Empower Your Staff Through Leadership Training

"Empowerment" is a key word whenever you go to any human resources conference these days. However, it takes more than bandying about the word to empower your staff. The essence of empowering your staff is to provide a facilitative style of leadership that enables you build up and encourage individual staff members to reach their full potential. This leads to many benefits for the company including higher staff morale, increased productivity, reduction in leave, and reduction in staff turnover.

Your role, as a leader in this process, is to ensure your team has:

A clear understanding of their boundaries
Access to the information required to make confident decisions
The ability and skills needed to work in smaller, self-managed teams

As part of this strategy leadership training can be the key to empower individuals and team members to tap into their full potential.

Personal Empowerment

When you send an individual to a good leadership training course, you provide that person with the opportunity to learn personal development skills. Since good leaders must understand the intricacies of interpersonal communication and learn how to motivate team members, the leadership training course will enable individuals to learn a range of skills that will allow them to better communicate on a number of different levels.

An individual attending a leadership training course will learn what their own personal motivation for working is and will learn how to self-motivate to achieve their goals. These communication skills and increased motivation are useful to individuals in whatever role they have within the organization. Individuals who undertake leadership training become more self-aware, empowering the individual to put those new communication skills into practice on the return to the workplace.

Building Team Skills

One of the ‘hidden' benefits of sending an individual staff member to a leadership training course is the difference it can make to team communication practices. Leaders learn how to appreciate other people's contributions to team projects and how to encourage individuals to give their best performance to each task.

Even if an individual does not take on a leadership role within the team, the training will open his or her eyes to the contributions of others within the team. This understanding can encourage greater team harmony and the willingness to work together to achieve the goals of the organization.

Team Empowerment

When you send several team members to a leadership training course, you will find that the entire team becomes empowered. Increased skills in working together are derived through such things as:

The leadership skills of appreciating another's contributions
Enhanced interpersonal communication skills
The ability to motivate others to achieve

The entire team or department can benefit from the increased understanding and reduction in miscommunication that arises when people learn interpersonal communication skills through leadership training. If you want to empower your team to move past a "storming" phase and get into productive work faster, you need several people on the team with a range of skills that will build up and encourage the team to succeed as a unit.

Leadership Empowerment

Finally, sending your team members to leadership training can have many benefits for you as a manager. If you have people who have some leadership skills working with you, it is easier to delegate tasks and share the burdens. You may not need to facilitate as many team sessions, or could find that the team is able to work productively without your continual input, as the team members become empowered to take on a range of leadership tasks themselves.

As a manager, you have many roles within the organization and delegating some of the tasks involved in leading a department can ensure you have time to attend to other important tasks too.

Leadership training empowers individuals, benefits the team, and provides easier delegation for leaders and managers. Everyone in the department wins when individuals become empowered through leadership training.

Source Timothy Millett