10 signs you (or your leaders) need leadership training
Most people managers or supervisors have been promoted to a leadership position without any leadership training (or guidance even) about how to manage people. Instead, they're promoted because they excelled as an individual contributor and are now responsible for other people's success in doing similar work. A lot of times this is setting up the leader to fail.
Just because they were good at producing the output at an individual level, does not mean they have the tools to lead others to achieve similar outcomes. What works for one person does not work for everyone.
As a people manager, you need to be able to think strategically about the goals of the company and team and how to guide individuals to support those goals. You need to navigate different communication, motivation, and recognition styles of members of your team.
These are the most common pain points of a leader that could be supported with proper leadership training.
1. You're a people manager and you've never been trained to manage people.
I can't stress the importance of this enough. Learning leadership skills is necessary to be an effective leader. Without it, the leader often can't understand other personality, motivation, or learning styles so they tend to lead everyone the same way they would like to be motivated or trained which creates inconsistent results across the team.
2. You don't know how to delegate effectively.
This looks like the manager being too involved in the day-to-day execution of the team's projects, having way too much on their own plate, and an imbalanced workload across team members. This quickly leads to overwhelm and burnout of the leader and potentially resentment by their team members.
3. There are a lot of miscommunications on your team and teammates aren't on the same page.
When your team members aren't communicating effectively to each other, or you aren't setting clear expectations across the team, you'll find a lot of inefficiencies in the team. This creates a lot of frustration and resentment within team members.
4. Your team meetings are ineffective, always go over the allotted time, and aren't moving projects or goals forward.
Without proper leadership in meetings, you and your team may lose sight of your priorities and goals and instead get caught up in conversations that are not important or not productive. This causes a lot of bad habits within the team including both communication and meeting habits.
5. You don't know how to manage the many different personalities across your team.
This means you may not understand people who have different personalities from your own, and also how specific personalities tend to clash and how to get them to work more effectively together. Without this cohesion, your team members may resist working with certain people and may start to silo themselves off based on their friendships, age groups, or roles.
6. You don't know how to empower your team without hand-holding or micro-managing.
Constant hand-holding or micro-managing is exhausting both for you and your employees. Typically this is just a bad habit and rooted in not trusting your team members enough. Over time, this will cause burn out and resentment among most of your employees.
7. You don't know how to handle conflict or difficult conversations.
So many people are so uncomfortable with conflict or difficult conversations that they avoid them entirely or put them off as long as possible. This puts unnecessary emotional stress on yourself and whoever else is involved, is delaying a resolution, and likely reducing performance of your team.
8. You are so busy with all your emails and meetings that you don't have the time to plan proactively for your team.
When all you have time for as a leader is sending emails and attending meetings, what are you really leading? Nothing. This is not sustainable or effective for you or your team.
9. You don't know what to talk about during your 1:1 meetings with your employee, you aren't having them at all, or you keep pushing them back.
When you're not prioritizing your team members and their own short and long term development, you're no longer leading. You need to be an advocate for your employees and you need to consistently prioritize them and their needs.
10. You want to continually grow your leadership skills to be an even better boss.
Of course, I LOVE this answer. Leaders need to have a growth mindset and know that their self-development is never done.
Because of these common topics with leaders, my go-to leadership training topics include:
Workplace personality styles
Identifying your brand of leadership
Strategic team planning
Prioritize & structure your time
Set & communicate clear expectations
Leadership communication skills
Coach & empower your team
If any of these signs hit close to home, let's talk about what leadership training could look like for you or your team. Book a free discovery call.
Brittany Canaski is a highly-rated Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Founder of Hello Velocity where she builds confident leaders and high-performing teams. When she's not building her business, you can find her planning her next travel adventure with her husband, watching Formula 1 racing, or volunteering in her local community of Charlotte, NC.
