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Should Senior Leaders Attend Their Peoples’ Training?

May 27, 2014

Blog Topic

Senior Leaders

Senior leaders tend to require their people to be trained without attending themselves.

There are various stated reasons for this:

  • They are too busy.
  • They’ve already been trained in those areas (albeit some time ago).
  • They are not the ones who need development.
  • They aren’t sufficiently connected with the people being trained.
  • They don’t want to be vulnerable.
  • It’s not appropriate for leaders to train with staff.
  • They believe they don’t need to learn the content because either they don’t do what the training is aimed at, or they operate at a different level.

What do you think are the most acceptable of the reasons above?

Here’s why they should attend, if not the entire program, at least the opening, the middle and the conclusion:

  • They show their support and commitment to the program
  • They can influence by example the participants to engage in the program.
  • They get the core spirit, terminology and currency of the learning to share with the participants.
  • They get to assess first-hand the effectiveness of the training.
  • They get a great opportunity to engage with the participants in a sound relationship building manner.
  • The evidence shows that the training is more effective and lasting.
  • They can better coach and support the participants to embed the learning.
  • Better leaders go first or together with their people.

Negative Actual Example

The client is a public company that delivers services to the resource industry.  The program was targeted at supervisors of the teams delivering the services and the content was about leadership attitudes and behaviours, particularly about dealing effectively with unacceptable behaviour and performance.

The senior leaders wanted the program to remedy the spate of service complaints from their clients.

The senior leaders didn’t attend despite the strong recommendation that they should.

Whilst the supervisors were delighted with what they learned they complained that they weren’t being supported by their leaders when they tried to execute better performance management.

Eventually the good supervisors resigned, the remainder returned to the standards tolerated by the senior leaders who were significantly disengaged from their direct reports and the service teams.

Positive Actual Example

When the same program was delivered to another organisation for similar reasons and the senior leaders did attend and support the program, here’s what happened:

  • The supervisors were delighted with the program and felt supported by their leaders who fully understood what the supervisors would do to execute better performance management.
  • The working relationships and communication between the supervisors and the leaders improved.
  • The supervisor retention rate improved.
  • Performance and productivity improved.
  • The workplace culture improved.

Senior leaders can become the most disconnected people in the organisation – too removed from the people who actually make the brand and the revenue.  Training participation is a great opportunity to re-engage.

What do you think?

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