Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
Over the last eight years, we have taken over 600 leaders out into the wilderness to teach leadership and team effectiveness. We have learned a lot, and we have also spent a lot of time studying the science of learning to continuously improve the design of our programs. Here are a few key lessons we have learned that you could try today!
What does learning leadership look like?
The gold standard of teaching leadership ought to be transfer of training. Decades ago, researchers and businesses realized that even after spending over 100 billion dollars on training in the US alone, people were not changing their behaviors at work. Quality transfer of training means that participants are able to recall key concepts and apply them effectively at work. At a higher level of transfer, people can generalize the training to other situations, a concept we lean on heavily in the experiential learning cycle. All told, training today does not succeed. About 10% of training fully transfers, and research provides some really great tools and ideas to help increase that dismal number.
Research points to several key factors leadership teachers can use to drive transfer.
Think about the typical emotional intelligence training you have endured in your career. You probably just found yourself selected for the training without a clearly defined need. I bet there were no quizzes or tests to help you actually memorize concepts. The training likely revolved around feel-good conversations instead of empirically backed learning theory. Your boss likely didn’t even know you took the training and certainly did not ask you to demonstrate learning back at work. Leadership training misses the mark on so many levels today because we want people to give us five-star ratings instead of actually learning.
Participants' cognitive ability and personality.
If people can remember information more effectively, actually want to learn the material, and perceive it as useful, they will learn more in a training opportunity. We work hard to tie everything we teach to practical use back at work – we call it actionable insights. For the most part, we avoid interesting but useless theoretical discussions. When you teach leadership, pay attention to who you invite to your class. If you cram the wrong people in to maintain funding, it won’t work well.
The design of the program (much more on that below).
Quality training requires a realistic training environment – we like mountains and thunderstorms because they tend to capture people’s attention and require real participation. Smart people have been looking at learning science for a long time, reading some books, and engaging in teaching expertise as well as leadership knowledge. To start, check out Make it Stick and Small Teaching. Sign up for a critical thinking newsletter and a college teaching forum. Knowing a lot about leadership does not make you a good leadership teacher!
Conducive work environment.
When people have support (we offer implementation coaching), opportunities to practice (we use online micro courses with practical application steps), and manager engagement, transfer of training is much more likely.
Research also clearly shows that small periodic nudges lead to more learning than mass practice, which is why we follow up training with coaching, micro-courses, and short reminders about the material via email and Whatsapp groups on a monthly basis.
Teaching people to lead: Fundamentals
It turns out that academics have been deeply interested in how people learn for a long time. We are frankly surprised that more leadership development firms are not explicitly using the bulk of this research to drive more quality learning. Here are two key concepts we lean on as we develop and deliver curriculum.
Bloom's Taxonomy
All good educators know and leverage Bloom’s Taxonomy. In short, we go through steps as we master the material, and we can’t skip them. We first need to be able to remember the basic terms and concepts, but facilitators fear making students upset by quizzing, yes cold calling, participants so we skip that step. An in-depth philosophical conversation about psychological safety is worthless if people can’t define the term simply, and training rarely holds participants accountable to that level of recall. Remembering is also critical to making changes in the organization. If at the next level, everyone in the organization does not share an understanding of what psychological safety means, how could you have a group conversation about it? As you move up the taxonomy, applying concepts and critically thinking about when and where they should be applied, your training will eventually enable strategic leaders to create psychological safety that aligns with your culture and strategy. Typically, we just give these leaders a 90-minute workshop and expect them to skip to the end of the taxonomy though. As you create programs, keep Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind. Everyone else in education does!
Multiple Intelligences
Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind brought a revelation to learning. In short, people have different ways of knowing and understanding. The more of these intelligences an educator can leverage, the more effectively people pick up the concepts. Gardner defines understanding as the ability to apply knowledge in one domain to another completely different domain. For example, a leader might take data and graphs from a workplace satisfaction survey and translate it into a compelling strategic story.
The key with multiple intelligences or learning styles is not to try to tailor training to participants’ preferences, but rather to use many of them to help a participant develop understanding. A typical lesson with us might include some reflection time (interpersonal), sharing stories (verbal), graphing a concept on a mini whiteboard (mathematical), crowdsourcing a graphic model of the concept (spatial), and then engaging in small group practice sessions while moving through the woods or down a river (kinesthetic). It’s no accident that we bounce around different ways of knowing a subject. This helps all of our participants learn more effectively and frankly makes the training more interesting and fun.
Teaching leadership (or anything) best practices
There is no shortage of fascinating studies on education. Here are a few pro tips from the experts to jump-start your programs.
Retrieval
We don’t learn by talking about concepts or highlighting articles. We learn by needing to retrieve the concept from memory, thereby literally strengthening a neural network to make it easier for our brain to recall the information later.
Make connections
People learn by making connections. Never teach anything in isolation. Once people can recall the basics, start asking how they connect to other key concepts.
Spread it out
Mass practice does not work, but we tend to prefer it as learners. Instead, teach a little of one concept, move to another, and then revisit the first. Layering lessons intentionally takes a lot of work on your part, but it leads to exponentially better outcomes. Spreading it out also means teaching a bit at a time over the years. Don’t teach trust once for director-level leaders and then forget about it. Those leaders could see trust in a completely different way as executives, and they deserve another chance to consider trust in your leadership development track.
So what’s the goal when we teach leaders?
The missing piece for most us, myself included, is demanding recall. It’s uncomfortable to ask a senior leader to define psychological safety half an hour after you teach it. Chances are they, like a college freshman, will look at you with a blank stare. This hurts you because you thought you taught it so well. It hurts them because they don’t know, and that’s an uncomfortable position for a senior leader. I have started doing this a lot, and you’ll get used to it. So will they. It helps a lot to laugh about it and explain in detail why you’re dragging everyone through the intellectual mud. When you point out that it’s wasted money and time for people to leave without being able to recall the information, senior leaders are much more receptive to being quizzed.
After that, you should always be driving toward transfer of training. To do this, use Bloom’s Taxonomy and Gardner’s intelligences to start. Check out Priya Parker’s Art of Gathering to supercharge the design of your trainings. Then do everything you can to build a learning network in your organization so that the concepts you teach don’t stop when people leave your workshop. Give people implementation coaching, give leaders basic recall questions, and inform bosses of what they should expect and ask for after their people go to your training. The more the organization expects the skills you teach, the more you’ll change behavior, and hopefully that’s what you’re after!
