“This is the big one – get this right and you’ll be taking home our star prize tonight.”
The game show host flashes you his $10,000 smile. You try to stop focusing on his jacket (a weird sponsorship? everyone in wardrobe’s drunk?), and try to start focusing on what he’s going to say next.
The host looks at the bottom of the card, “well I never knew that… Ok, here goes. Good luck.” You’re given a drum roll.
“What’s the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?”
Lucky old you. Who ever thought that zoology degree would come in handy? You explain about teeth in the lower jaw being visible when a crocodile’s mouth is shut, and invisible when an alligator closes its maw, and you’re about to launch into your commentary on dermal pressure receptors when the host rushes over and shakes your hand. You did it!
As the music kicks in and everyone is showered with tickertape, a voiceover describes what you’ve won. It sounds like the star prize is a holiday for one in a luxury hotel…
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If you want to run a management development project that really works, you’ll need 5 elements to be in place. We’ve covered three of them already:
1. Senior involvement
2. A focus on results
3. Robust content
People will need time to apply the robust content and create the results, so the fourth element required is a structure that will give them enough opportunities to create the results you’re looking for.
A day a month over 4-6 months is the best structure for a development project, with managers reporting their results back to their group at each subsequent seminar. In this way, not only do the managers accumulate a set of results, but they also learn. After all – we only develop a skill by doing it, and that’s what happens over this 4-6 month period.
The reporting element is crucial. Without this a course is simply a string of one-off events, and with a structure like this it’s rare to find that there are any results, or any significant increase in management or leadership skill (there can often be an increase in knowledge).
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This structure of a day a month (or event a month) for 4-6 months with a requirement to report back results is not the predominant model for leadership or management development. You are more likely to find projects which are:
• modular courses with no requirement to create results between events
• courses that consist of just two events, with one gap between them (sometimes the second event is a follow-up call)
• or one single event, often made up of a number of days
Perhaps the pinnacle of this kind of project is the five-day residential course conducted at a luxury hotel. Here delegates can help themselves to the spa facilities and golf course, network with their peers, and tap the deep expertise of the facilitators. Part reward, part study group, courses like these are the business equivalent of a liberal arts education – the material is valuable and we trust it will make us better people; only a philistine would ask it to create a measurable result for us as well.
If your management development project hasn’t yielded the results you wanted, it may be because everyone has become more cultured in their business knowledge without becoming more skilled in their business practice – they’ve been on holidays for one in luxury hotels.
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Why isn’t an event a month with routine reporting of results the common structure for management and leadership development, particularly as this is the only way to secure results and develop skill?
It’s easier to run short courses – you can focus on input rather than output, wheel out lead aeroplanes, and you don’t have to challenge anyone who fails to deliver results.
It’s also easier to book people on them – they involve fewer days out of the office and are (sometimes) less expensive, both of which are particularly important factors when the decision makers are unconvinced that they’ll see any return on their investment.
As we’ve seen, running courses that focus on what’s done on the day, rather than what’s done in the workplace, also helps to keep HR or L&D’s remit separate from the line manager’s domain. This is important if senior management are unlikely to support people applying ideas from a development project back in the workplace (more common than you might think).
All of this is not to say there’s anything wrong with a liberal arts education or its business equivalents. I had a pretty liberal and arty education myself, and loved it. When I recently read about a management course where the delegates had to read one of Sophocles’ plays and then debate a terrible dilemma one of the protagonists faced (because business people also have to take tough decisions), I thought – “what fun!”
What I’m saying is high growth businesses and ambitious managers are often better served by development that focuses less on talking and more on doing, development where managers create real results and build tangible skill. If your development programme didn’t deliver what you wanted, the problem may have been structural…
This post originally appeared at www.mitchellphoenix.com in 2013