Get the Most out of Your Leadership Program
Companies spend millions every year to send top managers to multi-day, off-site leadership training programs.
Getting the Most from Your Leadership Program
Marshall Goldsmith reviewed how effective leadership training programs were for 86,000 participants.
He found that the people who went home talked about the learning and worked, deliberately to implement new behaviours learnt best.
But those who just went back home and did no follow-up showed no improvement at all.
Top Leadership Program
A group of senior executives are finishing up a three-day program at a top leadership training centre.
They’ve already filled out evaluations of the courses they took and the instructors.
Now they’re grading the facilities and meals.
Soon they’ll be heading back home to see what work has piled up while they were gone.
This scene is played out countless times every day, all across the country.
Leadership Mistakes
It also tells you a lot about the mistakes companies make with leadership training.
Companies spend millions every year to send top managers to multi-day, off-site leadership training programs.
At the same time, they spend only about 7 percent of the training budget on first-line supervisors.
First-Line Supervisors
But it’s those first-line supervisors and managers that make most of the difference.
Jeff Immelt, the current CEO at General Electric, says that when he was a boy, he always knew the name of his father’s supervisor, but rarely knew the name of the CEO.
That’s normal.
First-line supervisors determine whether workers are engaged or not.
First Line Leaders
They’re the leaders who assure that teams have both high morale and high productivity.
Why not spend some training money on them to help them do a better job?
The other thing wrong with spending leadership training money on senior managers is that they’re not likely to change much.
Spend Where It Will Stick
A manager who’s been plying the leadership trade for a couple of decades isn’t likely to make a big, effective behavioural change because of a couple of classes.
To make matters worse, most leadership programs use ineffective methods.
Companies spend millions every year on classroom-based training that isn’t much different from what you’d see if you could go back in time to almost any Medieval University.
In both cases, there’s one person in front of the room talking to a bunch of other people.
Oh sure, today there would be PowerPoint slides and the seats might be more comfortable, but Martin Luther would have no trouble recognising what’s going on.
Non-Engaged Training
In this medieval training model, the instructor lays out some basic principles and then works down to specific applications.
That might be great for the teacher, but it’s not the way that most human beings learn best.
Think about any baby you’ve been around.
There’s not a general principle in sight.
The baby sees things, touches things, runs into things, and tastes things, and then turns all those experiences into general principles.
That’s how most adults learn, too.
The most effective sequence is from a specific point or experience to a general principle.
Experiential Training
What we need are more leadership programs that use methods that are more effective than a lecture, or even a lecture with PowerPoint and handouts.
We need to use more methods that offer opportunities to learn from specific, relevant situations.
And we need to use more methods that allow for reflection.
But, just because training is different from our Medieval model doesn’t automatically make it effective.
Different Is Not Necessarily Better
There are a lot of programs out there based on the principle that we have to do something special to make learning fun.
Other programs grow from the need for trainers and consultants to sell something “new.”
That’s why you have leadership programs that aren’t training at all, at least not in leadership.
Executives can try outdoor adventure training which can be lots of fun or they can learn leadership by cooking, which probably helps the executive be more helpful at parties.
But how do either of these make you a better leader?
None of these trendy methods seem to do much about helping you learn leadership, but they’re a fun way to spend the training budget.
Transfer To The Workplace
Here’s another really important thing.
A lot of great classroom training never finds its way back to the workplace.
It never seems to make any difference in what the leader-trainee does.
That’s because companies spend their time and money on the training and forget about the learning.
Learning Expectations
That’s up to the individual, but companies usually don’t even bother to set learning expectations or check to see whether a trainee is using what they were taught.
They should.
Marshall Goldsmith reviewed how well 86,000 leadership training program participants actually learned from the experience.
He found that the people who went home talked about the learning and worked, deliberately to implement new behaviours learned best.
But those who just went back home and did no follow-up showed no improvement at all.
Good Leadership Programs
The sad fact is that we know how to run a good leadership program; we’re just not doing it.
Here are some things your company should consider. Spend time and money training your first-line supervisors and new managers.
Help them put together a self-development plan that will help them learn on the job.
You’ll get the most bang for your buck that way.
Make sure the leadership program you choose addresses specific skills and uses effective instructional techniques.
Specific Learning Objectives
Set specific learning objectives for everyone you send to training.
Make sure that people who go through training get help and encouragement when they get back on the job.
Follow-up to see that they’re working to implement what they learnt.
This article was contributed by Wally Bock
Leadership Program
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