How Much Does it Cost To Develop Leadership Training?

Imagine you could turn a member of your executive team into a powerful influencer or an administrator into a mentor. What if your supervisors inspired greater employee engagement? Excellent leadership training can accomplish all of this and more for your company, but many companies avoid training leaders based on their perception of the cost to develop leadership training. 

Eighty-four percent of companies anticipate a shortfall in the number of leaders in the next five years, but many of your employees could become great leaders in that time. These people have the potential to support, improve, connect with, and motivate your entire company. You just need to bring these leadership qualities to the surface. 

Achieving these objectives is where excellent in-house leadership training comes in. You can turn workers into leaders in a few simple steps. The result? More confident, powerful, influential employees who can improve company culture, avoid union organization, and inspire other members of staff.

But how much does it cost to develop the best leadership training? At A Better Leader, we've worked with companies across the country to identify the training elements that engage and inspire leaders. Here, we've identified those elements, and we'll break down the associated cost of each.

The Cost of Delivering Great Leadership Training Content

If you want to create effective leaders, you need organized and memorable content. What topics will your leadership training deliver? Will your content require printed materials? Videos? Then, how will you provide that content? Will it be online or classroom-based? Virtual or in-person?

Designing your course curriculum should be your first order of business. Depending on your objectives, you may want to set aside several days of your time to map out your leadership lessons for the year. Alternatively, you can repeat the process every 3 to 4 weeks to determine your topic for the upcoming month.

Be realistic and determine the cost of drafting, researching, and creating monthly leadership training content. This process may differ in price for online and offline platforms, but expect to spend a minimum of 5 hours of your own time or around $250 to outsource each month's training content development. Just make sure your content is actionable, useful, and resonates with your employees.

If you choose to create videos of your leadership training (so it can be revisited), determine the cost to develop leadership training videos. Hiring a producer, narrator, editor, or graphic artist can increase costs significantly. The cost to create leadership training videos professionally will run you somewhere between $500 and $1000 per finished minute.

The Cost of Measuring and Reinforcing Leadership Learning Success

Leadership training is all very well and good, but how do you know it's working? You need to measure the effectiveness of your leadership training program so you know you're getting a good return on your investment.

One way to prove the cost to develop leadership training is worth it is to develop a quiz to test your leaders after each training session. You'll also want to decide how you will evaluate the questionnaires and how you can track success over time. If you don't have time to review your leaders' progress yourself, you can hire an independent exam marker for around $40 per hour.

Reinforcing your lessons is one way to justify the cost of developing leadership training. Leaders will better remember what they learned and be more likely to take action if you remind them of the content of the lessons. Printed infographics can help here. Research shows that 65 percent of people remember visual content for almost three days, far longer than regular text. However, you might need to hire a graphic designer to create your learning infographics, which will eat into your budget. These professionals, on average, charge $75-100 per hour.

Don't forget to archive your learning materials, too. Not only is this great for recall, but all employees can access your content for reference. If you use training videos, you might need to set up a DVD library or a server for streaming your content. Also, make sure you have enough server space to host your materials. (A good cloud server can cost around $300 per month.)

The Cost of Making Leadership Training Interesting

Yes, you read that right! Your leadership training should be interesting! And engaging and immediately actionable. That means that, regardless of the cost to develop leadership training, it's got to be relevant within the context that your leaders operate.

This is where you can incur significant costs, and its important that you don't just outsource your training's relevance. Hiring leadership experts to talk about your chosen topics, for example, can run anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000, plus travel. (And if you're going to shell out that kind of cash, you will likely want to hire a videographer, too!) Don't forget that you'll also need a venue for every live speaker — somewhere for your expert to connect with leaders. Remember though, that, depending on your leadership expert's contract, you may be able to stream the session live to your leaders, no matter where they are.

Excellent leadership training can help your company avoid third-party interference from attorneys, unions, and government agencies. The best leadership training will help your leaders inspire employees, leading to additional growth and productivity. Still, 58 percent of managers say they never received any leadership training at all. Perhaps because company directors think it's too expensive. Follow the tips above for more cost-effective leadership programs in your organization.

So how much does it cost to develop leadership training? The answer is... it depends. However, if you do not want to develop this training on your own and rather hire outside help to train your leaders, there are many cost-effective solutions.  A Better Leader will interest and engage your leaders, provide you with the ability to track their progress, and most importantly, provide relevant, actionable content, make sure your research includes A Better Leader.