It makes sense to invest in training – employees are a company’s most valuable asset. Effective training programs can increase revenue, improve corporate culture, and establish processes that streamline productivity.

According to Trainingmag.com, 58 percent of organizations spend more than $1,000 per learner on training for senior leadership—compared to just 39 percent for high-potentials and 32 percent for mid-level management.

Why then, do so many businesses fail to implement the corporate training methods and practices covered during the workshops?

What can you do to make sure your corporate training investment is money well spent?

1. Follow up

Baruch College conducted a study several years ago to determine the effectiveness of training follow up. The results were astonishing.

 In the study, two groups of employees from the same organization were given three days of training. After the training, the productivity of one group was evaluated, revealing an improvement of 22%.

The second group received eight weeks of follow up training, centered on specific skills covered in the training. At the end of the eight weeks, their productivity increased by 88%.

Your company may not be equipped to provide eight weeks of additional training after a workshop, but the fact remains: individuals who receive follow up show a marked improvement in retention and performance.

What type of follow up should you do to affect lasting change after corporate training within your organization?

2. Develop an Action Plan

To be effective, there should be a clearly defined purpose for the training.

Is it to improve sales techniques? Introduce new technology? Create a sense of teamwork?
Before the training, develop an objective that specifies what you wish to see as a result of the training. Inform your staff of the intended results, and have them write an action plan based on what they learned. Refer back to their action plan to evaluate their progress in that area.

3. Performance Evaluation

Individualized meetings with your team members gives you the opportunity to reinforce the training material and discuss their action plan to implement the new skill.  These short meetings can be beneficial to clear up any misunderstandings, review the objectives and evaluate progress on their action plan.  Schedule short meetings to keep them focused and productive.

4. Practice Sessions

One of the most effective ways to learn a new skill is to practice it. Studies indicate that even one episode of practice can improve performance by as much as 50% over people who simply review the material. Offer role playing opportunities, ask open-ended questions or use real world situations to allow team members to reinforce what they’ve learned.

5. Offer Feedback

Celebrate success and offer constructive criticism to help employees stay motivated as they work to implement new skills.  Feedback can focus on both team improvement and individual achievements, and allow management to highlight the progress that has been made. 

A quality feedback loop that provides consistent opportunity to practice, evaluate and adjust can be essential to maximizing the effectiveness of trainings.

Training can be an essential part of growth for your company.  The key to successful trainings is using consistent, planned follow up to reinforce the material covered during training sessions.

Next Steps:
All My Big Idea™ workshops have an optional follow-up module to reinforce the learning gained. Learn more here.

Often, business owners are reluctant to invest time, effort and funds into a leadership development program.

Running a business can get expensive, and team training or leadership development programs can be costly. After the soaring costs of payroll and other expenses, adding an additional expense for training seems excessive.  Isn’t it enough that employees are paid a fair wage?

Yes, and no.

A fair wage is one of the fundamental cornerstones of successful companies. It is an essential element of successful companies. However, companies that want to go farther and reach new levels of success must go beyond simply paying their employees.

Why waste my money on leadership development for employees who may leave the company?

The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that turnover costs to an organization reach nearly 33% of an employee’s total compensation. The main reason given for turnover? Poor management.

While there is a chance that employees will leave, providing additional training and leadership development will increase the chance that they stay. In addition, employees appreciate the investment and demonstrate loyalty towards a company that invests in their growth.

Why take time away from being productive for programs that are ineffective?

Leadership training is big business. More than $170 billion is spent annually on leadership training in the US, and many corporate leaders see little results.

Taking employees away from their job responsibilities to participate in silly exercises compounds the problem. Why don’t more leadership training programs result in better leaders?

Training that focuses on processes rather than leadership skills do little to develop forward thinking. Don’t settle for over-priced social events. Research effective leadership development programs and invest with a company that has a proven track record of results

The Value of Investment
Leadership training is an investment – but does it pay off? When can you expect to see a ROI? What benefit does leadership training actually provide?

1. Improves Corporate Culture
Horror stories of toxic work environments are abound. There are managers who demean their employees, controlling individuals who refuse to allow anyone else to make decisions or others who are consumed with paranoia who have a negative impact on their department.

These individuals can have a detrimental effect on the culture of the company, causing a drop-in productivity, a loss of revenue and high staff turnover.

One of the best way to cultivate a workplace culture that reflects the values and ideals of the corporation is to promote from within. Through a systematic leadership development program, you can instill the principles of your culture in current employees and help them rise to leadership positions from within, giving your company a consistent, positive culture.

The culture of your company is too important to leave to chance; investing in effective leadership development will provide you with long term results that can impact your bottom line in a positive way.

2. Attracts and Retains Qualified Employees
The most common reason given for employee turnover is dissatisfaction with their supervisor. Improving the leadership skills of current employees improves the morale within the company, which helps to retain top employees.

In addition, great leaders attract great people. A successful leadership development program reduces the costs associated with hiring and training new employees by reducing the rate of employee turnover.

3. Increase Revenues
In spite of the overwhelming evidence that leadership development improves corporations, many business owners simply want to talk numbers.

After all, if there is no revenue, the business won’t last. Is it possible to quantify the benefits of leadership training? The Global Coaching Client study discovered that an investment into leadership does pay off – in a big way.

"Past clients have shared with us that after their My Big Idea™ Workshop, their teams are more collaborative, focused and respectful of each other goals and objectives." Shaila Kasmani, Managing Director, My Big Idea™

The typical company that reported numbers experienced a median return of 700%. According to these results, the average company can expect a return of seven times their initial investment into leadership training.

Have we convinced you to take another look at corporate training and leadership development for your company? Contact us to see how we're a bit different and way more effective.

What does it mean to lead your team to accomplish professional goals?
What does it mean to have a team that follows you?
What does it mean to have a team you can truly trust?

It starts with you, but not in the way you think. You need to provide your team with psychological safety if they are going to be effective for you.

Why?
What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is another mind-blowing concept I learned at the Harvard conference, Leading High Growth Businesses. When I say “another,” the first of many was about leading a high growth team the next was about failure (but not in the ‘standard’ sense, please, read my article on this) .

Psychological safety is the need… absolute need for your team to know they are safe in your company. They need to feel safe to voice their opinions, share insights and even admit mistakes without being fearful of being blamed for their action of sharing the information.

This is a must if you are going to move forward and really make things happen for your business. 

Here’s why:

For businesses to really thrive today you need to:
Experiment
Problem solve
Be bold enough to embark on market creation
Innovate
Embrace diversity (not just race/gender, also ideas)
Cross train in multiple roles (no more “get out of my sand box!”)

Did any of those six-listed start to get you a little anxious?  These six items, even one of these can cause a fair big of disorganization and change around the office.  Change will ruffle feathers in some, be welcome by others, and cause a few to roll their eyes and batten down the hatches until all the “change” is over.

It will cause the politeness to rub off and will most likely nudge a few to speak out. If you’re really going to change things, you need to have a team on board that will go with you and support your charge.

Think about this. Our job as leaders, entrepreneurs, the dreamers, the risk takers is to paint the picture of our vision for our team to get behind. We have to take our magical thinking and emotionally connect with our team so they can see where we are going and how they’d have a part to play in getting us there.

We need their help on this new road to the unknown. It really is as if we are conquering new lands. And as we do this, we can’t always rely on the old road map nor on the old behaviours.

Our new travels will spark something in one team member and rub another the wrong way. In order to get the best out of them during this time, they need to feel safe to voice their opinions and suggestions and recommendations.

They need to be able to voice these things that may be negative (they might be protecting the company), may be off the wall and previously unthought-of, they might be the next best idea that takes yours, dear leader and suggests a better way of getting to where you wanted to go.

Do you see how all this is valuable, priceless?

It can only happen if your team knows they are safe. What does safe mean vis a vis the psychological safety net??

It means they will not be blamed for their suggestions, they will not be reprimanded, made fun of or told they are “not a team player.” They will be thanked for voicing their ideas and these ideas will be taken into consideration. Seriously. Not lip service, seriously.

Having a psychologically safe environment isn’t something you do overnight. Nor is it something you proclaim like the next catchy business term of the moment. It is something that has to be felt and trusted and consistent.

It is a change of behaviour for most teams. It needs to come from the top, be supported all the way down and be consistent. It needs to be tested out by a few team members to see if it is really “true”. Only then can you truly thrive with a team that has your back as your business moves forward.

Next Steps:
My Big Idea workshops help teams create and support psychologically safety in their company as a matter of how they interact. Learn more here.

The title sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?

Those who know me, know I like to travel far and wide. You’d be forgiven for thinking I actually participated in a tourist expedition to climb the tallest mountain in the world!

The Mount Everest Climb was a shocking simulation team exercise I participated in at the Harvard course  called Leading High Growth Businesses. 

I described it as shocking because of what I learned about what keeps teams from the top.

The outcome and the learnings from this exercise are not far from my thoughts all this time later.

READY TO CLIMB
Like most simulation games, we were put into teams, assigned roles and challenged to win. My team was no different. Made up of other business leaders, we were all willing and ready to be the first team to the top.

My role was of the team physician. I was responsible for my team being healthy and able to make the climb each day. I relied on what I knew to be warning signs of fatigue, frostbit and other dangers, but I also needed my team to tell me if they weren’t well.

Let me give you the shocker – we failed – we “died” before we made it to the top, we didn’t even make it to the first camp beyond base camp. However, the reasons we failed are not (I assure you) obvious reasons or dramatic reasons.

I had a winning team:
We were each capable at handling the role/tasks assigned
We each had a good mindset about our abilities
We each wanted to be on the team
We did not fight with each other, there was no control issues or power struggle
We had enough supplies

READY TO FAIL
Here’s why we failed – we kept information from each other. But we did it unknowingly.

What does that even mean?

Well, here’s what it wasn’t… it wasn’t a case of “Joe is really getting on my nerves so I’m not briefing him on my part”.

What it was, and this is so obvious to me now, was that we all had information we didn’t think was important or valuable enough to our goal of climbing Mount Everest. So, we unknowingly didn’t share it.

When I say we did this unknowingly…we really did. We unknowingly kept information to ourselves that seemed of very little use to anyone. We all have this kind of information, information we know but either think it is common sense, easy, simple, obvious, or not really “information”.

Here are some of the things we kept from each other (and why - as explained during our debriefing).

We made data entry errors (remember, this was all a computer simulation game) and didn’t know we made an error/typo until later.

We did not realize how that typo affected the information we would get next or our team members would get next. When we realized how our data entry errors may have affected our team members’ information, we didn’t say anything because we were not sure what exactly the negative effects were.

Each of us were what you may call type A. The desire each of us had to make it to the top made us ignore warning signs of ill health or dangerous weather changes. Although we were supposed to, we didn’t advise each other of our low oxygen, how we felt each day or other news that could deter our mission.

We had two chiefs – when the person in charge of the expedition got sick, there was not an official hand over to someone else. A team member decided to step up unofficially and assumed two roles, then proceeded to not do either role all that well.

We were too focused on the end game, summiting the tallest mountain in the world, making us delusional about each step of our progress. We powered through thinking we could get to the top on enthusiasm, not skill. We thought enthusiasm could overcome health problems, low oxygen levels and inclement weather patterns.

Now, think about what your team members know that they are not sharing because they don’t think it is valuable enough because you are leading the charge to your own Mt. Everest summit.

You can only get this hidden knowledge out of your team if you know how to ask and they know how to share and feel safe to do so. Not physically safe, but psychologically safe.

Think about some of the obvious things you know how to do and by holding this “obvious” information back from your team – it’s keeping you from helping them get all of you to the top. Yes, the leader is responsible for this behaviour too.

GET TO THE TOP
Here are the ways to unlock the valuable information everyone in your company has. Think about how to get your team members to do this with everyone on your team and all the teams in your business:

Share goals – share what you are working on and how you do it and what might be getting in your way.

To you, your process or what your responsible to do each day may seem obvious. To others, they may be hearing this information for the first time and have had no idea about an area of your business they’ve never been exposed to.

I remember sharing with a colleague how every closed sale for one of my best sales people took 4 calls and 6 emails, he had it down to a science. My colleague was stunned that sales didn’t close on the first meeting (she, as you can imagine, wasn’t in sales). She told me that she immediately had so much more empathy for the persistence it took to close a sale after hearing this story.

Identify priorities – with everything feeling like a priority today (and let’s be honest, some people treating everything like a priority) the team has to know what their 3-5 priorities are. They can better focus their efforts when they know where the team is headed.

Listen – not just waiting to talk, really listen to hear what is and isn’t being said.

Be willing to share – this comes after “listen” because often you can hear what another really needs and how to help them. Share what you know, share your insights, share your expertise. Particularly share the things that seem really easy and somewhat “common sense” to you -  these are the things that are golden to others.

Know each other’s goals – this is different than sharing your goals and assuming everyone heard you. Being able to say “I know Ralph needs to increase sales by 2 clients a month, Jim need to get inventory down by 3% each month…” is knowing your team member’s goals.  You’d be surprised how you’ll start to see opportunities and think of ideas to help your team members, the more you know what they’re working towards.

It’s not the big things we do wrong, it’s the little things we don’t get right that keep us from leading the team to where we need to go. Consider implementing these five steps into your team process this quarter

"Team Building" has become part of corporate vernacular in recent years. Parodied in movies, mocked in skits, and often thought of as unavoidable, the use of team building activities seems to have been relegated to just another item on a human resource department checklist. Despite their less than ideal reputation, however, team building activities can be some of the most important events your corporation hosts.

WHY ARE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES SO IMPORTANT?
Effectively done, team building can increase collaboration, build trust, reduce conflict, and encourage communication. For corporate teams that are looking for ways to maximize their talent, these activities can improve the bottom line, engage employees and foster a positive corporate culture.

Strong teams lead to a stronger company, which leads to enhanced customer care and higher profits. If you want to improve the culture of your company, want to maintain a positive culture, or simply want to improve your customer relations, team building is one of the most successful methods you can use.

WHEN SHOULD TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES TAKE PLACE?
Depending on the size and makeup of your team, scheduling quarterly team building events may be sufficient to maintain a cohesive team. For other companies, monthly team building activities are necessary to maintain team harmony. Mind you, in sales driven companies, even the daily sales meeting could be considered a team building activity. Each company must determine their own team building needs.

Pivotal moments within the business may lend themselves to team building activities as well. Opportunities for team building can occur after corporate mergers that result in the addition of new team members, the hiring of new employees, the loss of key team members or after the company has experienced a setback.

Whenever the makeup of your corporate team has altered, a team building exercise can be appropriate. To be effective, however, team building should happen regularly, through both formal and informal means.

WHAT KIND OF TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES ARE EFFECTIVE?

Formal activities include:
Professional Development. Schedule trainings, workshops, or other professional opportunities for your team to attend together. If possible, arrange for the workshop to take place outside of the work environment, allowing for team members to meet on neutral territory, away from the distractions of the office.

Team Building Seminars. Organizations that offer team building activities and workshops can be beneficial when used appropriately. Contrived team building activities can backfire, however. (Remember ‘trust falls’?) Use common sense and take the personality of your team members into account while planning any targeted team building activities. A ropes course may sound like fun to you but be terrifying to other members of your team. Ensure that the activity will be beneficial to everyone who will participate.

Informal activities include:
Volunteering. Working together outside the workplace is both personally rewarding and is a great way to support a community effort. Select a cause that your entire team can rally around, and spend a day supporting their endeavors. It creates opportunities for team members to spend time together in a more relaxed environment and is something everyone can be proud to participate in.

Field Trips. Spending time together outside of work is a great way to see team members in a new light. The trip can be work related – a tour of a major supplier’s facility, for example – or just for fun – taking in a local spring training game. Scheduling an event that gives people the chance to mingle with other team members is an easy, cost effective way of team building.

Corporate Events. Hosting a corporate picnic or BBQ is another informal means of team building that can be fun and effective. Provide opportunities for physical activities (inter-department kickball, anyone?) that team members can participate in, as well.

TEAM BUILDING IN ACTION
Since business seems to take a lot of interest from the sports world regarding team building, winning and mental strength, this story may drive home the effectiveness of team building activities.

In the late 1970’s, American gymnastics teams were considered mediocre on the global stage. There had been modest gains in Olympic achievement; the Americans were beginning to win medals for individual events around the world.

As a team, however, they were no match for the stronger, better trained foreigners. That is, until 1982. That year, the Karolyis opened a gym specifically geared toward gymnasts. Defectors from Romania, this couple had achieved notoriety with the stunning success of Nadia Comenichi and their subsequent defection to the United States. Their place in gymnastics history was secured, however, when they took a group of gymnasts and turned them into a powerhouse team.

Here is how they did it:

Tasked with coaching the American female gymnasts, they set about to perform what business analysts would recognize as team building activities.

To begin, they selected individuals who were at the top of their game, skill-wise. These were athletes who excelled in their individual events, now they simply needed to become a team. To accomplish this, the Karolyis brought the girls to their ranch in Texas, where they would spend several weeks, sequestered away from outside distractions.

During this time, they would work together, play together and test each other, forming bonds based on their appreciation of each other’s skills. They focused on one common goal: win the gold medal. Over the course of several years, they would continue to get together regularly in anticipation of the upcoming Olympic games.

The gymnasts, equipped with new uniforms, a new team unity and a new resolve, were ready. Their efforts paid off. In 1996, the United States brought home the gold medal in gymnastics, and a new era of Team USA gymnastics was born.

Without their purposeful, targeted activities designed to build a cohesive team, would the USA have won a gold medal? Perhaps. Their strategic efforts, however, revolutionized gymnastics in the US and transformed it into a team sport for the first time in the country’s history.