How to Design Leadership Training Courses That Impact Business Outcomes

This article first appeared on Acorn Labs in July 2023.

For a more in-depth look at leadership training, have a read of the full article.

Leadership training is a structured experience that helps individuals develop skills, behaviors, knowledge and tools that will help them to be effective leaders. It covers communication, decision-making, teamwork, and strategic thinking that helps the workforce achieve organizational goals.

The importance of leadership training

Great leaders are formed by the environment in which they work, which means they reflect your workplace culture. So, leadership training is the starting point for creating the leaders you need and want, the culture you want, and building a talent pipeline aligned with organizational goals.

Leadership training allows businesses to continuously identify high-potential employees with the technical and behavioral aspects required of leadership by measuring performance with a competency model. This creates a constant flow of leadership capabilities in your organization, minimising leadership gaps and instilling the right behaviors and mindsets to cultivate your workplace culture.

When learning doesn’t actually change behaviors, and learners just fall back on old ways of doing things, then leadership training has failed. And when leadership capability gaps aren’t being closed in individuals, then you won’t have effective leaders to make an impact on your business.

Types of leadership development programs

Because leaders exist at multiple different organizational levels, it’s important that leadership training reflects the most valuable skills, knowledge, behaviors and tools for their specific day-to-days.

• Executive coaching: Executives lean towards one-on-one coaching with an experienced executive coach who can give more focused and tailored guidance.
• Leadership workshops: These are commonly for new or emerging leaders to provide hands-on leadership training and collaborative experiences.
• Mentoring and coaching: This helps new leaders find their leadership style and creates new channels of communication within the organization.
• Stretch assignments: These are on-the-job training opportunities often done at the end of a training program to reinforce learned knowledge.
• Online training programs: Use a knowledge management system as a central source of truth for everyday problems and ongoing development plans.

Developing a leadership training program

When you have the foundations of a leadership training program right, you can mix and match specific leadership training methods for individual employees.

Step 1: Identify objectives

You need an end goal in mind so you can create credible metrics in order to measure progress towards your desired outcome. Think in terms of capabilities rather than specific roles, and consider what is essential for work to get done in your business in terms of different business functions and the industry in which you exist.

Step 2: Assess performance needs

Perform capability assessments to identify the individual performance needs of leaders. For the most objective data, have leaders perform a self-assessment first, then conduct a manager or subject matter expert assessment to follow up. This way, you ensure you have an unbiased rating of an individual’s leadership capability. A capability assessment should use a scale of competency such as:

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced
• Strategic.

Capability assessments will reveal where there are capability gaps—maybe an individual is only at an intermediate level in strategic thinking and planning when they should be, well, strategic.

Step 3: Determine training methods

A training needs analysis can be used to determine the best training for closing capability gaps. Consider the different types of leadership training to determine which is most relevant to your individual leaders and performance pain points.

Step 4: Measure impact

Measure impact to determine training efficacy and ensure that short-term growth leads to a long-term impact for the organization. A mix of quantitative and qualitative data provides the most holistic view of impact, which you can present to stakeholders as an example of how impactful leadership training has been on the business.

Something like the Kirkpatrick evaluation model is a good place to start—it starts with gauging learner reactions and moves on to evaluating how behaviors have shifted and learning was applied. This way, you can see what effect training had on your business and improve leadership training in the future.