Using E-Learning to Improve Leadership Training in Your Organisation
Developing new leaders is essential for companies in almost all industries. You can recruit new leaders, of course, but new leaders have to come from somewhere. That means you will, at some point, and probably sooner rather than later, have to identify, nurture, and develop new leadership talent.
There are some people in the world who are natural-born leaders, but they are a rare breed. Most of us have to learn how to be a leader. In fact, even those who have strong natural leadership abilities can still learn and improve.
Plus, all leaders are different, and there is a massive gap in capabilities and performance levels between good and bad leaders.
All these factors combined emphasise the importance of leadership training. For your organisation, e-learning could be an essential solution to this training requirement.
How Leaders Learn to Be Leaders
In the modern workplace, leaders obtain their skills in a range of different ways, including through coaching and mentorship, learning on the job, and self-directed learning.
These approaches are not always enough, however, particularly if you want to develop strong leaders who will help you achieve your business objectives. To ensure the leaders and potential leaders in your organisation achieve their full potential, you also need structured training. E-learning is one method you can use to deliver this training.
Why Leadership Training is Important
Structured, formal leadership training is important because it improves the standards and capabilities of leaders in your organisation. This, in turn, improves employee job satisfaction, productivity, and organisational culture.
It is also important to consider the changing workforce in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and further afield. Employee priorities are changing, digital transformation is changing the way companies operate, and there are skills shortages in a range of industries, particularly in highly skilled roles and leadership positions.
This has resulted in many companies placing an increasing focus on nurturing from within to identify talent and then to train and develop that talent. It is simply too much of a business risk in the modern world to rely on external recruitment to ensure your organisation has the leaders it needs. You also have to look within.
The Challenges of Leadership Training
Leadership training does present a number of challenges. They include:
- Time – leaders and potential leaders are often very time-poor, so it can be difficult to effectively organise formal leadership training.
- Ongoing needs – a one-off training programme isn’t enough for leadership training, not least because leaders at different levels of their careers need different skills. Instead, leadership training needs to be continuous.
- Personalisation requirement – the needs of leaders and potential leaders can also differ, even within departments and business units. Therefore, there is often a requirement for personalisation in leadership training.
The Benefits of E-Learning and How it Can Improve Leadership Training
E-learning provides solutions to the above leadership training challenges. It also offers your organisation a number of other benefits:
Minimises the Time Required to Complete Leadership Training
Many leadership courses take place in person, where groups of people gather in a location to undergo the training, often over multiple days.
E-learning does away with this by providing learners with the training online. This can even be on their mobile phone.
Therefore, there is no need to travel, and there is no need to take a large amount of time away from day-to-day operational tasks to complete training. Instead, learners can complete the leadership training when it suits them, on their preferred device, wherever they are located.
Straightforward to Develop a Library of Leadership Training Courses
Once you develop a leadership training course using e-learning, it can be used wherever and whenever it is needed. It is also straightforward to update e-learning training courses to keep them relevant and accurate. In other words, the leadership training course you create today could be completed by a potential leader who hasn’t even joined your organisation yet but will sometime in the future.
This advantage of e-learning – courses available whenever they are needed – makes it easy to create a library of leadership training courses that cover different topic areas, issues, and/or leadership levels.
E-Learning Training Courses Can Be Personalised
There are multiple ways of achieving personalisation with e-learning, where individual learners get access to content that is most relevant to them. This helps to keep learners engaged. It also ensures that leaders and potential leaders in your organisation learn the skills they need without having to waste time going through content that isn’t relevant or where they already have a good level of competency.
E-Learning is a Safe Environment
There are some leadership training topics that are highly sensitive, particularly those relating to issues like company reputation, discrimination, and harassment. These sensitive topics can be challenging to cover in traditional training environments, such as classroom-based training.
E-learning provides a much safer place to cover these topics, helping ensure the leaders in your organisation get the information and skills they need.
Improves Engagement Levels
This point is a general benefit of e-learning, but it is as important to leadership training as to other training in your organisation. When leaders and potential leaders are engaged with the structured training you provide them with, they will have a positive learning experience, and you will achieve better learning outcomes.
Reduced Costs
Leadership training can be costly, particularly when you take into account the lost productivity on training days, travel costs, accommodation costs, etc.
On the flip side, a lack of leadership training can also be costly to your business, especially if you struggle to recruit the right leaders from outside, or if an incident happens due to ineffective leadership that results in a fine or compensation pay out.
E-learning leadership training is the cost-effective solution.
Training Your Leaders of Today, and Those Who Will Be Leading Tomorrow
Leadership training must be an ongoing process to ensure your organisation remains competitive, productive, and relevant. You need to use all the tools at your disposal to create the leaders you need, including e-learning.
