Most business owners are not fully aware of the high cost of poor leadership. According to David Witt, Program Director at The Ken Blanchard Companies “the average organization is losing an amount equal to 7% of their annual sales because of poor leadership practices”. How is this possible? Poor leadership practices lead to higher turnovers, decreased customer satisfaction and reduced employee productivity.
There is in fact an ugly circle of events that contribute to this: individuals are hired in or promoted to a position of supervision and have little to no experience or training about the soft and hard skills of leadership. They are hired for their task skill sets yet expected to lead. In fact “leadership” has increasingly taken a back seat to task performance. Individuals referred to as supervisors or managers are glorified line employees who push their management responsibilities to HR because they don’t know how to lead or manage or supervise. Is it any wonder that we see statistics like: 40% of newly hired executives fail within 18 months, 47% of new supervisors receive no supervisory training (HR.com and 14CP), 65% of managers learned leadership by “guessing” how to lead people.
Now couple this with training myths: training is not legally necessary, managers don’t want to learn because they are busy, training is a nice idea but it takes away from productivity and profits, it’s expensive.
In fact, training is a remarkably powerful tool to educate and empower your leadership, to legally as well as ethically define the culture of a workplace and to create a sense of “future” at a business. It is no wonder that consistently the 4 of the top 5 motivators for employees (both supervisory and non-supervisory alike): good leadership, growth and development, clear communication, and respect.
So why train? It is the most efficient way to educate your team and reduce exposure to lawsuits and claims of discrimination/harassment, it helps to define the culture of the workplace and encourages engagement and “buy-in” all levels of staff, it certainly may dramatically improve employee relations which in turn reduces turnover, increases productivity and improves morale overall.
CPEhr helps employees and your business achieve greater success with live and online training. We focused on meeting the employee training and development needs across every industry and profession. Our employee training and development solutions include live and on-demand seminars, online courses, and an array of corporate training solutions. To view a list of our top programs please visit www.cpehr.com and click on Employee Training under “Services”.