Top 9 Benefits of Online Leadership Training

A company today must think fast, pivot, and always be on its proverbial toes. With so much change happening all around the world, talent retention and leadership cultivation are ongoing challenges. Without continued dedication to leadership training, a business’s short- and long-term success could hang in the balance. That’s not to say a company’s success is more important than the personal successes of its leaders. In fact, it’s only with great leaders that a business sees success, leaving many organizations wondering about online leadership training benefits.

A leader must be resilient, as well as:

• Capable of empathy
• Familiar with accountability
• Tenacious
• Self-aware

At The Eighth Mile, we enjoy partnering with businesses to cultivate positive outcomes and successful leaders. Organizations reach out to us to ask about the differences between traditional classrooms and online leadership training and what makes us different. We’ve found, even prior to the events of the past few years, that online leadership training benefits are virtually equal to those of traditional classroom learning —and then some.

Why Should You Choose Online Leadership Training?

If you’ve ever sat through a business meeting in person versus over Zoom or another platform, you can understand a few of the differences between classroom-based leadership courses and online leadership training benefits. There’s a definite difference between uninspired, text-based PowerPoints disguised as a “class” — whether traditional or online — and a specialized course developed according to real-world lessons learned over the course of a lifetime in the military and business. The latter training allows for hyper-personalization, attendance on your own time, and exciting coaching sessions, both individual and group.

We developed our coaching sessions and coursework through years of hands-on experience in the military and through years of lessons learned in and outside of boardrooms and businesses. As such, we know that it’s all about engagement. Without it, and without the online leadership training benefits we’re about to discuss, developing strong, empathic, accountable, and self-aware leaders would be impossible.

9 of the Most Important Online Leadership Training Benefits

Aside from some of the more obvious online leadership training benefits, such as saving on fuel, arranging your schedule as you need to, and not missing workdays, an online leadership training course also provides these lesser-known but ultimately more important benefits for employees, administrators, HR staff, and the company as a whole.

1. Support to Find Success

With a busy lifestyle, you may neglect the things you want for yourself in favor of others, even if one of your goals is professional success. Online leadership training imparts the motivation and confidence you need to overcome obstacles and distractions to achieve those goals.

2. Time to Listen to Yourself

Introspection is a gift, and it is the online leadership training benefit that reveals your weaknesses and strengths in a familiar environment so you can learn to trust yourself and your gut feelings.

3. Learn to Influence Others

Leaders must exude a careful mix of confidence, conviction, and humbleness. In doing so, you can influence and motivate the rest of your team to follow your lead. Really, a great leader helps the whole team become leaders by listening and trusting, which helps build everyone’s confidence.

4. Connect With Other Leadership Professionals

In an online leadership training course, you’ll learn the history of leadership, how ideas and methods evolve, and how those ideas and methods create successful leaders. Leadership is a bit like medicine in that respect — it’s an ongoing practice and it is fluid. You become part of a leadership network that stands together, grows together, and continues learning together from your combined experiences.

5. Gain a Better Understanding Of Your Business

HR professionals can especially benefit from online leadership training. When you’re the one responsible for hiring the right people, it’s important to understand the business and how it works. It isn’t enough to know Human Resources’ language — the HR team should be contributing members to the company’s mission and overall vision. If not, it’s unlikely that upper management will take you seriously because these are necessary aspects of fulfilling your duties, such as workforce planning.

6. Promote and Nurture Teamwork

The best leaders know how to build teams of individuals happy to collaborate. While you are engaged in your training to better yourself as a leader, you also have the opportunity to step away from the team and delegate. As stated previously, good leaders create other good leaders. Now’s your chance to see how you’ve done up to this point.

7. Clear Your Vision

Leaders who have no problem looking at a project and seeing exactly how it works out have clear sight — they’re considered visionaries, especially when presented with a rudimentary idea. Leadership training cultivates your vision. When you can “see” how to make something happen, you can also help others see it too, and motivate them to follow you.

8. Be Kind to Your Budget

Learning & Development is a department most of today’s companies couldn’t live without. As technology and business approaches shift, upper management has to stay on top of these changes by continuing to upskill. As such, one of the greatest online leadership training benefits for your company is the cost — it’s thousands less than a traditional college or university course. You can upskill an entire department in an online course for what it would cost to send just one student to a university.

9. Learn to Fail Better

One of your lessons in a leadership course is how to avoid making mistakes. Now, this doesn’t mean that at course completion you’ll never make a mistake again. What it does mean is you’ll know what to watch out for, how to spot a potentially damaging error before it happens and prevent the worst of the mistakes. As you learn how to do this for yourself, you’ll also learn how to help your team apply the same rationale.

Mistakes are human nature and bound to occur from time to time — the greatest leader won’t seek blame but rather a resolution. And after you fail (because again, you likely will), you’ll now have the tools to get back up, which may be the biggest benefit of online leadership training there is.

How The Eighth Mile Consulting Can Help

If you want to know more about online leadership training benefits, and the leadership style, level of accountability, and overall resiliency we strive to cultivate in businesses of all sizes, let us know. Our 8-week online leadership training course can help you develop strong leaders in your organization or become one yourself. Contact us to learn how we can help your organization improve and help your team unite and confidently embrace the challenges ahead.

Evan Parker

Evan is a Director of Eighth Mile Consulting, specialising in leadership, operational planning, company structures, change management and communications. Evan has 17 years of leadership experience across military combat operations, program and project management delivery at Ernst & Young (EY) and business acquisitions and leadership for Private Equity.