Successful leadership seminars: - Checklist for leadership training programmes

Companies are under great pressure to change. Work is being redefined, employees are striving for meaningfulness and want to actively participate in the work process. Digitalisation, agility and staff shortages are driving the demand for "New Work". These changes are a challenge for managers. They have to adapt the way they work and find new roles for themselves and their teams. Leadership training is therefore becoming increasingly important. Successful leadership training can help managers to further develop their skills and potential.

To ensure the success of a management seminar, there are a few steps that the client and participants should take into account.

In preparation: management development with a goal and a system

Before booking a leadership training course, it is important to set clear objectives and determine the area of application for the training content. A specific project in which the training content will be applied can be helpful here.

For example, perhaps a transformation project requires agile leadership in addition to traditional project management methods. Or it may be a matter of providing orientation for new employees in a rapidly growing company. In companies undergoing a merger, it may be necessary to accompany the process of cultural and organisational fusion with a planned leadership culture.

A client should discuss these and other requirements - e.g. whether an in-house seminar for their own management team or an external open seminar with the opportunity to exchange ideas with like-minded people from other organisations - with responsible managers before the search for the right training provider begins. The market for management development is large and the promises of added value are often dazzling. The spectrum ranges from personality development through group or individual coaching to the promise of developing charisma and the claim that anyone can learn leadership. Companies should be clear about what they expect from a leadership seminar. Organisers of leadership seminars must set themselves apart from the competition with clear offers and credible references.

Leadership development is also personality development

Ideally, HR development has a clear idea of which leadership competency models and leadership styles should serve as the basis for a suitable training selection. Seminar participants do not come without prerequisites either. Invitations to take part in a seminar should be formulated in dialogue and by mutual agreement.

Participation is an important keyword here. Even if every seminar is a bit like a "grab bag", the basic motto should be: Motivation through participation.

Participation is a consistent principle in good leadership seminars. If you want to lead, you should have or be able to develop your own attitude and this essentially means taking responsibility for what happens in the seminar. To summarise, this means that participants in leadership seminars must be actively involved in important decisions before, during and after the seminar and proactively think and act.

The training begins: golden rules for the course of the seminar

Of course, every seminar provider has their own ideas, concepts and methods. Clients should take this into account when selecting trainers and give them free rein to apply their concepts and methods after the basic assignment. In addition, it helps all those involved to clearly state before the start how the training will be regularly evaluated by the participants. A high level of transparency and regularity of feedback should lead to continued adaptation of the procedure. As the perceived benefit of the training increases steadily as a result, this is reflected in increased participant satisfaction.

Once the broad objectives have been defined in preparation for the seminar, good leadership seminars start again at this point with the participants. They

• work out the development needs together with their seminar participants,
• disclose the basis of their mandate (what is the mandate of the client, often the management?),
• define the seminar objective together with their participants (or disclose it if it has already been defined),
• openly mark the limits of what is possible,
• clarify in advance which management theories form the basis of their approach,
• ideally announce the topics and objectives or the agenda in advance and in writing, thus enabling future participants to prepare themselves.

Critical participants: Training evaluation increases learning success

During the training, seminar or workshop, the participating managers should pay attention to the training evaluation. The checklist for good management training includes

• illustrative transfer examples for the professional context,
• the opportunity to practise management and leadership skills,
• receiving concrete feedback and
• the authenticity and exemplary nature of leadership trainers.

It is also important that managers receive suggestions for planned and new transfer projects. The core findings relevant to the professional context should be clearly presented as an overview or summary of good leadership.

After the training, it is important to keep a transfer diary in which the application of what has been learnt in the professional context is recorded. This training diary can, for example, be discussed during the appraisal interview between the employee and manager. Or the training participants can give their colleagues in their own team an insight into the highlights of the seminar they attended. The following questions can be used as a guide:

• When, where and how could knowledge/skills from the leadership training be applied?
• With whom was there an exchange about the training content?
• What factors hinder the transfer of leadership development training content?

Diaries can contain very personal views and it is a matter of trust how detailed someone provides information about how the individual evaluation turns out. The more intensively the participants in a leadership seminar were able to actively participate in determining how the seminar went, the more willing they will be to provide information later and continue the process that has begun.

Following the steps described cannot guarantee the success of leadership training. However, it is highly likely that implementing the points described will significantly increase satisfaction and individual training success.