Lead and motivate your staff

If you manage staff, you could benefit from leadership training, ie training designed to help you maximise your own and your business' performance.

Benefits of leadership training

Leadership training will help you:

• inspire your team
• influence others
• bring about positive change in your business

Leadership training is as much about personal development as it is about learning set skills through formal training.

Types of leadership training

Mentoring is an informal, generally unstructured process in which a mentor, usually someone very experienced in business, spends time developing the inner resources of the mentee. It is not a teacher-pupil relationship. Rather, the mentor is more of a guide and somebody against whom ideas can be safely sounded out.

Networking is another important type of skill development for business owners and directors. A wide variety of business networks exists - including those for new businesses, young owners and women owners. These allow you to learn from people running similar businesses and facing similar obstacles.

For both networking and mentoring, your local chamber of commerce and your local Enterprise Centre are useful initial points of contact. See Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry.