Management Training vs. Leadership Development [Leadership Insight]

Foreign welcome to this Leadership Insights episode of the Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. If you love our content and want to support our mission to promote conscious leadership, please hit the subscribe button. It means a lot. In this episode, we're going to discuss the difference between management training and leadership development and why you should care. Picture this it's 7pm on a Friday night after a long, stressful week. You're looking over the budget for next quarter and it's pretty clear that something's got to give. You obviously can't put off building maintenance and layoffs are not on the table. But there, halfway through the spreadsheet, you see two things that might be duplicates management training and leadership development. Surely you could cut one of those. What's the difference between leadership development and management training anyway? Aren't they kind of the same thing? Why would you need both? And isn't your team better served by learning a new type of software than, say, figuring out their leadership style type? If this is a conversation you had with yourself or your accounting department, I get it. And if you've ever worried that you're double dipping by giving team management training and leadership development, you're not the first CEO to wonder about this. Leadership development is different than management training, and I believe your team likely needs both. Here are some key points. By definition, management training is logistical and leadership development is psychological. A typical management training program might include topics like effective communication, presentation skills, time management, ethics, policies, and procedures. Meanwhile, leadership development covers topics like how mindset and assumptions fuel performance, how leadership style affects communication, and how we can leverage personality types to lead effectively and build amazing teams. Or, to use an analogy, management trading without leadership development is like installing a bunch of apps on an iPhone without updating the operating system. The apps might work, but they probably won't work very well or very quickly. And in some cases, they're not going to work at all. Picture a Management training on how to give effective feedback. If your employee hasn't done any leadership development, they might be following the script for how to give feedback, but the way they do it could still be ineffective. If they have complying tendencies such as pleasing, belonging, or passivity, they might still sugarcoat their feedback and water down the message. Or, in contrast, if your employee has protective tendencies such as being arrogant or critical, overly critical, they may deliver feedback in a way that's excessively harsh and unproductive. If your employee doesn't have the self awareness to know the way they are coming across or how their own ego and desire to stay safe and is influencing their delivery. The management training won't work. Or put another way, your effectiveness is often 10% substance and 90% delivery. And to return to the iPhone analogy, does it take a while to update your operating system? Are we all inclined to put it off? Do we try to deny the need for it and hobble along performing at 70% of what we're capable of? Yes, yes and yes. This applies to phones and ourselves, but when we take the time to update it, we're amazed by the difference and how much faster and easier everything is. In fact, probably the battery life is improved. The further someone advances in their career, the more they need leadership development and the more they know they need it. By the time someone reaches the C Suite, they've weathered their fair share of logistical and systemic leadership challenges. They probably know how to manage their time, how to lead a meeting, and how to navigate some of the company policies. But they're much less likely to understand how they are self sabotaging or why they keep inadvertently hiring the wrong types, or how to get their team to give them honest feedback. C Suite execs know that what got them here won't necessarily get them there and where they want to go next. They know they need more than another software training to truly uplevel themselves, their minds and their teams. Team members who feel like their employers aren't investing in growth are more likely to quit. And employee turnover is expensive. A recent study of 25,000 people found that employees who don't feel supported in their professional goals are three times more likely to be looking for a new job. Replacing an employee with a salary of $45,000 costs a company upwards of $15,000. And then just consider how much higher that goes for replacing larger salaried senior team members. When C Suite team members get the leadership development they need, they feel supported and invested in. And when they feel supported and invested in, they're more likely to stay in their jobs. And when they can stay in their jobs, they can apply all the amazing things they've learned in leadership development to their team, affecting positive changes across the entire company. Software training can't do that. To learn more about how to integrate management training and leadership development programs, get in touch@susandrum.com we'd love to help you. And if you like this episode and want more leadership insights like these, hit the subscribe button and the like button and we always appreciate our five star reviews. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. Sam.