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Measuring Leadership Improvement as a Result of Leadership Training and Development

Are members of your leadership team requesting training and development courses? Are you wondering if the cost of the training will be money well-spent or just a waste?

 If you approve the training and development courses, how will you know if there has been improvement as a result of the courses or seminars attended? These are valid concerns for any leader.

In order to determine what leadership training will be most effective, ask the requesting leaders what exactly they want to improve and how that improvement can be measured.

If the leaders don't know what they will bring back from the training, chances are the training is just an excuse to get away for a day or a few days and the potential benefits will be small or non-existent.

Measurements are very important ways to gauge areas that require improvement and identify areas in which your team is exceptionally skilled. There are many ways to generate measurements before and after training which will allow you to clearly assess the effectiveness of development and training opportunities.

Customer surveys are a great way to obtain measurements. Do your customers feel valued and respected? Are they happy with the customer service they receive? Are your products timely and useful?

These are all questions that can be used to generate customer surveys and the responses can be complied and studied to reveal what your customers really think.

Process cycle time is another useful measurement. What is the turn-around time from request to delivery of each specific product your business delivers? You need to know this information, even when not considering training and development opportunities for leaders.

Can the cycle time be reduced?

Can the cost of product generation be reduced?

These data points can help you determine what leadership training and development is really needed in your firm.

There are many other ways to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of your leaders and your business as a whole. Think about your business processes and measure those things which make sense for your business.

These measurements can be used in many ways such as backup material for raise and promotion decisions, employee performance evaluations, reporting and account and much, much more.

It is important to have measurements in place to obtain a baseline prior to training or any process improvement activities so you can accurately measure improvement.

Without knowing where you are now, you can not determine the amount of change resulting from developmental training. After techniques learned in leadership training and development have been implemented, you'll want to know the difference in the measurements to see how much change resulted from the learning experience.

By measuring improvement, you'll know whether the cost of providing employees with opportunities to attend leadership training and development sessions is worth the funds spent.

If your leaders bring to the workplace improvements, whether in costs, relationships, service, cycle time or other areas, you'll know that your investment has paid off.
 

Copyright © 2005 by Bill Roche. All rights reserved. All material on this site (www.TopResults.com) is protected by U.S. Federal Copyright law. It may not be reprinted in any form, or hosted on any Web site, without explicit permission.

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Copyright © 1998-2008 by Bill Roche. All rights reserved. All material on this site (www.TopResults.com) is protected by U.S. Federal Copyright law. It may not be reprinted in any form, or hosted on any Web site, without explicit permission.