Cynthia Clay's Blog

Leadership on the Loose

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Organizations often promote top technicians or strong individual contributors into leadership roles because they've mastered unrelated skills in a specific discipline. The assumption, of course, is that the new leader will bring the same focus to their new role managing others. And Voila! Leadership!

It's odd. People seem to believe that leadership is one of the few skill sets that can be mastered through osmosis. (One definition of osmosis is the gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas.) Imagine a soccer team that never learns to play specific positions on the field, is never coached, and never practices. Picture yourself attending a concert in which the conductor never studied music.

Leadership is a discipline. Like any other discipline, leadership can be taught, practiced, coached, and mastered. The research consistently demonstrates that unskilled leaders create low morale and high turnover. (The Gallup Organization and the Conference Board are just two sources that have published studies to this effect.) Turning leaders loose without the skills to manage, coach, give feedback, and develop their teams is certainly misguided. So why do organizations fall into this trap?

The reasons we encounter include:

• • It costs too much money to send them to management training.
  • It takes too much time to send them to management training.
  • Our managers are also individual contributors and they're too busy contributing.
  • Other priorities are more important this year.
  • It's hard to quantify the benefit of developing our managers' skills.

All of these conditions are probably true:

• • Funds need to be invested to offer practical, relevant training.
  • Time away from work is required to develop skills.
  • Managers usually handle projects, tasks, and other assignments besides managing others.
  • Pressing priorities can certainly compete for dollars and time.
  • It is difficult to demonstrate the positive impact of management training.

However, none of these truths should prevent an organization from supporting the development of skilled managers and leaders. NetSpeed Leadership's management training and supervisory training is designed to meet the learning needs of managers, supervisors and individuals in fast-paced organizations. Using interactive instruction coupled with powerful, easy-to-use web-based tools for online reinforcement and for measuring impact, the NetSpeed Leadership system successfully ensures learning transfer, holds participants accountable and empowers them to apply new skills on the job.

• • Develop leadership skills for first and second level managers
  • Improve your work culture
  • Build stronger teams
  • Develop a common language and common practices
  • Improve morale, turnover, and attendance

NetSpeed Leadership Includes:

• • Online training needs assessment
  • A curriculum of 24 three-hour classroom or 90-minute web workshop courses
  • Trainer certification workshop (face-to-face or virtual)
  • Take-away Job Aid card (to reinforce key learning principles)
  • E-magazine (accessed online after training)
  • NetSpeed On the Job™ (web-based performance support)
  • NetSpeed Coach™ (web-based testing and coaching with built-in assessment tools)
  • NetSpeed Administrator™ (for tracking and reporting)

Onsite or Virtual Workshops: A certified NetSpeed Leadership facilitator can deliver the NetSpeed Leadership program on a pre-established time-table that meets your needs, both in the classroom OR virtually utilizing a web conference platform.

In-house Trainers: Certify your own internal trainer(s) to deliver the program to your employees. Trainer certification workshops are available on premise or virtually.

Learn more about the 24 courses in the NetSpeed Leadership training program.

More Resources

The NetSpeed Leadership Program Resource Kit is a collection of resources to help organizations with their leadership development planning. It includes:

• • Six questions to help you summarize your organization's current business objectives and connect that information to the objectives for the NetSpeed Leadership program.
  • A Training Impact Map, which you can use to link the skills developed in the 24-module NetSpeed Leadership 2 training program to your important business outcomes
  • A Leadership Self-Assessment, which includes 25 leader behaviors linked to five critical leadership guidelines that help leaders stay balanced and on track in the face of shifting priorities and unpredictable challenges.
  • An overview of the 24 NetSpeed Leadership 2 training modules, including the learning goals for each module
  • Resource Kit Promotional Discount.

Posted by Cynthia Clay at 9:20 am