Challenging trainers’ perceptions

Often, leaders are treated differently both within and outside their organisations because they are perceived as ‘leaders’. We have met many trainers who are in awe of those they train because of the leadership status conferred on their target audiences. Instantly, those trainers put themselves on the back foot within their training, shrinking before their delegates.

Good leadership trainers establish their own leadership credentials in the way they deliver leadership training. If you are embarking on leadership training, take a good hard look at yourself first. Examine your appearance – your voice, your deportment, your general demeanour. Do you walk upright, breathe calmly and deeply, make strong eye contact and shake hands firmly? Or do you shamble into the training room, making little attempt to engage with your delegates, mumbling a greeting and occupying less physical space than your body deserves? Which do you imagine paints a better picture of you as a leader? Think about how you establish control in the training room. (And do note the difference between controlling and being in control.)

Challenging leaders’ perceptions of themselves

Many leaders have learnt to believe the hype that surrounds their status and position. In some organisations, the sycophancy afforded them leads them to believe in the superiority of their position. In developing leadership training, focus on raising the self-awareness of your delegates. Help them to understand the need for a degree of humility; help them to dig below the surface and find out what’s really there.

The literature of emotional intelligence suggests that good leaders selectively show their weaknesses. We don’t propose that your training should be designed directly to expose your delegates’ weaknesses, but that activities and reflection should afford them opportunities to realise the gaps in their skills, knowledge and even their thinking.

Busy executives take little time to reflect. Include not only time for guided personal reflection, but paired activities in which delegates give mutual feedback. The business leader rarely hears what others think. Create opportunities for this to happen. The impact may be quite cathartic for some of your delegates, but it is an important stage in a leader’s development to get some real feedback.

As you begin your training or learning event, make it clear that you will challenge your delegates. A challenge need not be confrontational and should never sound like a personal attack. Establish early in your course that challenges are designed to stimulate the thinking not only of the person you challenge but of your other delegates, too. Effective leadership is as much about mindset as it is about process. True leadership is not switched on and off on a whim – it is evident all the time.

Ask your delegates to talk in the first person. Often, in describing something that we don’t want to face, we project our issues out into the ether, using ‘you’ where we mean ‘I’. Insist on ’I’ each time your delegates talk about themselves.

Don’t nanny your delegates. Tell them from the outset that they don’t need nannying – if they are given 30 minutes in a syndicate room to work on a particular issue, you’ll start again in plenary in 30 minutes time – and you won’t expect to have to round them up.

Think in terms of ‘wheels within wheels’ – creating training which is itself a reflection of the behaviours which you expect from your leaders. And don’t be afraid to comment on poor time-keeping. The standard response of ‘well this is just a training course – I wouldn’t do this in real life’ has never cut any ice with us!


Creating challenging and engaging training for leaders


In developing leadership training, create activities which allow team, rather than individual success. Whether or not you introduce a competitive element, delegates will tend to introduce a spirit of competition, but will tend to enjoy group success more than individual success. True leadership is achieved through partnership with others and is not an isolated activity. Effective leaders surround themselves with people who are better than they are in certain aspects of their work. Activities which allow individuals to dominate, to succeed in isolation or at others’ expense, tell entirely the wrong story. The best activities for leadership training demonstrate the need for engagement and involvement of others in complementary roles.


The stories you tell


We use a great deal of storytelling and metaphor in our training. Take immense care to establish the connections between the story and the practical application of the learning that comes out of the story. Despite the idea common in training literature that storytelling appeals to something very deep inside and develops us at a subconscious level, our own experience is that most people are simply not good at making connections between a story and their perception of reality and they will need to have the practical ‘meaning’ of a story spelt out.

Do use metaphor and story, but ground it in practicality through discussion and debrief.


Comfort zones


Many leaders we have trained are very comfortable in a small number of discrete areas. Like anyone else, left to their own devices, they will tend to revert to their areas of comfort. Devise activities and discussions which take them out of their comfort zones. In reality, the world is changing and many organisations in positions of competitive strength fail to gain competitive advantage because their leaders are unable to step away from the familiar. (In our experience, rather strangely, many leaders have little idea that competitive strength and competitive advantage are different. They assume that because they got it right last year, the same things will work again next year.) Whilst their actions have worked to develop a strong market position, the environment is constantly changing and simply continuing to do what they always did will not necessarily stand them in good stead for the future. This is a difficult message for many leaders to swallow and yet is vital for their continued development.

Choice

We are creatures of habit. Continual exposure to certain stimuli results in habitual responses. We often fail to stop, think and act, instead simply reacting. Effective leaders understand the nature of choice. A poor leader will tell you that certain behaviours demonstrated by others ‘make me angry’. We argue that whether or not one becomes angry is a personal choice. We present activities and discussions which focus around choice and help our delegates to understand the extent to which they genuinely exercise that choice in their leadership practice. Choice is ’bounded’ – that is, somewhat constrained by circumstance – but is often freer than our budding leaders have believed. But choice can come equally from an intuitive sense of what is right as from detailed factual analysis.

Learning from great leaders


A simple, but highly engaging activity is to show a rolling slideshow of great leaders from all walks of life – politics, business, entertainment, medicine – and ask small groups to select one or two leaders who they consider to be outstanding. Ask your delegates to enumerate the qualities and attributes which make those leaders so special. Then ask them to examine which of those qualities they themselves possess and what they would have to do differently, and how they would have to think differently in order to display those same characteristics.

Fun

Many leaders, under great pressure at work, forget that work is allowed to be fun. Help them, through your activities, to see how sometimes, letting go can yield better results than dry language and hard-headed analysis.

‘So what?’


Ultimately, if it doesn’t pass the ‘So what?’ test, your training will be deemed to have failed. Take real care here. We have produced what we believed to be fun, engaging, relevant training for a group of leaders and then been berated because of the apparent lack of practical value of the training. To us it abounded in practicality; to our delegates it was too abstract. We learnt a valuable lesson. However apparently engaging your training may be, it must always come back to practicality in the end. If there is no easily defined practical outcome in an activity, you need to work very hard to help your delegates to understand that it is about thinking, mindset and approach.

The best leaders understand the concept of ‘being’ as well as that of ‘doing’. Poor leaders believe that they must be ‘doing’ all the time. They will hound you to provide tools and techniques – any of which they can pick up on the Internet or in the business section of their local booksellers. They have, effectively, missed the point. Applying all the two-dimensional matrices and four-box models in the world will not make them good leaders. What happens inside their head will.

In conclusion


The most engaging training for leaders:

is designed to display leadership characteristics through a ‘wheels within wheels’ approach
stretches delegates beyond their comfort zones
includes time for (structured) reflection
establishes firmly the link between abstract theory and practical day-to-day work
helps delegates to understand their own limitations
helps delegates to understand the need to demonstrate their weaknesses selectively to others
helps them to see when competitiveness is, and is not, appropriate
helps them to understand the extent to which they simply react or stop, think and make a choice
allows your delegates to create vision, inspire each other and maintain the momentum needed to achieve goals
is fun
allows them to explore the attributes of other great leaders, to show them what might be possible
ultimately, holds a mirror up to them and shows them how they appear to others, warts and all.

From CIPD training Resources

Prof.Lakshman Madurasinghe