There is a wide range of critical skills gaps in the workplace, including the corporate leadership skills gap. According to the Association for Talent Development, there exists a huge gap between the leadership skills companies have now and the ones they will need in the next five years.
Not surprisingly, 58% of businesses state that their top priority is to close leadership skill gaps. Even though this gap has become a big challenge, it can be tackled with efficient, consistent leadership training.
Delivering relevant training is an obvious solution to fill the leadership skills gap, but how can companies effectively develop and provide training that produces the leaders they require? As a learning management system (LMS) delivers engaging, on-demand training that can be customized to the requirements of learners, it is an effective tool to help you get started.
In this article, we’ll discuss how companies can use an LMS to impart leadership training to their employees.
How To Use An LMS for Leadership Training
Using a learning management system, companies can develop and provide leadership training that yields results. Here’s how you can use an LMS to grow leadership skills:
1. Deliver short, self-paced training sessions
When taking into account the magnitude of the leadership skills gap, it seems obvious to offer a lot of training in this area. But in reality, it can be more useful to deliver short training segments, or microlearning, to employees that they can consume at their own pace.
Although you should equip employees with enough information (along with hands-on practice) about how to grow leadership skills, you shouldn’t overburden them with knowledge. A plethora of facts and figures about leadership may burn them out if they begin as weak leaders. For optimum results, keep things simple in the early phases of learning. Creating and providing leadership-themed bite-sized lessons with your LMS is one approach to do so.
After every lesson, give workers a chance to practice what they’ve learned in their day-to-day job. See how they can improve by using constructive feedback from colleagues. Ask your workforce to apply whatever they’ve learned and discuss their experience to help solidify learning.
2. Add one-to-one or group coaching
A proven way to transfer important leadership skills is via personalized or group coaching. After all, mentors encourage leaders to reflect on their experiences and draw their own conclusions. Leadership mentoring should be proactive. It should necessitate leaders to think not just about refining their skills but also how to create an action plan.
You can integrate mentoring into your eLearning-based leadership skills training program. Simple LMS features such as video conferences and calendars can be used to schedule and deliver personalized and/or group coaching sessions. You should include these sessions in a worker’s learning path to fortify whatever is being instructed in online leadership lessons.
Using an LMS to streamline mentoring also has the additional benefit of removing geographical obstacles. You can pair workers with mentors who are in different workplaces, states, or even countries so as to find the best match for their career path. In such a scenario, mentors and employees can connect through the LMS rather than focusing on face-to-face meetings.
3. Ensure leadership training is a collaborative effort
A successful leader is one who is good at collaborating with people, coaching others, developing teams, and nurturing the strengths of their team members. Think about helping your workers develop in these areas by guaranteeing that leadership training is collaborative and not isolated.
An LMS has a myriad of social learning tools, like webinar features, real-time chat, language localization, file sharing, online discussion forums, and other functionalities that interconnect users. Using these powerful features, you should stimulate workers to talk about whatever they’re learning in sessions, help one another, and discuss ideas.
Conclusion
Leadership skills can be learned; there’s nothing inherent in them. Of course, some individuals are better at leadership than others, but no one is born as a leader. And, as we know, if something can be taught, it can be taught online.
Using an LMS is a cost-effective and smart way to bridge the leadership skills gap in your company. You can decrease this gap only if you provide consistent, collaborative leadership training and help workers propel forward in their professional lives. Otherwise, organizations will continue struggling with a shortage of leaders who understand their business.
Identifying what works for your company and workers is critical to nurturing leaders who develop your company. But before you zoom in on one LMS, you should evaluate a number of online training platforms to determine the one that’s the best fit for your business.
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So, how are you closing the leadership skills gap using a Learning Management System or some other type of training tool? Let us know in the comments below.
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