A good manager takes charge of their team. A great manager takes the lead.
Recognizing what needs to change is the first step in transitioning from a good manager to a great one. Managers who wish to equip themselves with the skills to deal with complex and often unpleasant workplace situations should invest their time in leadership training.
If you’re in charge of a team, your most important role is to ensure that others succeed — a concept that might get buried among the million and one things that hinged your attention.
Let’s be honest: you have got a lot on your plate, and It is easy for you to become so preoccupied with day-to-day affairs that you don’t have time for self-evaluation. To make things worse, evaluating your leadership abilities is challenging. So, how can you know it is time to make changes?
Well, a few warning signs are pointing in that direction. For starters, you can look for the following four characters that determine if you need leadership training to strengthen your leadership skills and become a better leader.
Sales Are Declining or Stagnant
A leader’s primary task is to produce results, and your job is to lead and drive your team to achieve the organization’s objectives. If you don’t achieve goals, you may blame your team, and however, they are most likely only a part of the problem.
When your outcomes are not what you expected, it is time to rethink your strategy. How do you communicate your objectives and keep track of your progress? Is the level of assistance and accountability you are offering adequate? Are you proactively supporting your team in avoiding problems and overcoming them when they arise? Successful leaders take an active part in ensuring the achievement of objectives.
When your team or company sales are stagnant or decline, it is a massive red flag that there is something wrong with your leadership approach. Actual sales effectiveness requires creating and building management skills and a culture that adds value to the sales force.
It happens often: a top salesperson gets promoted to the manager’s position. However, the company quickly realizes that the abilities and thought processes that made this individual a top seller are not helping them succeed as a manager and may even be hurting its sales.
Many of the viewpoints and abilities that a salesman develops to establish a successful sales approach are incompatible with a manager’s views, capabilities, and environment.
Several studies have found that appropriate leadership training, which includes responsibilities and tactics beyond pure sales, significantly impacts favorable sales outcomes. For example, a survey by Gartner finds that to finish their work duties, 52 percent of sales managers have to work around their company’s processes, which has an 18% negative impact on quota attainment. Moreover, 58 percent of managers say they have trouble finishing their assignments in the time allotted.
These are problems that you can overcome with the right leadership training. Managers with the proper leadership training can coach individuals and bigger teams toward their objectives. For example, when you work as a salesperson, you have to make enough sales to meet your quota. As a manager, though, this is not the case. Instead, you must learn how to motivate your team to achieve departmental goals as a whole.
Leadership training allows managers to administer pay plans, assign duties, and hold employees accountable. New managers don’t just magically acquire these competencies when they get the new role.
Customers are Constantly Upset
Every business has one thing in common: it exists to provide customers with a product or service. Customer satisfaction is critical to every organization’s success, regardless of the product or service they offer. The mission statements and policies of most companies center on customer service.
However, leaders frequently lose sight of their responsibility in delivering a positive customer experience. Some leaders wrongly dismiss it as a low-level staff issue solely reliant on the performance of frontline, customer-facing employees. And this is a significant reason for customers being constantly upset or disgruntled.
Customer service excellence starts from the top. Leaders must prepare their employees for success by providing them with the atmosphere, resources, and expertise necessary to ensure exceptional customer service. However, that will only be possible if the leaders train to acquire the required skills for great customer service.
If your customers are constantly upset or dissatisfied with your service, it is a massive red flag that something is lacking in your leadership approach. You are not leading right, nor are you motivating your team enough to do their jobs well.
The most remarkable approach to providing outstanding customer service is to ensure you fully understand your customers’ needs. Understanding means you’ll have to teach your team how to provide excellent customer service.
The best leadership training will give you crystal clear instructions on what you should be doing and why it is necessary. Once you know this, you can communicate to your team to improve customer service and lower customer dissatisfaction.
You Want to Grow But Can’t
As a leader, one of your most important responsibilities is to develop your team. They should constantly be improving and pushing their abilities, and professional development should be a priority for those who report to you.
However, many leaders do not devote the time and effort necessary to achieve this. They can grow so reliant on top achievers that they limit opportunities out of fear of losing their top performers. As a consequence, their team members become stagnant and may seek growth elsewhere before too long.
So, it may be time to improve your abilities in this area if you cannot fully support your team’s progress or as much you would like.
Employee Complaints
Are managers paying attention to employee complaints? It does not seem to be the case. As per the Workplace Culture Report, one out of every ten employees stated they wouldn’t trust their bosses to listen to them if they raised a complaint.
When we talk about complaints, we usually discuss serious problems that should be brought to management’s attention and investigated as soon as possible. These include harassment complaints, diversity complaints, Return to Office complaints, inclusion complaints, etc.
A manager’s view and management of an issue may influence various factors, including in-group/out-group dynamics, power structures, unconscious bias, and insufficient social intelligence. These things can often lead to a blame culture in the organization. At the same time, the variables can influence whether or not an employee feels safe enough to file a complaint.
Because our workplaces are growing more diverse, managers must be hyper-aware of any bias in approaching “others,” especially those in the minority and are likely members of the out-group. When considering complaints, managers may well be overlooking essential signals.
One way to overcome this is leadership training. Being aware of the above challenges can help you spot when things are out of proportion, whether you are a manager yourself or an HR professional wanting to help others with balanced but firm leadership. Managers should welcome it when someone trusts them and the organization enough to bring a complaint forward, rather than becoming irritated when someone raises an issue.
Many seemingly small events have legal safeguards, and the way you handle your behavior and respond to that of others defines an organizational norm that has an impact far beyond the issue at hand, as you will learn in leadership training.
Final Word
Leadership is a muscle that you must develop regularly. You run the risk of being unproductive at best if you do not regularly assess and improve yourself. In the worst-case scenario, you could end up being a liability to your team and the organization. Observe the effects of your leadership on the outside, and then turn inward to make any necessary changes.
