Results of a recent study with LPA clients yield positive results.
Our last article talked about what factors lead to leadership training falling short of expectations. Today, we will look at a recent case study conducted by a client to measure the success of their leadership training using the LPA method.
The LPA method incorporates all the critical factors needed to ensure that companies can enjoy the long-term benefits of our leadership training. They include:
A recent client compared the efficiency of their leadership competencies before, during, and after conducting the LPA journey. The assessment asks, do you believe the person who received feedback has become more or less effective in the following areas?
Organizations are more complex than two days of training.
Leadership Training alone can not fix a company’s organizational and leadership problems. Yet, companies have been willing to pay for the chance to impact change through training. Globally, in 2015, companies were spending $356 billion on training programs. Did they achieve a good return on their investment? What are the keys to implementing effective change in any organization?
Here are some simple ideas to consider when exploring Leadership Training in your organization:
Are training that your company is buying created for your organization based on your company values and core leadership competencies or is it basically an off-the-shelf program?
Senior management drives change based on a clear set of business objectives. Those objectives need to be driven by a clear set of company values. Senior managers need good information to make decisions. And, their people need to be comfortable sharing data no matter how bad it may be. Employees need to receive guidance and opportunities to practice in a safe environment how to give and receive feedback.
Is the company open to honest feedback from employees?
Politics plays a role in most companies. Employee gamesmanship and positioning are detrimental to senior management and the company. They tend to provide information senior management wants and not necessarily what they need to hear. Companies need candid feedback about impediments to efficacy and execution, including senior management’s conduct. Even if it sounds strange, a lot of participants that are sent to training do not see the connection between the workshop they are attending and their daily work.
Is the training relevant to the business?
Company setup needs to reflect the openness to the changes made to move forward. The content and direction of the training need to be relevant to the industry. Don’t use training companies that offer off-the-shelf content that does not even use your industry terminology. And it requires a combination of workshops, coaching, and assessment of skills.
What happens after the training? Does the company offer ongoing coaching and training consulting to achieve positive change?
The problem with most leadership programs is that they end. Employees go back to their everyday lives, and old habits creep back into the day-to-day operation. Successful programs provide ongoing support and training to help managers apply what they learned to their daily routine. Change happens over time.
Can you measure the impact of your training on the organization?
As a continued follow-up to your leadership journey, can you measure the progress? Is it positive, negative, or static? A positive leadership journey will take time to impact change. Leadership and culture must be in it for the long haul and commit to creating a safe environment, a culture of openness, and leadership for all business units.
At LPA, we can help your organization reach these strategic objectives with our Leadership Potential Accelerator Program, addressing the pitfalls most companies find themselves with leadership training. And you will be able to track the improvement of your leadership skills.
Has your company implemented leadership programs for managers?
The impact on engagement and commitment of participants of Covid19 was fascinating. And it told me a lot about how leaders have to adapt their leadership style to their given working environment. Even though most of us used virtual platforms before Covid, making the change to 100% virtual had its consequences.
Participant Preparation
A lot of time, I have experienced that participants sent to training received a limited explanation for the activity by HR or L&D. Trainers spent their initial time trying to get buy-in from their attendees due to a perceived lack of value in training.
What I have been missing most of the time was the briefing of managers to let their direct reports know why they should attend a training and what their immediate benefit will be from it. A short announcement delivered by the superior would have directly impacted the level of engagement and commitment of their direct reports.
Purpose and Outcome
As a trainer and coach, I see that managers are looking for sophisticated tools to become better leaders; meanwhile, easy, fast, and free ones would make their life, the life of their team members, so much easier.By sharing the purpose of training and a few details about why the company chose, it would immediately impact the buy-in. Through that, participants would feel that their managers CARE about them, understand their needs, and support them. During the three main phases of Covid related to participants’ level of attention and confidence (medium, high, very low), direct reports would have needed a completely different communication delivered by their supervisors/managers.
What are you considering when sending your team members to trainings? What do you do if global HR sends your people to workshops that you don’t have influence on? What tools do you use to get the buy-in of your direct reports to be engaged and committed to a behavioural change in the world of training?
Need help building out a Learning Journey for your Managers? Contact Us
Communication is an art. Getting people to open up and talk is an important skill to have today. Sometimes, we have to maneuver around the person unwilling to share their thoughts. One approach that can work is to paraphrase or summarize what little information they have provided. An example may be:
“If I understood you correctly, your priority is to update your CRM data?”
I have never heard anyone answer with a clear Yes or No, which is excellent news! It opens new possibilities to involve the other person. People like to make corrections; they add something and say “Yes and,” “Not exactly because,” etc.
To be agile:
Understand the other person’s view,
Solve conflicts without burning bridges and hurting others, and
Involve and motivate others to achieve even more.
Ask questions to help communications. Try to limit your questions. The more straightforward question will be answered. Too many questions can limit your exchange. If you ask several ones at once, the other one goes to waste.
And the real magic of questions is…SILENCE. Make sure you count until 10 when you raise a question. What I see leaders struggling with is waiting for the answer because they think they know it better, not you, of course, the others who are not reading the book.
There is another question I have received many times: “How do I know that I asked a good question?” You don’t need me or a coach or a trainer to let you know. The reaction of your team member will tell you. The first reaction to a good question is, “I didn’t think about that; it is a good question!” Or “Hmm, I don’t know!” A great leader stays in the tension of the conversation and observes the impact of their questions and statements. He navigates through the conversation like a great captain taking one wave after the next. Good luck with adjusting the angle of your next conversation!
Covid forced us to spend most of our time in the online world. A lot of us had to learn how it works by trial and error. No organization or human being was fully equipped with tools and techniques in mid-March 2020 when Covid-19 changed our life from one minute to the other. Let me share with you what I have learned about how to be successful in virtual interactions.
Do you remember your last face-to-face interaction before the announcement of the lock-down when you did not think your life would change radically? Do you remember your first frustration when you had to run an important meeting in the virtual world and there was a lack of engagement even though you were well prepared?
As a trainer, I first thought that soon everything will return to normal, I was happy to have a little “break” when the lockdown was communicated on March 13th. Fortunately, I appreciated having less work (at that time I traveled 2-4 times a month), and I enjoyed having more spare time than usual. Soon reality kicked in and I saw that Covid-19 was here to stay for a while. My trainer colleagues and I had to unlearn, relearn and learn some new ways of teaching, training, and facilitating workshops.
I had a terrible experience during my first training in which an internal training manager wanted to control the way I was running the program. She did not want to have any breakout sessions and she wanted to limit the individual reflection time of the participants to two minutes. I had 22 participants, which is a large group in the virtual world. Since I was just learning how this works, I gave in and accepted her “rules” and it did NOT go well. I felt terrible. After having a lot of brainstorming calls with my wonderful colleagues about how to run workshops efficiently, we created our own set of tools and best practices which we are happy to share with you.
If you are interested in learning about what I consider as best in the world of virtual training, keep reading.
I have learned most of my tools from the evaluations and verbal feedback of my participants. They absolutely LOVE the work in smaller groups called “breakout sessions”. They feel much more confident sharing their thoughts when they are not together with 20+ other colleagues but rather with only 4-5. The engagement becomes very lively and afterward, they are happy to share their main points. It is beneficial if they know beforehand that they will be asked to do so. This means that selecting a spokesperson is an additional task for them that should be communicated before sending them into their subgroups.
I learned from a dear friend of mine that in the online world you always have to transmit energy, enthusiasm, and clarity. You cannot expect the same from the receiving end, your participants. Sometimes you have to wait until the end to get some recognition. Under clarity I mean you have to be 100% clear about what you want to share. The likelihood that people will ask questions in case they don’t understand is low, much lower than in the face-to-face world.
Using different devices such as a flipchart, annotation on your screen, a lot of open-ended questions like “On a scale from one to ten, how clear is this exercise to you?” or “What would you prefer, a break now or to finish sooner?” is key. Involving participants is even more crucial than in the “real world”.
Another important success factor is whether you are standing or sitting while you are talking as the facilitator. (Which is better, standing or sitting? What are the impacts of standing or sitting?) All this counts a lot when you do what, and why.
A lot of our clients could not imagine that a real leadership development program could be run in Zoom or on any platform. Our internal research tells us that participants are not just fully engaged and committed, but they are finding that an additional advantage of the program is that they can spend quality time together. Since Covid-19, most team members are working individually from their homes, so virtual training where they can see each other is a unique gift that is even increasing their loyalty to their team and organization. They feel that they are listened to and cared for.
If you want to hear more tips, contact us, and we will be happy to discuss virtual learning further with you.
