Making leadership programmes effective - factors to be considered

Lal FONSEKA Productivity Consultant, Brandix Lanka Limited

“Send them back to training.” “We need training.” “They need to be trained.” These statements are very familiar. In my long lasting experience, I have heard the above statements more than thousand times. It may be true even with you. Often times these are only symptoms of a problem. Until the problem is understood, providing training can be a costly and pointless way to treat a symptom. So, is training the answer? The truth is, not always.

Before we can solve a performance problem we first need to diagnosis it. Think the scenario of going medial professional. Is he prescribes the medicine just looking at your sick face. When you go to him, isn’t he conducting a needs analysis? The doctor asks about our symptoms, our activities, what we have been doing to treat it. He wants to know how long it has been happening. It is only after you the doctor has the information he needs and have performed an exam, that he attempts to diagnosis you. Once he has diagnosed the problem he will typically prescribe medication as the solution.

In order to determine if training is the answer we must begin by conducting our own exam.

Training is one way to attain desired performance, but it is not the only way. The first step in any training needs analysis is to differentiate between training wants and true training needs by examining the current state of performance and defining the desired state of performance.

A group of senior executives in a famous organization are finishing up a three-day in-house programme at a 5 start hotel. This training programme is an in-house programme and the company has spent about five to six thousand rupees only as Hotel Charges. During the day time, these so called higher officers listen to the lectures that are paid in Lakhs of rupees. Evenings All what they do is forming together and drinking yet again money but this time money they spend is not company money but it is their money.

They have already filled out evaluations of the courses they took and the instructors. Now they are grading the facilities and meals. Soon they will 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 city in Colombo. 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 programs. At the same they spend only about seven percent of the training budget on first line supervisors.

But it is those first line supervisors that make most of the difference, but this is very well forgotten by these leaders and also by the decision makers.

Jeff Immelt, 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 is normal.

First line supervisors determine whether workers are engaged or not. They are 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? Nowadays, these top companies do is to make some training movies involving the workers talking about the weaknesses of the front line supervisors. This is another weakness these managers do, because they do always think that they are saints.

The other thing wrong with spending leadership training money on senior managers is that they are not likely to change much. A manager who's been plying the leadership trade for a couple of decades is not likely to make a big, effective behavioral change because of a couple of classes. The maniac attitude these managers have is the highest qualifications these people possess. The Directors of these organizations go after the people with qualifications like MBA (sometimes may be from an unheard universities or institutions), Black/Green Belt on Six Sigma or similarities. Employers do not necessarily need well-trained employees. I know that may sound like heresy coming from someone employed in higher education, but what employers truly need is employees who perform well. This will even apply to me.

“90 percent GE’s top 600 leaders are promoted from within”

I have seen some organizations going for ISO certifications without first practicing the fundamentals. To make matters worse, most leadership training uses ineffective methods. Companies spend millions every year on classroom-based training that is not much different from what you'd see if you could go back in time to almost any Medieval university.

In both cases there is one person in front of the room talking to a bunch of other people. Of course, today there would be PowerPoint slides and the seats might be more comfortable.

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 is not the way that most human beings learn best. At the end of the programs, trainers become millionaires. There is no wrong in it. What they leant they cannot give free of charge to you. Think about any baby you have 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 is how most adults learn, too. The most effective sequence is from specific point or experience to general principle.

What we need is more leadership training that uses methods that are more effective than lecture, or even 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 does not automatically make it effective. There are a lot of programmes 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."

Thatis why you have leadership training that is not training at all, at least not in leadership. Executives can try outdoor adventure training which can be lots of fun or they can teach leadership by cooking, which probably helps the executive be more helpful at parties. But how does 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.

Here is 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 is because companies spend their time and money on the training and forget about the learning. That is up to the individual, but companies usually do not even bother to set learning expectations or check to see whether a trainee is using what he or she was taught. They should. No monitoring is done at all.

What normally happens is that the people who go back 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.

The sad fact is that we know how to do good leadership training; we are 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 will get the most bang for your buck that way.

Make sure the leadership training you choose addresses specific skills and uses effective instructional techniques. 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. Top Managers should follow-up to see that they are working to implement what they learned from the training. This will continue in the next week too.