Astute Leaders Know That Training Mid-Level Leaders Is A Game Changer
Transitioning from a successful individual contributor role into a supervisory or manager position is fraught with challenges, concerns, and worries. This is a profound change for your employees and comes with high risks of failure, personal dissatisfaction, and team disenchantment or disengagement.
Managing individual contributors differs greatly from managing other managers. This is why the leadership training programs for your senior leaders cannot easily cascade down to new supervisors and mid-level leaders. These folks need programs specifically tailored to their responsibilities, challenges, difficulties, and concerns.
Mid-level leaders make many decisions regarding strategy execution. Those without proper leadership training often make poor ones.
Mid-level leaders can only be effective when given optimal development and training opportunities that enable them to both lead for results and lead diverse groups of people. One without the other causes more harm than good and will cause your strategies to collapse and fail from poor execution, dismal commitment and buy-in from frontline staff, and a lack of innovative solutions when unexpected hurdles and obstacles are encountered.
Additionally, many mid-level leaders today are millennials, who want:
Personal/professional improvement
Coaches and mentors
On-going education opportunities
When these three important career development elements are not present, millennials are quick to jump to other employment opportunities.
Talent is essential to performance. But leaders are busy producing results. Hence too many leaders, particularly in SMEs and privately-owned companies, lack sufficient time to develop and hone their people leadership and coaching skills.
For an in-depth look at this important topic, download our free article Leadership Pipeline Mistakes of SMEs and Privately-Owned Companies.
Additional benefits of developing a strong cadre of mid-level leaders in your organization include:
- Increased employee engagement
- Reduced frontline employee turnover
- Reduced mid-level leader attrition
- Improved outcomes and results
- Greater execution on strategic initiatives
Also, as noted in the book The Leadership Pipeline, organizations that find it difficult to fill higher-level management positions internally can often trace their problems back to the mistakes made when moving individual contributors into their first leadership position without sufficient development or support.
To read more on the importance of leadership development training for mid-level leaders, download our free article Mid-Level Leaders Are the Glue Between Strategy and Execution.
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