Think about the Leadership Development in a similar way to Technical Skills
Whist this may cause uproar in the ranks of those who have spent their career developing the mystique that surrounds the dark arts of “leadership and management development”, the truth is that every principle of (really good) technical development can be very effectively applied to improve leadership development.
• Super clear inputs and outputs - How to measure training effectiveness? Easy! Don’t bother; ROI of training is a defensive justification. You’ll spend more time trying to ring fence measurement than you do developing people. Form a deep partnership with the senior stakeholders and measure the objectives through the real world performance of their people, that is all they care about and so should you.
• Perfectly timed training – You wouldn’t train your operators on equipment they don’t use would you? So don’t develop skills your managers they don’t need yet. (Strategic business planning, P&L, CBA’s anyone?) The Middle East is renowned for giving senior job titles to junior responsibility managers. Develop what they actually need.
• Focused specific skills – Would you certify operators on 30 pieces of equipment in 5 days? I certainly hope not! So why do we have programs on the market from highly reputable vendors and management schools that routinely do this for our managers? (My personal record find was 104 management tools touched on in 4 x 2 day workshops!) Your technical training colleagues would focus on no more than 2 skills at a time until they were practiced and embedded. I strongly suggest we should too.
• 10%:20%:70%
Really effective technical development “trains” a specific skill for no more than 10% of the planned period. Then double the trainer time (20%) is planned to provide supervised, coached support in the real world. Do you really believe Leadership Development requires any less?
Supervised implementation is time consuming and less measurable than a delivered ‘course’, but absolutely essential for effective implementation. Observing team meetings, sitting in on appraisals, project reviews, planning sessions etc. all following immediately on from the “10% training” makes all the difference in embedding effective implementation (just ask your technical trainers).
• The Mastery cycle – Only in recent years has it become widely accepted that learning is actually an interactive behavioral and social process, rather than an individual one. Technical training has intuitively known this for centuries, placing competent young people alongside the Masters, for them to absorb the subtleties of their trade beyond the mere skill set.
Supervisors who then become managers accept a PM scorecard responsibility from day 1, to partner in capability development of the next generation of supervisors.
• Real world – reality check – A good technical training team is 100% aligned with the way the operation really works. Gone are the days in any leading commercial business, where a disconnected HR T&D trains an unworkable ideal theory, leaving operations to “wise up” a candidate on how it really works. Good leadership development is no different. A solid understanding of how it really works (the good, the bad and the ugly) behind closed doors and on the shop floor is a fundamental requirement to be effective in designing meaningful development of your future leaders.
So is Blue Collar development really the same as Management and Leadership? Well, perhaps there may be a few differences! But if you are investing a big spend on developing your leaders and are just not seeing the desired outcomes back in the workplace, maybe consider dropping into your local technical training department for a coffee and see how they get their outcomes!
Adrian Waite has been developing, coaching and “training” managers in multiple industries, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for the past 20 years. He is the General Manager for Learning and Development with AMP Terminals for Africa and the Middle East, coaching senior leaders and developing the offerings and effectiveness of around 20 training managers and co-ordinators in diverse locations.
Leadership