an approach can be extended throughout an entire organization in a fractional amount of time and expense that any existing wholly facilitated management skill training program. And the approach empowers the entire management team by developing perhaps the most important management skill of all -- nurturing and developing one's direct reports.**
*There is a recent trend among leading companies to contract out the function of mentoring the development of individual manager skills. This may reflect a growing dissatisfaction with the ability of in-house trainers to conduct effective leader/manager skills development programs.
**To me the ideal program would incorporate the best features of both programs. Given the state of current instructional technology, both online and facilitated learning could be combined to produce an even greater impact in workplace.
Richard Dowell
President, Best Managers on the Net
We are
a business consulting, training and development company
dedicated to helping good managers and their companies
prosper by reaching for the top.
See also our Introduction to Management Training
Comparison of Selected Leadership And Management Skill Training Programs
| Approach | Live Facilitation | Online (including courses for hourly workers) |
| General Approach | Live facilitated sessions featuring media presentation by noted training personalities as catalyst for group exercises and follow-on in-house sessions. | Mentored skill development using online, self-paced training sessions which can be used as a catalyst for workgroup applications sessions. |
| Skill areas covered | Traditional leadership and managerial skills and other topics developed from periodic surveys. | Wide spectrum of core competencies. |
| Levels of Instruction | Single program for all attendees.*** | Each attendee can be assigned an individual learning track. |
| Learning Modules Available | Scheduled monthly half-day sessions, plus a variety of additional sessions structured to support individual topics. | 78 organizational and personal skills development training modules. |
| Scalability | About one facilitator for approximately every 25 participants at each training location. | Limited only by computer access, system capabilities and computer learning skills of employees. |
| Time commitment | Half day per month per employee | About 45 minutes of self-paced individual time per module |
| Cost per year | $1000-$5000 per attendee | $5 - $100 per employee |
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