But most principled leaders would argue that the development of others is one of the leader’s primary concerns.  So what is the problem?

As the culture moves ever so quickly along, experiencing faster paced life-styles, driving harder and faster than ever before, training and development seems to fall further and further down the priority scale.  Why?  Because training takes time.  Training requires a significant ‘investment’ from the leader and the organization.  Unlike the latest system tool that will solve everything (for those in business), or sermon series that will cause followers to finally do something (for leaders of churches), or whatever the silver bullet may seem to be, training is not a fast and easy process.  Training takes time and traditionally a lot of money and resources.

When most leaders think of training, especially in the non-profit or church world, they immediately think of expensive conferences or expensive 6-hour training video series.  They start to believe that there is no possible way that they can get the money together or time together to train their dozens of volunteers, staff, and teams.  So, is there a way to finally become an organization that focuses on training without draining the pocket book or time resources?  Can you possibly train your teams without spending thousands on the latest conference or popular speaker?  The answer is YES, and its outside the traditional box of development.

As you think about your volunteers, and their badly needed training, what seems to be the main hurtles from you acting on the need?  I would suggest that the following immediately come to mind:

• Your time: you have 16 sermons to write, 4 people to visit, 3 staff people to deal with, and the latest book on small groups just came out.
• Your money: you are struggling just to keep the doors open each week, let alone send your 50 volunteers or 10 volunteer leaders to some $2000 conference
• Your ability: lets face it, not every can train or create training materials on leadership or other organizational tasks
• Their time:  the E-Commerce generation struggles to balance one extra team meeting each week, let alone getting together to get trained on something

So what is the creative answer?  Online training through online seminars, or webinars.  Webinars enable a leader to provide training directly to their teams, volunteers, and staff without having to:

• Spend time creating the training materials,
• spend the money for travel,
• pay a consultant/trainer to travel in,
• and most importantly require your volunteers to leave their homes yet again and spend limited time to travel to the training or meeting.

Virtual Classrooms and eLearning can be provided DIRECT to learners at their own homes, tracking their progress through Learning Management Systems, even tracking their quiz results and overall participation.  Don't guess if your people are being trained, KNOW!

Its time to leverage the E-Commerce generation and culture to provide training direct to people’s homes or offices, available through a few clicks of the mouse and internet connection.  Webinars can be live, just like a traditional seminar, just without the person’s face.  Webinars can also be saved, or archived, available for ongoing future training for the participant or team. 

You are the leader, and are called to provide training to your teams and volunteers.  Start leveraging the resources so prevalent now in society to overcome yours and your team’s hurtles to development!  Check out a Custom Training Solution available for a very low cost today!