January 2024
How to get Leadership Training to Hit the Mark
By Dennis F. Haley
According to a survey of over 500 managers released by Grovo and fielded by Wakefield Research, 44% of new managers are unprepared to manage. The research shows 87% of managers wish they had received more training after being promoted, and 80% of managers who receive training fail to maintain behavioral changes after 6 months. Why?
Traditional classroom leadership training is not effective if the desired outcome is improved performance. When large volumes of info are given during a short training session, participants:
- Find it hard to remember all the information.
- Do not personally identify with the material.
- Rarely put the concepts into practice.
- Do not receive any follow-up support back on the job.
We learn best when learning is spaced out over time and interweaved with lots of real-world deliberate practice and reinforcement.
Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Conradi Eminent Scholar at Florida State University notes what truly differentiates the expert performers from the good performers is hours of practice (PEAK 2016).
You need a particular kind of practice — deliberate practice — to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate Practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustainable efforts to do something you can't do well — or even at all.
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It's not just to reach your potential, but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before.
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The hallmark of Deliberate Practice is that you try to do something you cannot do — that takes you out of your comfort zone — and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you
are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better (PEAK 2016).
A Deliberate Practice experiment was held in a Physics class. The goal was to get the students to practice thinking like physicists, rather than feeding information to them.
The results were amazing — 2.5 standard deviations better than the traditional classes. Expertise or superior performance is achieved when managers start to think like leaders during their purposeful Deliberate Practice.
Good people become great leaders through continual learning and deliberate practice. When organizations define the behaviors that constitute good leadership and design the training experience to reflect these behaviors the training program becomes transformative. They stop thinking about leadership training as a means to increase what leaders know, and instead transform what they know into what they do, the program closes the Knowing–Doing Gap.
When designing and facilitating a leadership training program that promotes Deliberate Practice it is essential to:
- Identify the Key Leadership Challenges the team is experiencing.
- Focus on meaningful content that will address those challenges.
- Present Case in Point Scenarios and Stories to keep participants engaged.
- Provide tools and strategies to overcome those challenges.
- Designate ample time for Deliberate Practice back on the job.
- Schedule time for the group to report back and share what worked and what did not.
If you approach leadership development as a process that includes deliberate practice, rather than an event, you will enable lasting and large-scale change in the performance of your team and positively impact your bottom-line.
