Leadership Training continues to be a tricky subject area to navigate. Companies are in desperate need of leaders that understand the needs of their business and its employees, but that's not an easily accomplished feat. It requires having an effective corporate training program in place.

Leadership Training Challenges

Historically, leadership training has fallen short. Harvard Business Review conducted a study in the 1980s which determined that leadership training programs did not, in fact, facilitate organizational change. Surprisingly, the companies that began major transformations with leadership training lagged behind companies that tried other avenues. The problem they found was that the training content didn't help leaders create significant behavioral changes among their employees.

Even well-trained and motivated employees couldn't apply their new knowledge and skills they learned when they returned to their teams, which were stuck in their old habits. In short, the leaders who underwent the training had less power to change the system surrounding them than that system had to shape them.

Traditional instructor-led leadership training has been criticized as overly general. Therefore, it’s more important to step away from a generalized approach to leadership. Though general management skills may be of note, leaders are more likely to move forward when they are given a concrete plan of action and understand the benefits of that plan.

Despite some harsh truths behind this study, leadership training has come a long way in the past few decades. Methods such as behavioral road mapping have become the norm for successful leadership training, pulling away from one-size-fits-all approach and moving toward specific behavior-based training. Using behavior-based methods allows for the measurement and analysis of tangible results, offering both businesses and individuals the performance insights they need to grow.

Road Mapping

Behavioral analysis provides a roadmap for where the company has been and where it will continue to go, so it's integral to the success of any business.

The Association for Behavior Analysis International asserts the science behind behavioral road mapping has the power to change corporate training for the better. That is to say, by understanding the habits of your team, you can better understand what job practices are most beneficial to the training strategy. However, this kind of analysis should be based on observable and measurable behaviors. Targeting measurable behaviors for your leadership training will most easily translate into behavior change within your learner population.

Measurable Behaviors

A vision of the learner journey for leaders becomes clear when you can first outline intended behavioral outcomes. Moreover, the content-optimized training that creates impactful behavioral change will be best served by first mapping out existing patterns of performance.

Aubrey Daniels International, a company driven by their passion for safety and leadership training, supports this idea, suggesting that identifying concrete, ideal behaviors provides the catalyst for company change. Their approach: make sure that the behaviors they identify are specific and observable, common to all high-performing employees, and transferrable for further training purposes.

One of our clients, a Fortune 500 insurance company, used road mapping to identify behaviors that had a direct relationship to revenue generation. For instance, consistently planning and scheduling services more than a week ahead and reviewing insurance authorizations on a regular basis could successfully increase revenue and schedule adherence when case managers and supervisors emphasized these critical behaviors.

Barriers to Behavioral Change

Task analysis requires honesty around the effectiveness of ones’ habits. Moreover, making performance improvements require changing those habits. But there can be several barriers to behavioral training, including:
1. Unclear direction on strategy and values
2. Lack of personal commitments to change
3. Inadequate time and attention to leadership training
4. A lack of coordination across departments, regions, etc.

Conclusion

Though resistance to change to a degree may be unavoidable, the direct benefits of a well-designed behavior-based training outweigh the challenges. When done right, leadership training can target and maintain the exact patterns of behavior that contribute the most to overall success. As with most initiatives, change has to come from the top down. So, if leaders are the first to change, then they will be better equipped to promote the larger organizational changes needed to drive business goals forward.