You want to make sure that your employees have the drive and the skills to help your business succeed, right? You might be wondering if a training program focused on business management skills will help. Let’s dive in and take a look at some reasons you might want to invest in this type of training for your peeps.
Yes, provide professional development for all of your employees
First of all, and most importantly, it’s almost always a good idea to invest in training. As we’ve discussed before, training shows your employees that you are interested in their development. The returns on your training investment include higher satisfaction among employees, better job performance, and lower turn-over, to name a few.
What about business management skills?
So let’s talk about management skills, such as:
- Strategy and how different functions work together to achieve the strategy
- Basics of planning, organizing and monitoring work
- Understanding business financials
- Communication and negotiation skills
- Team building and employee development
- Decision making
- Problem solving skills
It is useful to ask yourself which competencies are most important for your team right now. And take a look at which competencies are going to be most important in the future for the next level of performance, too. Mastering those skills now provides the groundwork for future success. Consider this research finding reported in Harvard Business Review: "Lack of a strategic perspective is considered a fatal flaw even when your current job does not require it." Your organization wants to see you demonstrate that skill before they ask more of you.
Keep your business goals in mind
It is also useful to ask yourself what type of training will help you achieve your current organizational goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve throughput in your call center, then your training budget might be better spent on skills and competencies that are immediately relevant to call center workflow. For that, we suggest a training needs analysis, which will help you identify who needs training most and what specific training they need.
If your objective is to grow your team’s capacity, both as individuals and as a functional team, then definitely business management skills can be a key piece in that strategy. In fact, many of the business management skills overlap with so-called soft skills, or emotional intelligence. And we’ve already established that there is great evidence for that type of training. Communication and collaboration skills, for example, have a demonstrable impact on performance.
Another great advantage to providing business management skills is that it gives people the ability to put their own daily work into the broader context. This can help with job performance and job satisfaction because employees feel part of the larger mission, and as importantly, it can help with more abstract tasks, like problem solving and decision making. Think how proud you’ll be when you observe your team members solving problems with an understanding of the overarching strategy and financial needs of the business as a whole!
