Mitchell Phoenix - Leadership and Management Training

How to Choose a Leadership and Management Development Provider - Part 2

Last week we explored training providers which deliver at Level 1 - Favourable Reaction. This week we focus on providers who deliver Learning.

2. Learning

What are the results reported by providers at this level?

1. A needs assessment is carried out, where delegates are tested to find out what they already know and don’t know. Training is delivered, and delegates are retested on what they now know. The result is shown in the difference between what they know now compared to what they knew before.

2. A certificate is often awarded to show that delegates now know more than they knew before. Where the certificate is deemed to be a useful addition to the delegate’s CV (eg an MBA), it is often the securing of this certificate that is held to be the most important result of the training programme.

Training that is focused predominantly on learning varies widely, from an MBA at a prominent business school to a one day Personality Type session run in a kitchen. What is learned can range from the latest, most complex process improvement models to the fact that one member of the department is less detail-oriented than another.

Clues that providers operate at this level:

• Testimonials focus on how much the trainer knows, on what the delegate now knows, or on all the useful tips and tricks the delegate picked up
• Promotion focuses on participants’ intentions to put what they learned into practice, rather than what they did differently back in the workplace
• Marketing focuses on the heritage / prestige of the institution
• Advertising will focus on how programmes kick-started careers through contacts made on programs, or once delegates were able to put the qualification on their CV

Why are the types of offerings described above only listed as the second in a hierarchy of four types of training? Why would a learning and development manager look for a programme that delivers anything more than learning? Leadership and management training which focuses primarily on learning often does not deliver development.  

How can this be? Consider these two questions:

1. “If a change is going to be unpopular with your subordinates, you should proceed slowly to gain acceptance.” Agree / Disagree

2. “If you are promoted to a management job, you should make it different than it was under your predecessor.” Agree / Disagree

What would you answer? Click to find out how these questions point to the gap between learning and development

Last month we put forward the idea that Leadership and Management Development Providers will create results at one of four levels:

1. Favourable Reaction
2. Learning
3. Short Term Behavioural Change
4. Long Term Behavioural Change

(Read more about this here)

How can you quickly discern at which of these four levels a potential provider will deliver? After all, as one of our clients famously said, “everyone out there will tell you they can do everything, but they can’t.”

1. Favourable Reaction

Clues that training companies primarily operate at Level 1 include:

• Testimonials focus on the trainer – how much fun, how inspirational, how dynamic, how interesting he/she was
• Little concrete evidence of results in the workplace – the result is that people attended the training and were not upset or bored by it 
• Training often woven into other fun activities, such as actors’ games, cooking, assault courses
• Business promotion reflects testimonials: people have a good time – all course days rated good to excellent, etc.
• Companies use associates – the key skill required is to be able to hold the interest of a group of executives for a day, or two days. Full time employees with deep knowledge of in-house content and approach are not required; in this case, associates hired on a daily rate will be able to fulfil the brief.

Click for a fuller discussion of Favourable Reaction as a Result of Leadership and Management Training

GOVERNING CHANGE DATES

Structure: Six full day seminars, one day each month for six months

Seminar 1 Wednesday 25 January, 2012
Seminar 2 Wednesday 29 February, 2012
Seminar 3 Wednesday 28 March, 2012
Seminar 4 Wednesday 25 April, 2012
Seminar 5 Wednesday 23 May, 2012
Seminar 6 Wednesday 20 June, 2012



Principal Focus: Leading, directing and mobilizing staff

Key themes:

Seminar One - Key and Fundamental Principles of Management
Seminar Two - Improving the Contribution of Staff and Others
Seminar Three - Leadership in Management
Seminar Four - Improving the Quality of Leadership Influence
Seminar Five - Dominating Change
Seminar Six - Managing into the Future

Course fees: £3650.00 exc VAT

Who will benefit? The Managers of Managers (Senior Level)

"Governing Change" is for managers and management teams who wish to capitalize on their experience and advance their leadership and management abilities. The focus is on the critical area of high quality communication and the management of relationships which take up a substantial part of every manager's time.

Click here to make a booking on this program

What is covered on this course? Click here for course outline

What results do delegates create when attending this course? Click here for sample results

Here is an example of real ROI:

Communicating a Challenging Decision and Retaining Commitment

A manager had to run a difficult bonus review meeting with one of her direct reports. Under previous arrangements, put in place when the company was much smaller, the direct report only had to satisfy some basic requirements in order to qualify for his bonus. The manager wanted to change this situation, and link the direct report’s bonus to target achievement. Mindful that this was likely to be unpopular, the manager booked out a whole morning for the meeting in which she was going to broach this subject.

Using concepts developed on the Foundations of Management Program, the manager first agreed with her direct report that bonuses should be based on performance. This done, they worked together to create a set of objectives for the coming year relating to a particularly important aspect of the direct report’s role. With the objectives agreed, the manager told the direct report that his bonus for the coming year would be dependent on the achievement of the objectives they had just created. After a short discussion, the direct report agreed to this and they set a follow up meeting to monitor progress towards the achievement of the first objective. 

The manager felt in complete control in the meeting, and concluded it in 20 minutes, leaving a whole morning free for other work. She later reported that it was completely successful in terms of creating motivation in the direct report and securing agreement to a difficult decision.

c. 8-10 of these per delegate x 8 delegates = c. 70 results = real ROI from a management training program

… and what is a waste of money:

As mentioned in a previous post, the management training industry has created a smokescreen around what is a real result and what isn’t. The examples below are regularly proffered as ROI, when in fact all could be achieved much more cheaply through other means:

1. Everyone actually attended the course – (the only requirements here are physical presence in the seminar room and a pulse, it is a rare delegate who cannot manage either of these. Cheaper alternative = organise a meeting, see who turns up)

2. Everyone enjoyed themselves – (cheaper options = pub, crazy golf, day off…)

3. Everyone found things out about themselves (without action in the workplace to build on this, cheaper alternatives = horoscopes + star signs, drunken post pub truth-telling sessions, books)

4. Everyone left with an action plan for how they are going to implement what they learned back in the workplace (alternatives = your last set of new year’s resolutions)

5. Everyone enjoyed the facilities on their residential course (most residential courses are hotels that use training to hook people in. Cheaper alternative = book a week in a better hotel, leave out the “training”)

In 2010 - 11 Mitchell Phoenix have been working closely with Alderley Dubai, running bespoke in-house programs for senior and fast track managers both in the UK and Dubai. 

“The management team of Alderley Dubai were especially rewarding to work with. Their enthusiasm, diligence and application of ideas created the results that Nick and the senior team envisaged. In addition they made use of all the available strategies in Mitchell Phoenix projects, supporting each other, building team results and spurring each other on to deliver the maximum - a great group of people!” 
Kevin Yates, Managing Director, Mitchell Phoenix

Click here to read the case study

You’ve decided to do some management training with your people. The business case is clear and the necessary budget has been secured. If you don’t spend the money in the next couple of months it will disappear, so you sit down to make your choice.

You think that with stronger management skills you and your people will behave more effectively on an individual, team and organizational basis. This would be a fantastic business result. You search the internet for management training companies which can deliver business results… and to your surprise, everyone can. Every provider you look at shouts back at you about the “results” they create for their clients, like a flock of parrots that has learned to say just one word.

In fact, in the world of management development “results” has a range of meanings:

1. At the basic level, the “result” is that everyone who attended a day of training rated it highly on a feedback sheet – eg. as “very good” or “outstanding”. People had a good time, nobody tried to climb out of the windows.

2. The next type of “result” is that everybody learned something on the course. They learned what personality type they are, or that they annoy a colleague when they don’t turn on their out of office message. The link between the learning and the workplace is hazy, or based on firm promises to put an action plan in place one delegates get back to the their desks. Six months down the line, people are still annoying their colleagues by not turning on their out of office messages. Perhaps unexpectedly, much of the input on MBA courses falls into this category: interesting but not used.

3. Short-term behavioural change is the next category of “result”. Here, people adopt a new behaviour and stick to it for a while. For situations where longevity of application is not a factor, “results” in this area are useful.

4. Long-term behavioural change is the pinnacle of “business results”. This is rare, requiring all of the other three preceding “results” to be in place (no one will change their behaviour if the course designed to do this is making them want to climb out of the window). Along with these, any course operating at this level will create a deep understanding of management principles, such that they can be applied to any situation a manager faces. Managers take decisions with this new frame of reference in mind, and choose new, more effective behaviour now and in the long-term.

Next month: the clues that show which of the four types of result above a provider can deliver.

Business is on the edge of a new economic age that is already increasingly complex and unpredictable. Economic power shifts, emerging markets, natural disasters, scarcity of resources, population explosion, regulation, fear of double-dip recession all compound the challenges around growth and sustainability.

The pressures on business have seldom been as intense as they are today. Companies are under pressure, more than ever, to manage and maintain their reputation, manage their talent and keep pace with emerging technologies.

In 2004 Hewlett Packard embarked on further development of its excellence culture which was already highly focused on continuous improvement. It built on its existing culture by integrating continuous improvement with ‘continuous learning’.

Expert Facilitation is not Facilitation by Experts

When choosing a leadership development programme, one may encounter courses which promise “facilitation by experts.” The experts will have a background in a particular industry, and will draw on this background as they develop managers from the same industry on their programme.

Mitchell Phoenix MD Kevin
Yates working with executives
at Alderley Dubai

In this way, ex civil-servants will train other civil servants, ex manufacturing directors will instil leadership and management disciplines in those working in manufacturing, ex-lawyers will develop other lawyers, and ex IT professionals will inculcate “soft skills” in current IT professionals. 

When the development focuses around technical information, it is easy to understand why those with a background in a similar industry might be preferable. Non-lawyers will have no grasp of technical aspects of law, non-IT professionals will know little about the technical issues facing those working at the front line of IT.

Where leadership and management attitudes and skills are to be developed, it is less clear why those with a particular industry background will be a useful choice. An impressive track record working in a certain industry only suggests that a person is expert at working in that particular field, rather than in developing others to do so. Further, the more impressive the track record, the stronger the hold it will exert over the person’s thinking. Hard-won experience is even harder to relinquish. Yet anyone who wishes to develop wider understanding must do just that: let go of the particular, loosen their grip on their individual insights and begin to see further than their own autobiography.

Developing and inspiring others is not the same as doing oneself, as footballers who turn to management often discover. Who had a better track record than Sir Bobby Charlton? In terms of industry experience, of “been there, done it, got the medals to prove it,” at one stage he was peerless in the English game. His management career underlined the gap between doing oneself and mobilising others. For some this gap is easily bridged - Charlton’s peer Franz Beckenbauer managed the German World Cup winning team of 1990. For others it proves impossible to cross. (Charlton’s choice of subsequent activities shows how fast he learned this, and how shrewd and adaptable he is.)

What qualifications should one look for from those involved in management development? Kevin Yates, Managing Director of Mitchell Phoenix, has become convinced that there are four key factors: expert facilitation - by those who are skilled at mobilising others; robust course content; a unique day a month structure which places the emphasis on delegate output rather than trainer input; and an unwavering focus on the creation of concrete business results. When choosing a development programme, it is a strong track record in these areas which gives the clearest indicator of future performance.

Few CEO’s Cite Paint-Balling as their Chief Leadership Influence

Rare quotations:

“I paint-balled my way to the top”

For comedians training is one of the most fertile areas of business life. The tenuous links made between a host of activities – from actors’ trust games to orienteering – and our working practices are funny because we can all recognise the scenario. Whether it is making the accounts team go through an army assault course or asking the production division to do a karaoke for leadership programme, everyone knows someone who has done something ridiculous in the name of development, or – worse still – has had to take part in something ridiculous themselves.

If you want a development activity which is useful, rather than simply entertaining, what should you look for? After more than 25 years in development, Mitchell Phoenix’ Kevin Yates concludes that there are four pillars of successful development programmes. “Look for expert facilitation, an unwavering focus on the creation of results, a structure which will allow the creation of results, and tried and proven content,” he says.

What should this content consist of? First of all it should be usable in the workplace. Under pressure in a real life work situation, anything overly complicated, such as a theoretical ‘model’, will be difficult to bring to mind or use. Second, content should be useful, so that when it is applied it will solve a problem and/or generate concrete results. This means the content should focus on how to conduct the key activities managers and leaders undertake. Whether the focus is delegation, persuasion, motivation or anything else, concrete detail on how to do each of these things is vital. It is not enough to define the problem, the content must take us towards the solution and then prompt us to take action back in the workplace.

“Perhaps most important,” says Yates, “is that the content is based on strong, ethical business principles which senior managers can relate to, and on which they can build. They must see clearly how what is being suggested to them fits with the business principles they already hold, or with principles they aspire to and are likely to adopt.”