Welcome to Our Comprehensive Guide to Leadership and Management Training

In this guide we will introduce key concepts of leadership and management training, laying a theoretical groundwork and pointing you in the direction of the course best-suited to your professional development goals.

After reading our guide, you will have an in-depth understanding of the types of courses available to you, and the benefits offered by each. You will understand how each course can shape your professional development, and how they can contribute to your continued progression up the management hierarchy.

Management and Leadership Skills

It takes a wide variety of skills to succeed as a leader, which is why we offer several different courses to assist you in building a strong skill set for the challenges you’ll face. Below we’ve highlighted some of the many important skills that will enable you to perform your duties effectively upon taking a course with In Professional Development.

Active Listening

The focus of this skill is on hearing the whole message of others when they’re speaking to you, and not on just their words. Active listening entails paying close attention to the speaker and not allowing your own thoughts to distract you while they’re speaking to you. Developing this important skill enables you to become more productive, persuasive, and influential; form better working relationships; identify problems and opportunities; build knowledge and understanding of new topics, and manage conflict easier in the workplace.

Conflict Management

This skill is the practice of creating strategies that minimise dysfunctional conflict and maximise constructive conflict. Good conflict management creates scope for improving learning, enhancing workplace culture, and updating systems and processes.

Conflict Resolution

A manager must learn to identify when a conflict is productive or beneficial (in a fair and ethical manner) and when it’s generating a negative impact. Whereas conflict management is about preventing conflict from arising and keeping constructive conflict healthy, the purpose of conflict resolution is to end disagreements in the workplace and other environments.

Effective Speaking

A leader must be able to communicate and convey their message so that people hear it and act upon it. They should be able to do this at all times, whether this is in a boardroom meeting or during an informal chat by the water cooler. To speak effectively, you must consider both what you say and how you say it.

Strategic Thinking

This essential skill involves forming a long-term vision for the company and deciding the courses of action you’ll take to realise this vision. You’ll have to devise the day-to-day tactics you’ll implement to move closer to this vision and to assist you in solving problems.

Motivational Skills

Organisations, and the teams within them, will go through tough times and more encouraging ones. As a leader, you must be able to drive teams to achieve goals and keep them working hard, maintaining a positive attitude and feeling enthusiastic even when things go wrong. In difficult times, this is challenging. It’s also not impossible, as many leaders have proved before.

Problem-Solving

Leaders will encounter problems, and solving them will take a combination of teamwork, creativity, good decision-making, research, and risk management. The ability to solve problems can help businesses prosper and maintain good interpersonal relationships.

Organisational Skills

Leaders are under a lot of pressure, but by organising yourself well you can be productive and take advantage of opportunities. Good organisational skills reduce procrastination and lower stress levels. Not only this, but you can also monitor performance more easily and manage the organisation better. By demonstrating yourself to be well organised and reliable, you build trust with your clients and your employees.

Persuasion

As a leader, you must be convincing and able to persuade others to want the same things you do for the organisation, especially if you adopt a strategic leadership style. This is a difficult skill to develop, and not everyone is going to be on board with you in everything you do or propose. Being able to persuade them into your way of thinking is essential to forge ahead more smoothly with plans for your organisation.

Ability to Implement Change

This skill is part of the wider set of change management skills and places leaders under particular pressure. As uncomfortable as it is, when you fail to implement change well, this failure is very public. You can, however, use tools and analysis to support you to introduce change correctly and increase your chances of success.

Summary

To summarise this section, our training courses are built for leaders to help develop their skills and proficiencies required to advance their careers. If you’re looking to progress along this trajectory, a leadership training course can help.

Qualifications within the CMI awards framework offer structured and established course content to refine your leadership skills and help you to take the next step. At In Professional Development we offer an expansive selection of CMI qualifications for aspiring leaders.

Executive Development Programmes

Executive development programmes are another avenue for professional development. Courses in this category are tailored to people with some level of management experience – we recommend at least three years of experience for our Mini MBA and Director’s Development Programmes.

You have multiple delivery options for this type of course:

Accelerator: you’ll complete the whole programme in five consecutive days.
Certificate: you’ll complete five modules, each delivered in two-day blocks. You have the option to complete the full course over 6-18 months.
By module: you can take individual modules as open courses, and can register for the missing modules if you decide later that you want to complete the full programme.

On successful completion of this type of course, you may be eligible for the PGCert Strategic Leadership for Directors.

In this next section, we’ll explore what Mini MBAs and Director’s Development Programmes entail, and how each can contribute to your ongoing professional development.

What is a Mini MBA?

A Mini MBA is a type of accelerator course that condenses the essential theory, practice, and techniques of the full MBA. The goal is to deliver the same benefits but over an intense 5-day session instead of the full MBA duration.

This programme is ideal for managers and senior stakeholders with at least three years of experience in senior management. The programme objective is to develop a managerial skill set and enhance prospects.

The Mini MBA accelerator aims to deliver the same benefits of an MBA course while only requiring a small fraction of the time investment.

Below are the key learning outcomes of a Mini MBA to give a rundown of what you can expect to achieve when completing this type of course:

Build a deep understanding of core business concepts and theories.
Build a strategic framework from which to make effective business decisions and plans.
Foster your critical thinking.
Improve your ability to act strategically in the context of business.
Increase your confidence and communication ability.

The Mini MBA focuses heavily on commercial viability and relevance in the business arena. Contemporary management ideas underpin the course content, ensuring ongoing best practice.

How will a Mini MBA Help my Professional Development?

Mini MBA courses are specially designed to improve your career prospects and develop your managerial awareness. You’ll delve deep into the core disciplines of management, leadership, and organisational relationships.

The course also offers direct benefits to your professional development. A Mini MBA offers considerable time and costs savings when compared to a traditional MBA course. The format makes a Mini MBA more compatible with your career, allowing for study alongside work rather than demanding a pause in your professional activities.

Here are intended outcomes of the Mini MBA, along with tangible benefits to your career development:

Actualise professionally by improving your confidence and leadership skills.
Strengthen core business relationships by learning to influence and impact colleagues and clients.
Achieve your business goals by developing your negotiation skills.
Strengthen the financial standing of your business by improving your financial acumen.
Amplify your results by improving your understanding of critical strategic marketing tactics.

By focussing on the most important aspects, a Mini MBA course allows for real professional development in a short amount of time.

What is the Directors Development Programme?

The Directors Development Programme (DDP) is another accelerator course, designed to teach the knowledge and skills required for director-level management positions. As with a Mini MBA accelerator, the DDP spans five days of intense learning.

As an accelerator, the DDP is best suited to those with three or more years of experience in a managerial position. The goal is to help you continue your progress up the management chain.

You can study the DDP as one five-day programme, or as individual modules to be taken at your convenience. This flexibility allows you complete control of your study and ensures effective alignment between your professional development and your responsibilities.

Here are some key DDP learning outcomes to set expectations for what you’ll learn:

To build a deep understanding of a director’s role and responsibilities.
To build commercial, operational, and leadership skills and knowledge.
To build your confidence when operating at the highest echelons of management.
To instil knowledge of best boardroom practice.
To improve your decision making by helping you to view challenges more objectively.
To foster strategic thinking and planning.

By developing the skills and knowledge required to operate at the highest levels of management, the DDP improves your professional prospects. All course content is up to date, aligned with best practice, and deeply practical.

How will a Directors Development Programme Help my Professional Development?

DDP course content is developed with the professional development of aspiring managers in mind. By building our course around the real needs and demands of individuals operating – or aspiring to operate – at this level, we can deliver real value.

As with the Mini MBA, a DDP represents savings of time and money when compared to longer-form courses covering the same content. This is intentional: it’s our belief that training and professional development should take place alongside work, rather than requiring dedicated time off for study.

Here is a small sample of the benefits a DDP offers, all of which are directly relevant to your professional development:

Enhance your negotiation techniques to increase your success.
Improve your ability to impact colleagues and clients.
Learn the essential skills required for directors to achieve success, including legal requirements.
Develop methods for analysing, evaluating, and improving your ongoing effectiveness.
Learn to direct improvements in all of the above toward a refined bottom line.

Coaching: How to Maximise Entire Workforces

Corporate and executive coaching delivers results to individuals and organisations looking to maximise workforce performance. As a leadership style, coaching looks to link the goals of an individual with those of their parent organisation. Then, by developing each in tandem with a rigorous focus on desired future outcomes, better progress is made toward both.

When you hear the word coaching, sports may well be the first thing to enter your mind. But this leadership style is increasingly effective in workplace settings, for many reasons:

Coaching fosters a sense of togetherness and shared effort that some other leadership styles struggle to cultivate.
Coaching places a strong value on the individual’s goals and objectives within those of the organisation, allowing both to develop.
Individuals being coached often feel their needs and concerns are taken into account more comprehensively than in other leadership styles.
As a result, individuals are more liable to feel part of something greater. This often results in increased engagement and performance.

Coaching stands to contribute an enormous amount to your leadership skill set and we offer many courses to hone and refine this skill.

What is Coaching?

At its core, coaching aims to link the goals of an organisation and the individual. By respecting the interplay between these goals, a coach can identify the best course of action towards achieving them and can nurture the individual being coached accordingly.

With coaching, success means building confidence and relevant skill sets of individuals on your team and guiding them in such a way that their development takes place alongside and within the group.

This focus on the individual is a core strength of coaching, along with the accompanying assumption that a truly effective team is the sum of its parts. By developing these individual parts, you open up the possibility of transforming your team.

The purpose of coaching alters slightly depending on the level of attainment of the individual being coached:

With beginners, instruction and constructive correction are prioritised. The main aim is to build confidence and lay the groundwork for developing key skills.
With intermediates, the focus shifts to developing skills. New and good behaviours are identified and nurtured, with feedback shaping ongoing development.
For individuals with some level of mastery, an effective coach turns their attention to guiding these skills toward the goals of the organisation. Behaviours to facilitate this are identified and reinforced.

Across all levels, it is common to focus on continuous learning as well as the construction and maintenance of a framework in which ongoing development and success can be achieved.

As a coach, you will help the individuals in your team and organisation toward being their best selves, and you’ll help direct these best selves toward the pursuit of your organisation’s objectives.

How can a Coaching Qualification Help my Professional Development?

Coaching qualifications provide up to date insight into coaching and mentoring. As a leadership style, coaching is heavily goal-oriented. For this reason, developing coaching skills carries many tangible and directly relevant benefits for your professional development.

Our coaching qualifications are geared toward people with any level of experience. They help individuals develop a better understanding of their own strengths, weaknesses and the influence they can have on others. Here are just a few examples of how they help:

For newly appointed leaders looking to broaden their skillset, coaching qualifications offer an opportunity for self-reflection and guided development.
For leaders who already have experience of coaching, studying a qualification allows you to refine and build upon your existing knowledge while being guided toward avenues for further development.
For established coaches, qualifications offer a way to realign your knowledge with ever-evolving best practice. It’s also a way to sharpen your skill set and to enjoy the interaction with other coaches, both of which foster ongoing development.

Through a series of learning techniques including role-play, scenario setting, instructive learning, and thought leadership, coaching qualifications allow you to test and implement your knowledge in close-to-real-world settings. This benefits your professional development by expanding not only the theoretical framework you draw upon but the range of situations and scenarios you can effectively coach within.

The free-flowing exchange of ideas in a course invites refinement and continued learning. Rather than studying privately, group learning encourages discussion and debate, providing fertile ground for your understanding to grow. Challenging your ideas and knowledge in this context benefits your professional development by fostering confidence, assertiveness, and a more precise understanding of coaching theory.

Your coaching toolkit will be equipped with the resources and concepts reflective of the most current best practice: another clear benefit to your professional development. By tapping into best practice, you bring the most effective methods to your organisation. Improved performance and results should follow, strengthening your contributions to your organisation and, as a result, your professional acclaim.

Coaching offers too many benefits to explore in full detail here. These are some of the other benefits you can expect:

Build your familiarity with confidentiality requirements in a professional context.
Gain or refine the ability to identify the strengths and personality type of your coachees, and adapt your approach to meet their needs.
Conduct a professional coaching conversation with an individual to identify their needs.
Facilitate effective coaching sessions to ensure the ongoing progress of individuals along their identified development trajectory.

To find out more about coaching as a concept, or to explore the coaching courses we offer, click here.

Leadership and Management Training with In Professional Development

This final section of our leadership and management training guide will focus on the broad range of benefits offered by our in-house and bespoke training package.

From our many years of experience in the leadership and management training industry, we understand that out-of-the-box qualifications are not always perfectly aligned with the specific needs and challenges an organisation faces. To be effective, training must be flexible and responsive, based on the actual requirements of the trainees and their organisation.

With this in mind, a core aspect of our service offering is in-house and bespoke training. We work with our clients to assess their objectives at both a business and individual level. From this basis, we develop bespoke training and development programmes from the bottom up, ensuring a laser focus.

Through such training programmes, we can cultivate and develop the specific skill sets that an organisation needs to succeed. By instilling these skills throughout an organisation, we provide value and results to individuals and their organisation alike.

Here’s what we look to achieve with our bespoke training programmes:

Increased productivity amongst your workforce, with a specific focus on the critical business objectives you outline.

Increased buy-in from your workforce, leading to higher motivation and goal-oriented behaviour.

Full relevancy to your organisation. Our initial conversations enable us to remove irrelevant content and spend more time on the topics that will drive results.

Industry relevance, to guarantee that what you learn is applicable beyond the current challenges your organisation faces.

Flexibility to complete course content in the way that best fits your business. We can deliver training in person, or digitally via our virtual classrooms.

Our In-house and Bespoke Training Process

We’ve broken down our process into six core components, each designed to maximise relevancy and results.

Consult: we’ll discuss your specific needs and discuss potential approaches and solutions.

Identify: we’ll focus on identifying the desired impact and establish the overarching objective of your training programme.

Develop: our most relevant academic experts and industry practitioners will design a custom programme based on the needs identified in steps 1 and 2.

Approve: we’ll present our proposed course structure and content to you for sign-off, giving you the chance to approve the content, method, and approach. This step also includes amends, where necessary.

Deliver: we’ll coordinate the required logistics and deliver the course in a way that ensures minimal business disruption.

Evaluate: we’ll work with you to ascertain what success looks like and whether the course achieved the desired objectives.

Leadership and Management Training

Asked to envision a training session, most of us would imagine something face-to-face. People seated around a table, discussing ideas under the guidance of an instructor. Or perhaps faces behind laptops, diligently noting down course content for further reflection later.

At INPD, we’re very familiar with this method of delivering course content. It’s what we’ve built our business on, and it’s where our passion lies. But it’s also something we’ve worked hard to modernise over recent years.

Because there’s real value in being able to offer training digitally, and remotely. In a world where reducing our environmental impact is more important than ever, remote training is a way to reduce carbon footprints while still delivering industry-leading courses. It’s also a way to improve synergy between INPD and your organisation: digital delivery means full flexibility with timings, the involvement of colleagues from different locations, and the ability to learn in familiar and comfortable settings.

Our processes for digital delivery have been refined and perfected over time, as many of our delegates will tell you. With the advent of coronavirus and the accompanying restrictions on how and where gatherings can take place, these remote learning processes are an asset to your organisation. They enable full-fledged course delivery with no in-person contact whatsoever and represent a fantastic way to take advantage of the possibilities this uncertain time offers.

Our course calendar is just as full as ever, and our virtual classroom methodology has many benefits to offer:

Full course content is available to download after each session.
Ongoing contact between tutors and delegates is available.
Delegates receive fully-digital certificates of completion.
Learning can take place anywhere, from your office to your home.
High-fidelity audio and video streaming ensure crystal-clear course delivery.

To find out more about how our leadership and management training can benefit your organisation, and how our courses can be delivered digitally, get in touch.

We’ll identify your needs in a targeted consultation, then develop a bespoke training plan to meet your specific needs. On your approval, we’ll deliver the training at a time and place to suit you, then work together to evaluate its success.

In Conclusion

This guide has outlined the myriad types of leadership and management training available to you, and the benefits each offers to your professional development trajectory. We hope that you now feel aware of the options available, and empowered to take the next step.

Now it’s up to you to decide what that next step will look like. We have a few ideas that might help:

Take a look at our courses page to find something that aligns with your goals.
Read through our customer testimonials to hear what aspiring leaders just like you have gained from our courses.
Learn more about the qualifications we offer and the ways they can benefit your career.
Delve deep into the thought leadership content on our blog.
Get in touch with us to find out how we can best help you to achieve your professional goals.

Information correct as of 06 July 2021

Leadership and Management Training: A Guide to Accredited Courses for Aspiring Leaders