Created by the best-selling author Alexander Hiam, this site is designed to give tips & techniques, free downloadables and new insights to leaders, managers and HR management professionals.

We are the developer! Come to the source...

Leveraging Limited Leadership Training
by Alexander Hiam (Harvard, class of 1980)

Leadership development and training receives far less time than it used to, yet leadership is, by most accounts, more challenging than it used to be. We’ve been working with a number of organizations to create high-impact leadership workshops and courses that are intended to begin a development process that continues when the participants go back to their supervisory roles.

Self-assessment is a powerful way to stimulate introspection and raise self-awareness of leadership behaviors.  If training participants walk away with increased self-awareness and a desire to reflect on their own behaviors, then you’ve initiated a learning process, instead of letting it stop at the end of the workshop.

Courses on leadership, conflict management, teamwork and other behavioral skills should start with an assessment exercise (to hold up a mirror for participants to see their own behavior more clearly). Here are some ideas for optimizing the impact of that assessment and leveraging it into ongoing learning and development:

1- Pick or design an assessment that relates to the actual challenges of the participants. For instance, a traditional managerial leadership assessment does not fit the realities of leading an inter-departmental team very well, since the traditional assessment probably assumes the leader has line authority. We designed the Team Leadership Instrument to meet this emerging need, by analyzing the competencies needed to actually pull together and manage a modern project team. For instance, inter-team and external communications are both critical competencies for team leaders.

2- Integrate the assessment into the curriculum. For instance, if the assessment looks at leadership style, include modules on each of the styles measured, and make sure participants get to practice each style in appropriate cases or role plays.

3- Spiral back to the opening assessment activity at the end, and use the framework (assessment model) as a planning tool. Participants can build personal action plans based on their assessment results, and generate their own ideas for how to lead differently and better.

4- Provide take-away job aids for leaders. Reminders in the form of reference booklets, wallet cards, posters and the like are surprisingly likely to be used after the course by leaders, and these job aids greatly reduce the decay of learning that normally occurs after such courses.

5- If possible, reassemble participants for short follow-up discussions and problem-solving sessions after the course. You can create “cells” wherever there are two or more participants working, and give them process guides (forms, instructions) for reviewing their own performance and asking each other for help with “problem employees”, performance shortfalls, difficult communications, and other leadership challenges.

6- Administer the same leadership assessment again, at least one month later. This can be done remotely, self-administered, so long as you include a cover memo with specific instructions. Include some open-ended questions of your own, such as, “Did your results change? Why?” and “Please describe how your action plans are coming along, and whether you need to update or modify them.”

If all of six these techniques are used, a single training event can be transformed into a many-month process of leadership development. Each time you can remind participants of their learning experience and prompt them to apply specific learning or assessment results to their managerial behavior, you are leveraging the impact of the training tremendously.

Yes, in an ideal world, you would also link leaders’ performance reviews to the training and assessment design, but in our experience, that rarely happens, so rely on the six simpler steps above to make sure your training event catalyzes real leadership development.

Why are we concerned about leveraging the training event with self-reflection and follow-up? Because most people who attend a  content-oriented leadership training cannot remember any details of the content a month later. Leadership development is a process. Exposing people to theories, facts, and suggestions does little, well actually nothing, to change their leadership behavior. Engaging them in self-reflection and in follow-up applications of the learning to actual leadership challenges does a great deal to improve leadership behavior.

© 2005 INSIGHTS FOR TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT. All rights reserved.