How Leadership Skills are Being Taught in Modern Training Programs

Leader is not the ringmaster only any more. The involvement of specialized workforce in doing projects requires him to be quite tactful. He not only has to manage work, but he needs to manage egos and inter-personal relationships too. High pressure of work commitments, tight deadlines and ever-changing requirements can create havoc in anybody’s life if he gets to work under a person who has questionable ability in terms of leadership.

If you assume that whatever you know is the ultimate truth and that there can not be any kind of enhancement, then you definitely have not come to terms with human world of unending possibilities. This is why; leadership training programs are organized all across the world so that the trainees can come to know what is it that is missing in them and making their life a bit difficult as a leader.

1. Emotional Quotient is the new requirement

Not all jobs require scientists. When the whole world is being run on fingertips (thanks to mobile technology), it becomes more important to have the ability to control and live up to the emotional needs rather than having an IQ of a robot. More than intellectual intelligence, it is the emotional wisdom that is proving to be of great worth in driving people towards better performance and growth-oriented thinking.

Activity quite good for maintaining emotional intelligence in a team

Often we come across certain expressions, both implicit as well as explicit, that when not handled properly may cause complete deviation of the team members from their path of accomplishment. Team members may not like the attitude of each other or some of them are not able to keep up with the pace of others. Here is an activity that allows you to find better about the emotional health of the team.

Compass Point Activity – North-East-West-South form the four kinds of approaches towards work. North stands for extreme promptness to work, East for speculative behaviour to show eagerness towards fathoming possibilities, South for caring where the focus is more on taking care of feelings of all, and finally the South that stands for too much eye for detail.

How it is played: Team members can be made to stand at each point that best represents their style of working. And then, responses are recorded after giving a task to the group. You will see that there is no expertise involved; only approach towards work is taken into consideration. Thus, you come to know how comfortable or uncomfortable people are while working with each other. This is a very beautiful activity for maintaining emotional balance in the team.

2. Change management is a very important tool
With so many options around, employees do not feel ever that they have reached the right place; and, the result is – unexpected turnover. Organizations somehow have sensed that turnover are now the way of life and that they should come up with strategies to let organizations sail through unstable working conditions.

Some very useful activities that help trainers talk about change management are:

A. Invitation to a dinner party where guests are aliens and hosts are humans
B. Cross the arms in the way that is not the natural style
C. P-P-P-P exercise – the trainees will divide their sheet into four columns Project, Purpose, Particulars and People. When they jot down against each project the requirement, the purpose and people, they can take changes more positively thinking them to be the need of the project.

3. Improvement in listening skills

Gone are the days when leaders were considered those people whose only job was to deliver inspirational speeches. Nowadays, when the workforce is very much mature, (and sometimes manipulative too!), it becomes important for the leader to identify the difference between fake and genuine, necessary and trivial, and some other similar kinds of extremes. All this is possible only when the leaders have superb listening skills.

In addition to judging the promptness towards work in an employee, it also helps to grow his skill-set by grabbing ides that he might not have thought about.

Activities that you may find useful for improving listening skills

People choose to listen selectively, they may tend to lose attention while listening or sometimes, will just respond to only mood rather than the words. All these may hamper the effect of message to a great extent. Sometimes, the words reach to the last receiver in the most distorted fashion.

1. Telephone activity: People are asked to whisper a message to each other. The first person who initiates the activity and the last person in it are asked to announce loud what they received as input. It is played to check attentiveness.
2. Selective listening: Trainees are given a long list of words and are asked to write down as many as they could remember. Some words written are not exact but related to the word.

Take Away

The world of leadership has gone through a transformation, and accordingly, the training programs are changed to meet the demands. A number of activities, therefore, are being used in training programs to make leaders the better managers of people than that of tasks assigned to them.

Author Bio

Josh Barett is a leadership training advisor and also can provide tips on leadership assignment writing tasks. He is currently associated with Global Assignment Help, where he provides useful guidelines on management assignments. In his free time, he enjoys listening to music, attending concerts and travelling.