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Many of our clients are preparing their budgets for 2023 including the investments they plan to make in developing their supervisors and managers to be more effective leaders. OA has been working with clients for over fifteen years to give their managers the tools they need to be more effective as leaders, and help them become better at coaching and developing their own staff and helping the senior leadership team execute on strategy. Whether you are a private-sector organization, a nonprofit, or are part of a public-sector agency, a bench of strong managers will:

• Ensure your staff are well-led and receive the coaching and development they need to be productive
• Ensure your staff have competent and reliable leaders to whom they can turn when they need help doing their jobs
• Assist senior management with developing and executing strategy
• Relieve senior management of routine employee matters, personnel administration, and performance management
• Generate ideas and recommendations to enhance service delivery, improve processes, foster teamwork, and drive change

Unfortunately, many times our clients don’t see the full potential of leadership development training. Perhaps they recently had a bad incident and feel that training will solve it or prevent it in the future. But that’s only part of the value of training your managers. Providing them with fundamental leaderships skills will not only reduce the likelihood of bad situations but will strengthen the organization. What are some of the benefits of investing in supervisor training?

• It helps round out your supervisors. They may be very skilled at the technical aspects of their jobs but relying solely on what they’ve picked up…good, bad, or otherwise…about supervising over the years means they will have gaps. Coordinated training helps fill those gaps.
• It fosters camaraderie. Bringing supervisors together who may not directly interact with each other enhances mutual trust and friendship. They see each other as colleagues on whom they can rely for help with management challenges.
• It shows the organization that everyone participates in learning new skills. This sets the example that everyone from senior management to the newest employee is expected to become more effective at their jobs.
• It ensures consistency. Employees will know what is expected of them regardless of where they work. Staff will be treated in a fair and consistent manner. Performance standards will be upheld equally. Claims of unfair treatment will be minimized.
• It helps identify high potential staff and managers. Observe how participants in leadership training act in the workshops. Are they helping their peers? Are they addressing their opportunity areas? Are they processing the information so that they can share it with their teams? Training and development programs can help with your talent review and succession planning processes.

As we’ve said before, training and development programs can be expensive to implement. Determining your goals and defining the outcomes before you embark on working with a partner or sending people to training is critical to ensure you get the best return on investment.  Making sure that ways to measure behavior change is also needed to determine success or failure. Remember too that training should not be seen as ‘punishment’. Remedying poor performance may involve additional training, but it should not be seen as a means to enforce discipline or only used if there is something wrong. Training and development is based on taking good people and making them even better. Check out our archives for more on training and development, then contact us to set up time to learn how we can help you enhance your management team.