BY ZOE STANLEY

We can’t stress enough the importance of providing your team with the top management trainings. Training is essential to equip managers with the foundational skills needed for effective leadership, handling employment legalities, empowering their team, and making the organization the best it can be.

 

Anyone on your team with any sort of management or leadership functions – such as hiring, performance, employee relations, or DEI – baked into their role can benefit from this type of training.

 

The benefits of effective management training are numerous, but here are some important ones:

• Improves communication skills to build trust amongst employees and management.
• Empowers managers to be culture ambassadors to create an inclusive environment
• Teaches managers how to provide better feedback to engage and motivate employees
• Provides a deeper understanding of their role as a leader in the company
• Teaches managers how to make tough decisions and implement solutions
• Allows managers to help employees be their best selves and achieve their fullest potential

There are so many more, but from this list, you should see that management training is vital to creating strong leaders in your organization.

 

Now let’s get into the specifics of which trainings your managers need to be the best leaders.

A Manager’s Role in Workplace Culture and Effective Communication 

Achieving Effective Managerial Communication 

Do you know your employees’ communication styles? Know how they prefer to receive praise or feedback? What about the best way to provide constructive criticism?

A typical communication pitfall is a lack of communication or miscommunicating altogether. Miscommunicating can cause many issues down the line if everyone – especially managers – doesn’t know how to communicate effectively.

Communication training helps bring recognition of our own and others’ communication preferences. Knowing how to best communicate with your team helps build trust quicker to motivate and meet the needs of your staff. 

This involves the idea of two-way communication – managers can learn by listening to their employees and use this insight to solve issues quickly. Giving everyone a voice can reduce the number of miscommunications and improve efficiency. 

Managers must be aware of their core professional values and roles to provide clear and effective workplace communication. 

Managerial communication training can teach managers effective communication strategies, common communication pitfalls, and how to set communication boundaries as professionals in influential leadership roles.

How Managers Can Create a Respectful and Inclusive Workplace Culture

Workplace culture can sometimes be this nebulous thing that’s maybe unclear in certain workplaces or a non-negotiable in others. In essence, workplace culture is how things get done within an organization, including a shared set of underlying behaviors, values, and mindsets. 

We’d argue that managers are culture keepers – they interact with employees daily, and each interaction serves as a way to communicate and reinforce respect and inclusivity.

It’s vital that your organization’s leaders set a good example and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Creating a respectful, inclusive workplace requires an essential discussion on how everyone – employers, managers, and staff – is responsible for positively contributing to the culture. 

From social justice movements to social media call-outs, workplace conversations have evolved, and employers have a significant opportunity to engage in those critical conversations through listening, learning, and training. 

Trainings such as Respectful Workplace Training, Anti-Harassment Training, and DEI training are great ways to involve your entire staff in creating a culture-positive environment. 

Managers, especially, should be trained to take the lead and appropriately respond when unprofessional issues arise at work.

How to Hire and Onboard Employees for Success & High Retention

Hiring Right the First Time

Hiring employees is one of a company’s most essential – and costly – investments. Glassdoor found that the average cost of hiring a single employee is around $4000.

Beyond the monetary investment, the hiring process is very time-consuming. Time is money, so you’ll want to make every step of your recruitment process count.

Managers must have a fair and consistent system from job ads to interviewing and then to the final selection. Hiring managers should work to simplify and standardize the recruitment and hiring process to eliminate any biases.  

Are your managers familiar with recruitment and hiring compliance to reduce biases or decisions based on protected classes? Do they know what can and cannot be asked on an application or during an interview?

If not, your managers need recruitment training. This type of training can help managers feel confident in their interview skills and provide strategies to support selecting top-notch talent for the organization. 

Check out True Calling Recruitment’s custom recruitment training options. Topics include – but aren’t limited to – Recruitment best Practices, Manager Interview Training, and Recruitment Compliance Training.

Onboarding and Retaining Top Talent

Once you’ve hired a new employee, your work as a manager isn’t done! The next, and most crucial step, is proper employee onboarding.

The onboarding process is integral to ensuring that newly-hired and newly-promoted staff are engaged and welcomed to the team. Managers should ensure new employees understand how to be successful in their role and how to measure this success. Along with this, it’s crucial to set expectations by immersing new hires in the company culture from Day 1. 

To clarify some misconceptions, onboarding goes well beyond the first week on the job – the first three months are the most crucial to employee retention. Managers should have a comprehensive plan in place for how they will support an employee in this make-or-break time frame.

Onboarding and retention training can teach managers how to build the foundations of a successful onboarding process to ensure that staff is engaged in their first 90-days and beyond.

Hiring is costly and time-consuming – you don’t want all that hard work and recruitment budget to go to waste.

Performance Management: Coaching, Feedback, Progressive Discipline, and Documentation

Coaching and Feedback Management Training

Knowing how to provide clear, productive coaching and feedback is an essential skill that every manager should have. Performance management is a process that all managers and leaders should be familiar with to support employee growth and create a more productive workforce.

Feedback can be a powerful tool to help employees reflect on their past performance. Effective feedback should be timely, specific, descriptive, and constructive – employees need to know how they’re performing so they know what to continue or where to correct.

Once managers learn how to provide effective feedback, they can move on to coaching, which entails building a shared understanding of goals and areas that need improvement or development.

Managers should also know how to use a standard performance tool to help them determine the root cause of the performance gap, so they are coaching correctly.

Performance management training helps managers engage in true “in-the-moment” coaching to nip performance issues in the bud.

A Guide to Progressive Discipline, Documentation, & Difficult Conversations

While nobody likes to encounter employee conduct or performance issues, managers must know how to approach the situation professionally and tactfully.

Managers should be familiar with the Progressive Discipline process and identify when they’ve moved beyond coaching to formalized correction. 

According to SHRM, Progressive Discipline is “a method of discipline that uses graduated steps for dealing with problems related to an employee’s conduct or performance.”

It can help managers correct conduct problems and resolve performance issues early rather than letting them gain momentum. The corrective process is not meant to be a “scare tactic” – it should be a valuable tool for staff and leaders to create a clear path to improvement. 

Progressive Discipline management training can teach your management team how to determine what level of correction is needed, why we must document, how to document, and how to gain confidence in having face-to-face performance conversations.

Leave of Absence and ADA: What Managers Need to Know

Leave of Absence Management Training

You might be thinking: Why do I, as a manager, need to know about leaves of absence? Isn’t this a human resources topic? 

Before we answer this, we want all managers to ask themselves if they’ve heard any variations of these statements:

• “My spouse is pregnant!”
• “I’m having back surgery.”
• “My father passed away, and I need time off.”
• “I’m missing work due to anxiety.”
• “I’m managing time for substance counseling.”
• “My child has chronic ear infections.”
• “I’m taking a new medication, and it makes me sleepy.”

If you have heard any of these, congratulations! You have leaves of absence experience already. 

Managers are more present in the day-to-day with employees than HR – they need to recognize the common “ADA trigger words” from employees’ conversations and know how to respond appropriately. 

Leave of absence management training is vital to ensure managers know their next steps and resources to manage legally protected leaves.

 

ADA and Workplace Accommodation Management Training

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, the Department of Labor defines reasonable accommodation as “a modification or adjustment to a job, the work environment, or the way things are usually done during the hiring process.”

An accommodation allows an individual with a disability an equal opportunity to get a job and perform their duties to the same extent as people without disabilities. Providing reasonable accommodations is not just best practice – it’s the law!

Reasonable accommodation training should help managers understand the concept of reasonable accommodations, know when an employee is requesting an accommodation, and be able to differentiate between different types of accommodations.

Beyond the legal requirement to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, all workplaces benefit from creating a more knowledgeable and inclusive workforce.

Ultimately, managers are key employees in the ADA process, and it’s essential to provide proper training and tools for confidence in the process and mitigate risks for organizations.

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Are your managers in need of all these trainings? If so, we encourage you to explore our popular quarterly Manager & HR Crash Course training that covers all the training topics mentioned throughout this blog. We designed our MCC for managers, emerging leaders, HR pros, and owners who wear all the hats in the company. 

Check out our event calendar to see when our next 2-Day Manager & HR Crash Course is coming up!

Wanting your managers to learn more about a specific topic? We hold live webinars frequently on timely, helpful topics. Not in the mood to attend something live? We have a variety of past recorded webinars in our webinar library on a wide range of topics. 

Head to our online shop to explore our webinar library, or check out our event calendar to register for our next live webinar!

Looking for custom training for your leadership team? HR Annie’s team of experts can bring custom trainings to you made specifically for your team and unique needs. 

View our training catalog for our custom training offerings and how to contact us to get a session scheduled!

 

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Zoe Stanley is the founder of Quill & Pine Digital Marketing and a content marketing extraordinaire. She’s passionate about helping small businesses worldwide achieve their top digital marketing goals. Connect with her to see how she can make your content marketing dreams come to life one blog, email, and article at a time.