Tips for E-Learning to Boost Employees’ Leadership Acumen
There’s no understating the importance of strong leadership capabilities across your team. Employees with strong leadership capabilities tend to be more effective when navigating challenges, have better manager-direct relationships, and have a more positive experience at your organization overall.
However, while you have certainly put significant thought and effort into hiring the right candidates, that doesn’t mean every employee you hire will be a natural-born leader. That’s fine! It just means you’ll need to focus on your professional development efforts.There are many ways to boost your employees’ leadership skills, such as instructor-led training, one-on-one coaching, or even facilitated workshops and discussions for leaderships, as provided by BRYANT GROUP.
For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to focus on custom-developed e-learning courses, which have a variety of benefits whether you’re creating learning materials for nonprofit, healthcare, or even corporate training. Then, we’ll cover three tips to keep in mind when you work with an e-learning content development partner to create these courses.
Why use e-learning to increase employee leadership acumen?
Think of the most influential leaders you’ve encountered over the course of your career. Did they lead exclusively through email or over the phone? Or, were they in the trenches, chatting with their direct reports and building relationships with individuals?We’d guess the latter. And, we’d also guess that they built these skills in a variety of face-to-face training efforts, such as group and one-on-one coaching or even facilitated virtual workshops in our current work-from-home era.
So, why should you invest in e-learning courses—which, unlike instructor-led training, tend to be completed independently and without significant interpersonal engagement—to build strong leadership skills across your team?
Don’t let the lack of face-to-face instruction deter you from e-learning courses. Custom-developed courses offer a variety of benefits that make them the ideal addition to your face-to-face training and virtual learning efforts. For example:
As long as your employees have access to a computer, the show can go on with e-learning. If your offices shut down due to a global pandemic or weather-related emergencies, it can be a logistical nightmare to reschedule traditional training courses.
E-learning courses can include interesting engagement elements. Engaging e-learning courses can keep their learners’ attention from start to finish.
E-learning courses can be paid for upfront and used repeatedly. As more and more employees seek to improve their leadership skills, this cost of providing training will add up. E-learning allows you to offset some of that cost.
And lastly, remember how we discussed hiring the right candidates? Well, the last thing you want is for your “just right” new hire to leave for a greener pasture because they don’t foresee impactful professional growth opportunities.
With e-learning courses, your employees can access leadership training targeting their desired skills, exactly when they seek it, through a dedicated e-learning library. This increased accessibility and personalization benefits employees and goes a long way toward retaining top talent.
3 Tips for Building Leaders with E-Learning
Getting on board with e-learning is only step one for boosting your employee’s leadership skills. For your courses to have the impact you want, you’ll need to back your decision to use e-learning by developing stellar content and courses.
Just as you’d partner with an organization such as BRYANT GROUP or The Eight Principles for live training, you’ll want to partner with an e-learning content development partner to author your e-learning content. So, let’s walk through three tips for creating leadership-based e-learning courses that you should keep in mind when doing so.
Focus on what leaders need to know.
Have you ever attended a leadership retreat? Picture this: at the retreat, you sat through a variety of information-packed presentations and speakers who improved your performance. However, you also attended a session in which the speaker droned on for 15, 20, or 30 minutes plus with some personal anecdote that, while somewhat helpful, wasn’t really necessary for your development.
The result? You feel as though you’ve wasted those 15-30+ minutes sitting through an unnecessary presentation. That’s how your employees will feel if you bog down your leadership training courses with superfluous information.
Here are a few tips to make sure your courses are value-packed from start to finish:
Cut the fluff. While it may be interesting to some, most of your employees simply don’t have time to learn about the history of a certain leadership approach or the science behind a communication strategy. Before including information, ask yourself: how will this help employees do their jobs better? If the information isn’t necessary for a change in behavior, cut it.
Loop in a variety of stakeholders. What’s helpful to you may or may not be helpful to other employees at your business. Consider looping in a variety of viewpoints from influential leaders at your company to the employees you’re training. Doing so will help you understand which leadership topics will be of most value. You can also work with an e-learning content development partner that has experience with leadership training to adapt these in-demand skills into helpful courses.
Use microlearning to pinpoint key skills. Microlearning courses are short, hyper-focused courses that highlight one specific skill. For example, you could create a course about delivering constructive feedback during meetings. Consider developing a variety of microcourses that target common leadership skills your employees want to improve, and they’ll be able to create a personalized professional development path.
The last thing you want to do is to hype up your leadership development opportunities and then drop the ball on the content itself. With these tips, you’ll create courses that give your team the tools they need to improve, while avoiding fluff and other time-wasters.
Contextualize content in your team’s day-to-day experience.
Now, let’s consider another scenario. Have you ever taken a generic online course and felt disappointed because it didn’t really relate to your experience? Maybe it discussed leadership tips for in-person offices, and you’ve been fully remote for years now. Or maybe, it was addressed to employees at large corporations, and you work at a nonprofit. Either way, the result is the same—you learn skills that aren’t helpful in your role (if you end up moving to a new industry, however, you’re all set).
Contextualize your custom courses to establish a clear correlation between your course’s leadership tips and how those tips will apply to your employees’ careers. Here are a few ways to do so:
Include scenarios that are relevant to your employees. There are many best practices when it comes to leadership, but what does leadership look like for your team? Adapt your content to fit your team’s day-to-day work experiences. For example, one-on-one, in-person meeting best practices aren’t going to be relevant if your team is fully remote for the foreseeable future.
Reflect realistic characters in your courses. Represent diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, and physical abilities. Your employees should have strong leadership skills regardless of who they’re working with, and your courses should reinforce that.
Update the course as needed to reflect changing circumstances. Changes in compliance regulations and updates to the evolving hybrid workplace happen, so make sure your leadership training courses reflect the latest best practices. This is one of the benefits of working with an e-learning content partner who provides access to all source files—you can update the courses (or, hire a partner to update them) going forward.
The entire reason you’re creating these courses is to build strong leaders across your organization. Make it easy for employees to connect your courses and their day-to-day efforts.
Remember that practice makes better.
Practice may not make perfect, but it certainly makes better. Sometimes, learning to be a strong leader is a trial-by-fire situation—either you perform well when the time comes, or you learn tips to do better the next time around. With e-learning, that doesn’t need to be the case anymore. With practice opportunities in your e-learning courses, employees can build their leadership skills in a risk-free environment. Here are a few tips:
Build opportunities to practice. This could be as straightforward as quick quizzes throughout a course or more complex activities, such as in-depth scenarios, simulations, or games with multiple levels.
Vary your practice opportunities. When you include scenarios or other immersive practice opportunities, vary the questions and responses. For example, in a course about providing feedback, include one scenario with an amicable employee, one with an upset employee, and one with a neutral employee. This allows your learner to practice a range of skills.
Provide reasoning behind answers. Providing the reasoning behind why a learner has answered correctly (or not) transforms a quick practice question from an assessment into a learning experience. This then allows them to take the principles from the practice opportunity and apply them to day-to-day life.
Being a good leader isn’t always easy in the moment, especially if you’re trying to lead with empathy during a challenging situation. Effective practice, however, can make these skills second nature. There are many ways to elevate leadership skills across your team. If you’re seeking accessibility, flexibility, and customization, e-learning courses are a great fit.
However, creating just a slide deck on leadership best practices won’t cut it. With these tips, you’ll be able to develop content that gives your employees the tools they need to evolve into strong leaders. Good luck!
