Strong leadership is integral to the successful future of any organisation, but are leaders born or made? If you don’t believe it is worth leaving to chance, offering effective workplace leadership training can provide a strategic approach to talent development.

This type of training doesn’t only provide efficiencies for businesses. It is also an attractive benefit for ambitious employees.

Read on to explore seven of the major benefits leadership training can offer your business.

Retention

Every business wants to attract and retain great employees. But great employees also expect great opportunities, and if you fail to provide them, you’ll lose your key talent.

Investing in your future leaders with leadership training demonstrates you value their worth, trust in their abilities, and believe in their potential. This, in turn, fosters a greater sense of engagement and loyalty to your company. The fear of spending time and resource investing in your employees, only for them to leave for another company, is invalid when you realise they will leave anyway if they are not given opportunities to develop and grow.

Retention (again)

The most common reason for an employee exodus is a bad manager.

According to Gallup, a research-based, global performance-management consultancy, 50% of employees who quit cite their manager as the main reason. Yet 89% of employers believe employees are motivated to leave for more money. The study shows that in reality, only 12% of workers actually leave for more money.

Bad management is bad leadership. When your employees are your most valuable asset, it makes sense to invest in workplace leadership training to ensure they stay. Failing to do so could be costly. Analysis from Oxford Economics found the average cost to employers of replacing a single member of staff is more than £30,000.

£25,000 of this comes from lost productivity as a result of the time it takes (28 weeks on average) for a new recruit to get up to speed.

The remaining costs are attributed to the logistics of finding a replacement. This includes agency fees, advertising costs, HR and management time, and the possible need to hire temps before the vacancy is filled.

Good leadership has a powerful appeal to employees, and is vastly more cost-effective than the cycle of recruiting replacement staff.

Preparation

Sometimes you will need to promote someone early unexpectedly, or be faced with the need to quickly bring someone in. These scenarios can’t always be foreseen. In the rush to appoint someone, training often falls by the wayside, while firefighting becomes the main priority. This can lead to a haphazard, as opposed to a deliberate approach to training.

If you have implemented workplace leadership training, you are more likely to be in a position where your staff are ready and can step in to the required roles and responsibilities. Your in-house training can continue uninterrupted.

Culture

Each time you bring a new employee into your company, you run the risk of jeopardising your company’s culture if they do not share the same vision, ethos and values that underpin your business.

You can interview, test, and request infinite references, but you won’t truly know if a candidate is a good fit for your business until it is too late. Promoting from within means you can help ensure your company’s culture for generations to come.

Strong relationships

Workplace leadership training provides the opportunity to develop strong relationships amongst your future leaders. When promoted to leadership positions, employees who have trained together are more likely to form a cohesive team, who trust, respect and understand each other. This leads to more efficient idea sharing, decision-making, and project management.

Organisational agility

You may think leadership training is helpful for ‘big picture’ and strategic thinking. But effective leadership is also crucial during critical times. Change, accidents, restructuring, personal tragedy, and a reduction in workforce, all require strong leadership to successfully navigate. Having developed your own leadership team through training, your business is likely to be more resilient during challenging times.

Maximised talent and productivity

It’s unlikely you would willingly underutilise any of your other assets, so why wouldn’t you maximise your talent with workplace leadership training. To thrive in a rapidly evolving business climate, businesses must tap into the underlying potential of their leaders.

Strong leadership also inspires and engages your workforce, increasing productivity and efficiencies.

“Investing in the training and development of staff at all levels reaps many positive and beneficial rewards for both the individual and the business”, says Jane Smart, Learning and Development Director at Capital City Training & Consulting.

“Great leadership skills can be the difference between success and failure for a business.

“Higher morale, increased productivity, greater creativity, reduced staff turnover, improved bottom line; these are just some of the potential outcomes from a well-trained and well supported workforce. Why would a business choose to ignore this?”