Leaders across your company are facing more complexity and challenges than ever before. Many are in the biggest roles they’ve ever had. They are expected to balance tensions between authority and autonomy, inspire through a compelling and clear vision, and delegate, coach and develop others. While delivering feedback, they are asked to hold people accountable, navigate continual change, and foster a climate of empathy, performance, and collaboration in a distributed and culturally diverse workforce. Whew!

leaders in a leadership class — *Participants in a leadership seminar*

As an HR or business leader, your role is to equip managers and senior leaders with the skills and resources to navigate all this noise and responsibility with confidence and enthusiasm. It’s a tall ask! Especially with the archaic “best practice” approach to leadership development programs: leadership development training conducted statically in a stuffy conference room where leaders sit for two to four hours digesting a bunch of information and handouts they never reference again.

The problem with this conventional model of development comes from the lack of internalizing the skills taught. This style was inherited from 19th century teaching styles. We all know the adage “practice makes perfect,” or how it’s sometimes conveyed today, “practice makes progress.” So, why do we keep thinking a two-hour workshop, or even a one-day offsite will transform our leaders in extraordinary ways overnight?

It won’t. It doesn’t.

Now is the time to flip the script. If you’re looking to cultivate new team habits, integrate learnings into the daily workflow of leaders, and shift their ways of thinking, you need to alter the focus of leadership development to sustainable behavior change.

How do transformative leadership development programs do this?

They establish a cyclical learning loop of awareness, insight, action, and support that hones new behaviors into productive habits.

1) Awareness

Behavior change starts with self-awareness. If leaders do not have a benchmark of where they are in their skill development, they will have no frame of reference from which to grow. The Institute of Leadership aptly quotes, “without self-awareness, your effectiveness will always be limited. You will be unable to properly balance all the conflicting demands made on you, or juggle them for the best outcome.”

Self awareness is important for leaders to understand their strengths and weaknesses, what styles are comfortable, and the ways or areas in which they may need to shift.

Here are a few questions to encourage self-awareness in your leaders:

What do you bring to the table to advance the team?
Where are you the most effective? The least?
How do others perceive you; your strengths and weaknesses?
How might your biases and preferences motivate your behavior?

The more intimately leaders know where they excel and the areas they can shore up, the better prepared they are to handle challenging interactions or difficult circumstances. Additionally, in areas of strength, they can be a resource and support to others. In areas of weakness, they can actively practice and proactively seek out additional help and resources.

It’s even more powerful when leaders understand and are clear about the expectations around leadership behaviors and values — what it means to be an effective leader at your company or organization. Developing more self-awareness can help leaders see where they might need to focus to improve how they’re showing up.

Quick Tip:

Personality tests like the DiSC, Caliper Profile, Birkman Method, or even the Gallup StrengthFinders, can be great resources for building benchmark self-awareness. These tests outline the leaders’ key character traits and how those traits show up in various instances. Many of these assessments also chart an individual's traits against those of their peers and teams, offering insight into similarities and differences, and the gap, in depth or breadth, between various traits.

To take self-awareness even deeper, consider using 360-degree feedback through assessments or interviews. Through this process peers, managers, and employees are asked to provide confidential, anonymous evaluations of the leader in question, offering keen insight into how that individual is perceived in the workplace around them. These insights are helpful in recognizing discrepancies between intent and perception, overcoming these misconceptions, and shaping new behaviors for more positive outcomes.

The Institute of Leadership also quotes, “As a result of your own self-awareness, you are in a better position to judge and adapt your leadership style as necessary. It also gives you a much better chance of understanding the biases and prejudices that you did not know that you had.”

Sustainable behavior change lies in this realm of adaptation—shifting approaches and styles of behavior to various team members and situations. As leaders learn, awareness is also key in recognizing what skills are working and what skills need to be reapproached to achieve the desired results.

2) Insight

So leaders now have awareness that the current approach isn’t working. Now what? This is where insight comes into play. Once leaders are aware of their behavior, it's time to introduce new skills and methods to approach things differently. Building insight is all about teaching frameworks, tools and practices leaders can use to shift and change their behavior (i.e. adaptation).

As explained by The Decision Lab, “Frameworks distill strategies for influencing human decisions into simple, portable mnemonic devices or acronyms. This makes it possible for complex, theoretical insights about how people think and act to make their way into the practices of organizations across every industry and environment.” Think of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis or SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals. These are common examples of frameworks that take a complex idea and distill it down into more approachable concepts that are easy to implement and remember.

Awareness helps managers to recognize their behaviors while insight equips them with the tools to tweak that behavior for new results.

Quick Tip:

Frameworks and models can be very broad or specific depending on the skill in question. Rarely will you find a one-size-fits-all solution. As you consider the proper resources to introduce, think about your specific learning objectives and outcomes, the gaps or areas of improvements you want to address, and the methods or formats that best suit the groups’ needs and preferences. The more relatable and applicable the tools and frameworks, the easier your managers can integrate the ideas into their daily action and achieve sustained behavior change.

Another key element of insight is reflection. Once you introduce a new idea, offer space for the participants to reflect on the new framework and how the concept applies to them and their teams.

Some sample reflection prompts include:

How can you implement this framework in your team(s)?
If you were to embody XYZ behavior, how would that look? How would that impact your teams?
Where do I have triggers?
Where am I meeting resistance?

When a leader finally has the map to see the path forward, Regroup calls these realizations the “A-HA” moments.

3) Action

Practice, practice, practice! New skills do not become lasting behaviors overnight, even with new insights, frameworks and tools. Often, leaders stumble and fall a few times in practice until they find the right approach that works for them and a given situation. Think about a time you attempted a new approach, how many tries did you take before becoming proficient? Managers and leaders need to try new behaviors and frameworks in a variety of different ways and with a variety of people to reach proficiency in a new skill.

Even then when we reach a level of skill proficiency, we require practice to turn new behaviors into predominant action or habits. According to Eduardo Sala and his psychology research at the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation and Training, “roughly 90 percent of new skills may be lost within a year if not reinforced by practical follow-ups or assessments.”

Quick Tip:

Traditional, prescriptive programs assume participants will take the learnings introduced in the session(s) and practice on their own. Instead, think about integrating an expectation of practice with accountability into the overall leadership development program, such as incorporating small group coaching following the workshops within a smaller cohort or 1:1 coaching with a boss or leadership coach.

A recent study by the Association for Talent Development found that:

Individuals who committed to someone they will take an action have a 65% change of following through on that action, and
Having a specific accountability appointment with someone to whom they’ve committed to increases the likelihood of action to 95%.

Follow-up coaching provides leaders with time to practice their learned skills and holds them accountable to practice and action, which in turn helps build the competency for sustainable results.

4) Support

*Managers participate in group coaching session*

Follow-up coaching is also largely beneficial in providing support to managers and leaders as they try out new ways of leading. Whether through a boss, learning cohort, or personal coach, coaching offers opportunity for leaders to ask for guidance and/or reinforcement of their struggles and successes in practice. Particularly in group coaching, the opportunity for leaders to share their experiences and gain insight from others strengthens internal relationships that can be critical in driving performance and results.

This is where the cyclical learning loop begins to turn. Practice builds new awareness around a skill. When managers share those successes and challenges, colleagues and coaches are able to offer support to maintain the momentum and new insights that in-turn require further practice and support.

Quick Tip:

When structuring coaching groups and interactions, consider a structure that recognizes and celebrates small wins. In a Harvard Business Review article on motivating people, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer state:

“When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. These big wins are great—but they are relatively rare. The good news is that even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. Many of the progress events our research participants reported represented only minor steps forward. Yet they often evoked outsize positive reactions.”

Integrating small wins into support efforts helps maintain the momentum of practice for sustained behavior change and concept internalization.

Group Coaching Versus Individual Coaching

When adding a coaching component to the larger leadership development program, take care to use an approach that best meets the needs of your teams and leaders. Both group coaching and individual coaching offer great benefits in building accountability for action, offering space to share frustration or concerns and solicit feedback, or celebrate small successes and achievements.

Individual coaching is 1:1 and customized specifically to the needs of the participant. As such, this approach can be highly effective for leaders and managers that have been recently promoted and need to adjust their performance to the specifics of the new role or executive leaders who handle situations that require more confidentiality. The 1:1 nature of the coaching offers opportunity for greater depth in personalized skill development. Individual coaching can also be more time consuming and cost prohibitive.

Group coaching, on the other hand, is more general and broad, offering solutions that support the majority of participants. Each participant has less time to share their personal experiences and solicit advice, however they are able to receive feedback and input from a greater variety of people and perspectives and pick up different insights from the experiences of others. The collaborative nature of group coaching helps to build a heightened sense of accountability when participants are beholden to the coach and their peers. The group approach also offers value by instilling a sense of community. As leaders learn together, they grow together, establishing an internal network that can extend well beyond the completion of the leadership development program.

Quick Tip:

The composition of group coaching cohorts can be tricky. Regroup has found the ideal group cohort includes a wide swath of managers and leaders from across the company in diverse areas of focus and expertise. With members from different teams, leaders feel more free to share their experiences and all learn from the spread of responsibilities across the company.

Whether group coaching or 1:1 coaching make the most sense for your teams, remember to establish clear goals and expectations for the coaching at the onset so both the coach and participant(s) know what the intended outcomes are, how best to work together and resolve any issues, and the level of engagement and participation that is required to get the most out of the exercise.

Conclusion

People leaders can no longer settle for the traditional model of one-off workshops. Shifting leadership behaviors and mindsets take a full cycle of building awareness, gaining insights, and taking action over a period of time, often with a structure of support to help them stay the course. Take full advantage of your team building and leadership development programs by integrating a cycle of learning to refine skill and establish sustainable transformation:

Effective leadership programs help leaders build awareness about their skills and areas of weakness, biases, and motivations.
Insight with frameworks and reflection enable leaders to visualize change in an approachable way.
Encourage practice and accountability to ingrain these learnings into the habit, leading to lasting results.
Follow-up coaching offers a place for support to work through roadblocks and celebrate small wins while sharing tactics and ideas that achieve results.

Only by changing the way leadership development is delivered, will organizations see new, lasting results to meet the heightened demands of the modern workplace.

Would you like help to level up your leadership development programs? We’re here for you! Click here to schedule a call.