Marketing management roles require skills to guide multiple team members in the right direction by understanding their capabilities and strategize to execute the company’s strategic vision. The key to performing well in any management role is to undergo leadership training. A leadership development program is an efficient and cost-effective way to induce leadership excellence in your workplace culture. A leadership development program is an exclusive training experience which helps an individual to hone their skills in order to perform well in leadership roles. It lays a strong foundation that enables them to find innovative ways of managing people, creating work consistency, and achieving success ‘as a team’.

 

In the current environment where the global economy is volatile and highly unpredictable, having strong marketing leadership in your company has become vital. Leadership training provides potential leaders with the necessary mentorship and skill set to lead others and positively influence their performance. At the same time, it doesn’t have to be boring or inauthentic. With that in mind, here are five tips to create a comprehensive program that is engaging and productive:

 

• Identify leadership needs

Creating a highly effective leadership development training program starts with outlining your company’s leadership needs. This requires a clear understanding of the company’s long term as well as short term goals. Based on these, the leadership development program should be built to meet your business priorities in the best possible way. Before implementing anything you must also reflect on the traits that are currently missing in your leaders and are a must-have for the future.

 

• Identify potential candidates

While identifying leadership candidates, a very common mistake is considering only top-performing employees as potential leaders. However, leadership is not restricted to just doing good work in their current position. It is much more than just doing given responsibilities excellently. Talk to the people currently in leadership positions in the company to understand their perspective of which employees would turn out good leaders when properly groomed.

 

• Provide Mentorship

Formal and traditional training programs fail to keep learners engaged. Mentoring proves to be a better strategy for delivering in-person learning with the help of a mentor who has relevant experience. It is a powerful tool that allows your more knowledgeable and experienced managers to share their personal learnings with other team members in an informal way. The mentor can be someone who is a part of the organization or an external coach/consultant. One-on-one mentoring involves sharing practical suggestions and special assignments with supervision to encourage the mentee’s development towards becoming a better leader.

 

• Emphasize communication and building relationships

The power of effective communication is not something that leaders are not aware of, but it is a skill that needs to be fully optimized in order to drive their teams for better results. Apart from this, it is also necessary to incorporate into the program how to develop interpersonal skills. These skills are of high importance because of the rise of a remote working culture where managers only interact over video-conferencing or phone calls with some employees. Establishing and cultivating relationships with such employees is an important task for a leader to keep them motivated.

 

• Track and measure results

It is important to assess whether an employee’s performance in their current job has been enhanced due to the leadership skills learned through the program. It is also crucial to determine a way to measure the program’s success. For this, you can consider investing in a Learning Management System, take iSpring Learn, for instance. A highly popular choice, the iSpring Learn features include analytics for performance tracking and automated reporting among many other beneficial tools.

 

• The Takeaway

Marketing leadership training and development is not a one-time event. Rather it’s a process to nurture and develop drivers of the company. As you build your program, consider the above-mentioned ideas to provide a learning experience that will push your leaders to grow and learn from one another.
 

Source: Business 2 Community