7 Tips for Creating Great E-Learning Leadership Training

A trait that is common among most leaders in business and other fields is their commitment to ongoing personal and professional development. In fact, many leaders talk about their passion for learning. Therefore, it makes sense to offer leadership training throughout your organisation, and e-learning is the ideal delivery method.

When thinking about leadership training, it is important to remember that being a manager or supervisor is not the same thing as being a leader. Management is often about administration and implementing strategies and initiatives from above.

Leadership, on the other hand, is about strategic thinking and seeing the bigger picture. Leadership also involves inspiring and motivating others, and not just with direct reports, but with everyone you encounter.

Of course, some people are natural leaders. However, most of us need to develop and enhance our leadership skills.

Here are seven essential tips for creating great e-learning leadership training courses.

1. Determine the Most Important Skills

With all training initiatives, it is helpful to identify priority areas, i.e., the training topics that will be most beneficial to the business, that will foster the greatest level of positive change, and that will deliver the best return on investment. You should follow the same principles when planning leadership training.

2. Outsource E-Learning Development

There are several reasons why it is beneficial to outsource the creation of leadership training to an e-learning developer in the UAE or Saudi Arabia. Those benefits include:

• Expertise – the leadership training requirements of your organisation will be similar to the requirements of other companies, including companies in different industries. By outsourcing to an e-learning developer, you will benefit from expertise derived from other leadership training development projects. You will also get access to individuals and teams with extensive training, technical, and creative skills.
• Better quality – following on from where we finished in the point above, the technical, training, and creative skills of a professional e-learning developer will produce high-quality leadership training courses for your company.
• Lower overall costs – when you consider all the costs that apply when developing e-learning training in-house, it is often more cost-effective to outsource. The figures move even more in favour of outsourcing when you consider return on investment.
• Faster turnaround – an e-learning developer will be able to allocate the resources required to get your leadership training courses completed on time.
• Internal training resources can focus on other projects – finally, by outsourcing the development of e-learning training, your internal resources can focus on other areas that are not as easy or beneficial to outsource.

3. Make the Training Personalised

The managers, supervisors, and leaders in your organisation will be on different pathways, with different experiences, skills, capabilities, interests, and objectives. Therefore, it makes sense to offer personalised pathways in the leadership training you offer.

This can take many forms, including multiple pathways through a training course or multiple courses all covering different topics.

4. Ensure the Content is Relevant

There are countless books, websites, and other types of material available on leadership topics and improving leadership skills. Almost all of them have one thing in common, however – they are not directly relevant to your business.

Making your leadership training relevant to the individuals who will complete the courses will improve results and help achieve your objectives. For example, don’t use theoretical situations to explain a point or concept. Instead, link the point directly to a situation or example within your business.

5. Value Their Time

Many people in the modern workforce are time poor. For most managers and supervisors, the issue of time is an even greater challenge. As a result, it is important to think about this when creating e-learning courses for managers and supervisors.

You need to value their time by keeping the content of the course-specific and to the point. For example, remove unnecessary repetition, information that is not relevant to the topic in question, or information that is already known.

6. Use Scenarios

Most people learn better by doing rather than being told, whether in text or with a video. You still need text, video, and other e-learning elements to pass on information and explain topics and concepts. However, you should also provide opportunities for leaders to practice what they have learned.

Scenarios are a great way of doing this. You can create scenarios that put the leader in situations that are as close to real-life as possible, asking them to make decisions based on learnings from the course.

7. Use Mistakes as Learning Opportunities

Leaders can learn a lot by making mistakes. This is another thing that is common with many leaders in business and other fields, i.e., they use mistakes and failures as learning opportunities.

You can create opportunities for this to happen in the e-learning courses you create for leaders, managers, and supervisors. Scenarios are a good example, where you present learners with difficult and challenging situations, including situations where there is no ideal or completely correct answer. After all, these are the types of situations they might have to face in real life.

It is then important to provide context and additional explanations after the learner has made their decision, even when they get the answer or selection wrong.

Continuous Improvement

It is important for leaders in your organisation to continuously improve, but the same applies to the training that you provide them with. In other words, you need to continuously update, enhance, and add to the leadership training that is available to managers and supervisors in your organisation.

E-learning facilitates this ongoing updating strategy, particularly if your training courses have a modular structure. You can also add new topics to your library – topics that will help your business grow through better leadership.