Leadership Development Training has become incredibly important to reduce employee turnover and to train experienced, knowledgeable individuals for the upper echelons of your company. A Stanford study, for instance, has established that succession planning requires talent assessment and recruiting, but taking the time to move people through the talent pipeline can sometimes fall by the wayside, leaving a dearth of internal candidates for key roles. However, finding excellent training vendors can be a challenge, if you haven’t worked with a high-quality training vendor before. Use these keys as guidance as you research the best training partner for your company’s Leadership Development needs.

Find a Vendor That Personalizes The Curriculum

Generic Leadership Development curricula won’t be as helpful as a training that has been developed in concert with your company’s leaders. The Balance Careers points out that offering training can be a major motivator for employees, especially those who see themselves on the path toward leadership, but when the curriculum is too general, it can be easy for individuals to disengage from it, or to fail to see how it applies to their work on the path to advancement. Aim for a vendor that first assesses needs in order to create a truly inclusive and comprehensive program; while many companies may claim to meet with you in order to assess needs, make sure that this meeting really assures you that they understand what your employees need and how they can individually and collectively benefit from a Corporate Leadership training.

Find a Vendor Who Addresses Your Local Challenges for Leadership

Beyond the need for personalization of the curriculum, your vendor should also discover any challenges that prevent leadership development from getting off the ground. For instance, a diversified training organization provides a combination of classroom trainings, online instructor-led trainings, and online self-paced instruction, all with the goal of addressing the challenges that your organization may have faced in the past to successful Leadership development.

One of the main local challenges is actually that there hasn’t been enough prep work done in order for the training to be well-received: knowledgeable vendors will know that your team needs to understand what they are getting into and feel ready to learn by the time training begins. Research in The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management points to the idea of “sowing seeds” before a training. When these seeds are planted, your employees may have questions and concerns about the training, but you’ll have the power to address them and prepare with your vendor for an excellent training that yields a strong ROI.

Find a Vendor With Training Reinforcement Through Assessment and Application

When a vendor drops in, gives a training, and disappears without a trace, your employees are less likely to take their lessons through to application, no matter how good the training might have been. Leadership Development training vendors should have a proven track record for generating training reinforcement exercises, providing both benchmarks for how trainees can continue to improve in their work, as well as concrete ways to apply the lessons they’ve been studying. According to the whitepaper, “The Modern Corporate Learner,” less than 1% of work weeks is devoted to training and development. Upping that amount by even 1% on an ongoing basis through reinforcement exercises can have an out sized impact on the leadership abilities of your employees.

Many organizations are finding great success when their vendors offer eLearning reinforcement options after a given in-person or instructor-led training. Even if people may at first be hesitant about an ongoing component, many employees discover that the application of the training has ripple effects on their other work, making the overall value of the training much higher. Employees also believe that trainings are part of an overall serious attitude toward work when they are applied throughout the workplace. Choose a vendor that will help you facilitate these long-term assessments and applications.

Find a Vendor Who Values Fun and Engagement During Training Sessions

It is all well and good to have a “serious” training session, but most corporate professionals realize quickly if they can zone-out or surreptitiously do other work during a training session. A truly useful corporate training requires a real level of engagement and fun: choose a vendor who demonstrates that they understand engagement and fun are the only way that these lessons stick. This doesn’t mean that training is childish (though we do all have an inner child); it means that training requires responses, gets employees talking, and helps them develop their own theories on what they are learning.

Find a Vendor That Sees How Leadership Development Will Change in Coming Years

Understanding the cutting-edge trends in Leadership Development means recognizing that Leadership Development happens both inside the training space and every day under the leadership of your company. A great vendor for your trainings will want to work on a holistic plan that helps you anticipate new trends.

When the Society for Human Resource Management commissioned a study of leadership development, their study describes major shifts that are coming in the near future:

More than one-half of HR professionals expect that Coaching (70%), Leader-to-Leader Development (68%), On-the-Job/In-Role Learning (60%), Mentoring (60%), and Social Media (58%) will become more important Leadership Development methods in the next two to three years.

When choosing a training vendor, choose a group that are constantly innovating, tailoring their trainings not only to your local needs, but also to the various new methods and strategies that are becoming more important every day. Your Leadership Development training should ideally be reinforced by in-role learning, mentoring, and on-the-ground coaching for the many months and years after the training, but the training can help prepare you to do just that.

Ready to work with a professional, helpful, and thorough Leadership Development vendor that will generate real ROI for your company? Contact us today!

You want your training programs to hit the mark.  You want them to get the results you need.  And you want to receive accolades from participants.  But how can you make sure you are providing best practice programs that will do that?  Download our free whitepaper called , “The 7 DEADLIEST Mistakes Training Managers Make When Providing a Leadership Program.“