Leadership Development News Roundup: Employee Training and Education Edition

Whether you’re promoting an employee from within your organization or bringing on a new hire, providing training and education to help make the transition a successful one is vital to your employee’s success. And in today’s competitive market, providing development opportunities for your employees will not only help them succeed but also help your organization keep it’s top talent on board.

This week’s Leadership Development News Roundup brings you five articles with information on offering great employee training and education.

• A Network Rethink for Learning and Development. Workforce: “Learning and development plays a crucial role in driving above-average employee performance. And, based on a 2012 CEB study, continuing to refine traditional classroom training won’t deliver more than a 4 percent improvement in employee performance. The new work environment and the importance of network performance requires learning to redefine how it operates.”

• What You Need To Know About Training Your Employees So They'll Stick Around. Fast Company: “It’s important that you give your employees the skills that they need to do their jobs. This means not just the obvious training--the latest software for software developers or the latest project techniques for project managers. It means giving them skills from outside their area that will help them understand each other and get new insights into their work. Train marketers on the processes that create the products they market. Train designers in marketing so that they know how their products will be sold. Let the ideas mingle and cross-fertilize into something new.”

• 3 Surprising Benefits of Training a New Employee. Inc.: “New employees bring a very important asset that seasoned team members can't contribute: a fresh pair of eyes. Knowing this, why not take advantage of your new hire's ‘outsider’ status on your projects? I did this unknowingly while training my staffer on a time-consuming and manual process that was a major pain point for our team. After finishing my training, she offered the suggestion that we streamline the process with an Excel template that we could utilize month after month, saving our team tons of time. While this seems like an obvious solution in hindsight, our team was too execution-focused to take a broader view of the problem. What we really needed was that fresh perspective.”

• Can Leadership Urgency Be Taught? Forbes: “Technical skills are table stakes meaning these skills can be taught either in school or on the job.  A critical attribute though is urgency.  What do we mean by this term and how does it translate into leadership behaviors?  Employers often ask me to help coach leaders on becoming more urgent.  When I ask these senior leaders what they mean they do define a number of behavioral attributes.  Here’s what they say. ‘An ability to be a self-starter, demonstrating passion that exudes excitement, embracing change with a winning attitude, being first out of the gate, owning the need to win, showing initiative with the aim of keeping competitors at bay.’”

• How to Give Your Team Feedback. Harvard Business Review: “Providing feedback isn’t solely the team leader’s responsibility, according to Mary Shapiro who teaches organizational behavior at Simmons College and is the author of the HBR Guide to Leading Teams. For starters, that would be impractical. ‘You can’t be the only one holding everyone accountable because you can’t possibly observe everything that’s going on,’ she says. Second, if you’re the only one praising or critiquing, group dynamics suffer. ‘You want to give everyone the opportunity to say his piece,’ she says. Your job as manager is to ensure that team members are ‘providing regular constructive feedback,’ says Roger Schwarz, an organizational psychologist and the author of ‘Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams’.”

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Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.