For the most part your foremen, project managers, crew chiefs, team leaders and other supervisory leaders are selected based on their maturity, work ethic, technical know-how, and individual excellence. As exemplary followers, perhaps they showed the potential for leadership. Of course, they weren’t born with leadership skills, and they didn’t learn how to lead in a classroom. Growing up, they may have acquired some leadership experience in team sports or social activities. Hopefully, they’ve had positive role models in the workplace from whom they learned helpful relationship and communication skills.
But nobody’s perfect, and even the best managers may be doing things out of habit that have a negative impact on employee performance. And a leader’s inability to deal with people effectively can lead to conflict, low morale, inefficiency, poor quality, turnover, the failure to achieve business goals…the list goes on.
Because so much is at stake, organizations like yours spend billions of dollars every year to train developing leaders. You have a right to expect this huge investment in time and money to pay off in permanent changes in leader behavior, measurable improvements in workplace performance and a positive impact on business results.
Unfortunately, traditional approaches to leader development rarely achieve permanent change in leader behavior, much less improvements in performance and results, even when the training is the best that money can buy (see Appendix 1). The presenters may be outstanding, and participants may rave about the programs. Some of the more motivated participants may show improvement; but after several months most will stop using the new skills. Typically, they revert back to their comfortable former habits.
You really do expect learning to transfer from the classroom to the workplace—for the long haul. That’s what you’re paying for. Left with disappointing results, your staff will sort through the positives. The training was excellent. No doubt some good did come from it. Managers and supervisors were exposed to best-practice concepts. It’s good to have those thoughts in their heads—surely that’s worth paying for. Who’s to say that they won’t apply this knowledge sometime in the future?
Because of the persistent need to improve the way leaders lead, our experience says that you’ll continue to invest in leadership development. Your trainers will evaluate and make adjustments. They’ll scan the literature to check out new vendors. It’s like the mythological quest for The Holy Grail: the search for a leadership development program that consistently produces permanent changes in leader behavior. It is after all, the worthiest of goals—of utmost importance to your organization.
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, Inc. David Erdman is President of Vital Learning Corporation. They are co-founders of the TRAIN-TO-INGRAIN alliance.
Copyright © 2005, Performance Support Systems, Inc. and Vital Learning Corporation.
