Why Most Development Spend Produces Attendance Not Change

During my military and corporate careers, I attended a leadership development course at least once a year. Since becoming a consultant, I have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my own professional development. I am a learning addict! One thing I have noticed is that most of the people on these courses rarely see a return on their investment – if they even track it. I made it my mission to find out, explain why, and then fix it.

The average leadership development program normally involves a group of leaders at varying levels of ability and experience, and with a unique set of challenges, being selected to head off on a course and being taught content about being a better leader. There is sometimes a bit of role-playing or suchlike. It certainly isn’t contextualized to your team because there are leaders from all across the business or worse, strangers in the room with you. There usually isn’t a focus on application, reflection, and integration.

At the same time, you see your inbox stacking up with emails from your team, your boss, and your customers – triggering stress responses that neurologically impact your ability to remember and integrate what is being taught.

After the course ends, you head back to the office and are expected to incorporate everything you have learned at a theoretical level, into your own team’s practical context; often with very little support to help you with this application step. It’s like being taught the rules and history of boxing, and then being sent into the ring to fight – you may get punched in the face and that will certainly discourage you! You need examples and practice to be successful, not just theory.

You probably also don’t have much headspace to implement what you learned around your busy day job. When you get back you most likely have days full of meetings. You have inboxes full of approvals and requests, and you’re now even further behind because you were away on a course. This leads to the money spent on your development being wasted, you being increasingly burned out, and your team becoming even less engaged. Indeed a recent US-sourced article believes up to $50Bn per year is wasted in exactly this way.

The “Ways of Working” program is different because we partner with leaders and their teams together to help you build the new culture and way of working that you and your team aspire to, based specifically on your context. We start with data collection so everyone has a really clear picture of where the team is at – which we compare with the results at the end of the program.

The program is specifically designed to build trust and connection which leads to measured performance shifts. We bring people together for three action-packed modules which are delivered over 3-4 months. We space them out because you need time to try and learn from the experiments you run.

Instead of you having to do the heavy lifting, our facilitators work with the team to help them integrate the new ways of working whilst you are discussing the things that are going to shift the dial for your team The difference becomes apparent almost immediately – conversations are high in engagement and drive to change the things that need to be addressed.

Once each of the three modules is done, you are given a roadmap of things that need to be discussed in your next few team meetings, so you have structure to follow. Our coaching team offers you separate support sessions if you need help approaching one of the topics or just need a sounding board on the best way to have a conversation. We focus on getting teams to practice the new ways of working before they leave the “room” and your role is to keep momentum and accountability.

We find this shift to the leader becoming a participant in the room, listening to what’s being said, contributing where appropriate, and connecting with your team at a meaningful level makes all the difference. The approach has a much higher success rate for everyone involved and accelerates the process of high-performance team formation.

The other benefit we offer you is an invitation to join our monthly Global Leadership Mastermind where you can connect with other leaders from varied industries and locations to share ideas about what does and doesn’t work in your approach to leadership. It’s a game-changer because suddenly you have a new network of advisors on tap, and can benefit from the wisdom of other senior leaders in similar positions to you, all of who are experiencing the same challenges you have.

Ways of Working is all about helping you to create a team culture that changes the game in terms of performance and that other people want to be part of; all for the cost of one recruitment fee. If you’d like to learn more about how we do it or dive deeper into the methodology, book a call and we can discuss how our program can support your team to become more agile, resilient, and high-performing for the future.

Speak soon,

Jimmy

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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