This Might Be the Best Way to Develop Your Frontline Leaders

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How effective are your frontline leaders? Do they have the skills, insights, perspectives and confidence to lead in the ways you want and need them to? If your answer is an emphatic yes, congratulations. But if you have any hesitation or trepidation with your answer, stop and read on. Because having a plan and process for developing your frontline leaders might be the best investment your organization can make.

In working with organizations on developing frontline leaders for many years, I see a couple reasons why some don’t invest, or don’t invest consistently. Here are three of the biggest reasons:

• Lack of awareness. Some organizations don’t see the connection between effective leaders at all levels and culture, turnover/retention, innovation, and engagement and more. Many organizations search for cures for those woes, but don’t start with the highest leverage point, frontline leaders.
• Different priorities. Some organizations do invest in developing leaders but invest more in middle and upper-level leaders rather than those at the frontline.
• Lack of strategy. There are plenty of ways to develop new and frontline leaders, and organizations either don’t think long term, or get lost in so many options that they never build a coherent strategy.?

Common Approaches

While people get lost in what seems to be lots of approaches to developing frontline leaders, when you get past all the possible suppliers to consider, the options come down to:

• Build your process. If you have the skills and resources, you can build your own leadership development training and learning assets. Many large organizations take this approach to match their organizational culture and needs most effectively.
• Buy training from a supplier. There are plenty of organizations that can provide you with training – whether virtual or in person, tailored or off-the-shelf. As well as buying traditional training, you can also purchase eLearning. There are benefits here too, but often organizations don’t approach this strategically, but rather in a more haphazard way. While doing this does provide some support for new and frontline leaders, it may not create common expectations, language and approaches.

But there is a third option, which may be the most flexible and quite possibly more powerful than either of these options…

Perhaps Your Best Option

What if you could bring the best of tailored learning to your organization, and use your internal resources to deliver and reinforce the training, without needing to build it from scratch? And what if, when doing this third option, you would have access to world-class proven content and learning experiences too?

I’m describing our Bud to Boss Certified Trainer approach.?

In this approach, we will certify your internal trainers and experts to deliver our content to your new and frontline leaders in a way that works best for your organization. Once your trainers are certified, you simply pay an economical licensing fee for every leader you train.

If you work with us to certify your trainers to deliver our proven content, you get a variety of benefits including:

• Proven and credible content. Our Bud to Boss Training has been delivered to leaders around the world and we have been improving and adjusting it for nearly 15 years. Plus, leaders see that this content is tied to the bestselling book From Bud to Boss .?
• Additional content support. Since we have other materials (the From Bud to Boss Book is one example), you can support the training beyond the learning event with high quality learning materials.
• Relevance to your organization. Since your folks are delivering the training, examples, context and more can be tailored in real-time to the needs of your leaders.?
• Speed of delivery. Once certified, your trainers can deliver at your locations, on your timing without the need to schedule outside vendors.
• Continuity. Often when internal training is created, it is tied to the creators. And if they leave or move to a new job, the effectiveness or even ability to deliver what was created is compromised. With certified trainers, you can always come to us to have additional trainers certified and know you have a consistent message over time.
• Reduced investment. This is the cheapest way you can continue developing frontline leaders with a consistent message.

If you have many frontline leaders or if you are growing, adding new leaders regularly, certifying your internal trainers to deliver Bud to Boss Training is likely the most effective, flexible, consistent and economical way to develop your frontline leaders.

You can learn more here or email us at [email protected]? and we will be in touch to answer any of your questions.

We hope to hear from you – but even if we don’t, we hope you are or will take developing frontline leaders seriously, because when you do, your frontline employees will be more effective, you will have less turnover, build a pipeline for future leaders, and will celebrate better organizational results by most any measure.

A version of this article was first posted on our blog .

What Do You Think?

Share your thoughts in the comments – What are your organization’s best practices in developing your new and frontline leaders?

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