Lead Generation/Nurturing Blog for a Training Company

Annual Survey Reveals Seven Benefits of Frakbar Leadership Training

Frakbar provides leadership training for many clients in the tech and video game industry, but its training can be applied to any industry.

It’s four o’clock on a Friday, and you’ve just finished a one-on-one review session with your star developer. Your hands are shaking because the star – the key player on your team – has aired a long list of grievances and whined that headhunters have been calling with generous offers. Would you know what to do?

If you had attended any of Frakbar’s leadership training programs, the answer would be yes. That is one of the clear messages we got from this year’s annual survey of past customers.

Frakbar conducts the annual survey to be sure our training is effective and to identify updates we need to make for the coming year.

Overall, Frakbar Leadership Training received a 4.75 out of 5-star rating. (Not bad, but we’re still aiming for a 5-star rating.) More than 65 percent of the respondents told us their more effective leadership skills increased team unity and helped them work together to meet challenging goals. In fact, an often-cited case study by Training Times calculated that, over the year following leadership training, companies earned $4.15 for every dollar they invested in leadership training.

We’re thrilled and humbled by the number of customers who shared detailed examples of their leadership wins and solid strategies for handling common leadership challenges. We’ll include many of these examples in upcoming training sessions, but there were so many that we created a special 60-minute webinar to share them with you now. (You can sign up below.) In this blog, we’ll summarize the benefits of enrolling in Frakbar Leadership Training: Real-world leadership challenges the survey respondents felt they could handle more effectively after taking our leadership training.

1. Leadership challenges in communication. Effective leaders understand a project’s vision and can express both the big picture and the importance of each component. That ability helps the team work together to resolve conflicting priorities and schedule glitches. Also, strong leaders aren’t threatened by questions, because they want the team’s experts to discuss risks and propose alternative solutions.

2. Leadership challenges to maintain and increase productivity. What happens when an employee doesn’t have essential information or equipment? Your company could lose thousands of dollars every minute. An effective leader encourages team members to request resources and knows how to communicate with managers across the supply chain to ensure the team receives what it needs when it needs it.

3. Leadership challenges to build employee engagement and retention. Engagement – an employee’s emotional commitment to a company – is a crucial factor in productivity and employee retention. (If you’ve ever had to replace a key employee who left mid-project, you know how much time and money a company can lose as it searches for a replacement.) A good leader knows how to recognize and address emotional needs as they arise. Our survey highlighted the importance of meeting the needs of three types of employees.

• Experienced workers who expect to be respected for their advanced and specialized skills. These employees tend to be independent, well-paid, in demand, and especially hard to replace. The survey found that these employees can come across as arrogant and difficult to work with.
• Remote workers who value a work-life balance. They cherish the right to work from home but can feel lonely and isolated from the team. Or they may feel they’ve stepped off the career track. Our survey showed that leaders used meetings to build team spirit. While many employees grumble about too many staff meetings, don’t skip periodic status meetings where team members can catch up. We got feedback that leaders who encourage humor and inside jokes help the team relax and bond. Another tactic: Schedule one-on-one meetings with remote workers to see if they would like to take on higher-visibility projects.
• Millennials who expect an open culture that will nurture their talents. They’ve grown up expecting a bright future, but they face intense economic pressures and uncertainty. Leaders can’t change economic realities. But the survey told us that leaders felt their teams ran more smoothly when they were patient with millennials and helped them learn the business skills they needed now and in the future.

4. Leadership challenges to manage dotted-line employees. Many teams are cross-functional, meaning they are temporary and made up of employees from other departments. If you’re the project manager of a cross-functional team, you don’t have direct authority over anyone on the team. Effective leaders learn to use persuasion, compromise, and negotiation to keep the project on track.

5. Leadership challenges to make timely and confident decisions. A well-trained leader does not hesitate to gather information, untangle complex problems, and make effective and timely decisions.

6. Leadership challenges to act as role models for other employees. An effective leader inspires by example, motivating others to consider a leadership career.

7. Leadership challenges to introduce and champion change. If you work in business, you know the only constant is change. Having a pool of well-trained leaders and potential leaders is essential to building an agile, learning company that can adapt to change.

“I’ve been through other leadership training courses. But I was impressed by how Frakbar tailored its training to the challenges our industry is facing today.”
— John Sullivan, VP of Development, Gothic Gaming 

Want more details, plus tips you can start using as soon as the webinar ends? Sign up for our free 60-minute webinar now. We’ll tell you how one leader used our training to handle the rock star developer who threatened to quit, along with many other real-world examples. Have a schedule conflict? Sign up anyway, and we’ll email you a link to a replay.