Training Resilient Leaders During Times of Change

Today’s leaders must lead differently

“Every aspect of this business is changing daily. Compound this with limited leadership training and a millennial employee base and you end up failing to lead… when it matters most.”

 

So opened my first interview with a Managing Director who I’ll call Dana. The sense of frustration grew as we continued: “We’re in a period of extreme growth. How do I lead people in that kind of environment? I mean, how do I effectively manage underperformance when I’m always putting out fires?”
 
What Dana experienced isn’t unusual: far from it. Many leaders face rapid-fire change and find themselves constantly reacting to shifts in client needs, staffing and regulatory frameworks. Most are trying to build more responsive cultures and consequently, Learning and Development specialists are looking for innovative approaches to training.
 
Why? Because leaders like Dana play a key role in demonstrating behaviors like innovation, collaboration, accountability and trust. Modeling the right culture is especially important during crucial conversations.

But change doesn’t come easily. Dana and her leadership colleagues had already completed a series of powerful workshops on topics like difficult conversations, accountability, and coaching but they admitted to some discomfort applying the applying what they learned to tough conversations with workers and peers. Faced with crucial conversations, most admitted they forgot what they’d learned and fell into old, not-so-effective habits.
 
In truth, as my interviews continued, many of Dana’s co-workers confessed that they found these difficult conversations to be uncomfortable or anxiety-provoking. They were hesitant to engage in them or avoided them completely. Others struggled with specifically how they should model leadership behaviors during those conversations.
 
Dana spoke candidly about her own challenges: “The leadership course we took taught us a lot about collaboration, accountability and trust but it was all ‘head-knowledge’. I walked out of the class and into a crisis and had no idea what to do or say.”
 
In the end, it became clear that the new crucial conversations learning solution we built would have to accomplish two goals: 1) bridge the gap between knowledge and day-to-day practice; and, 2) result in a lasting skill improvement change that would be evident to leaders and workers.

Habits are behavioral cycles consisting of a cue, an (often-ingrained) routine, and a reward. Breaking ingrained habits requires more than building new knowledge. It entails practice, feedback, coaching, repetition and reward.


 
Practica Learning designed a series of simulation roleplay activity to provide practice with four scenarios that Dana and her team identified as the most important crucial conversations they typically have:

By the end of the course, Dana and her leadership colleagues demonstrated significant, consistent improvement in the skills considered critical to building a culture of collaboration, accountability and trust:
 
When asked at the end of the course, 83% of leaders said they would recommend the course to a colleague.
 

 
At Dana’s firm, internal surveys of leaders were conducted. They found the following:
94% agreed that their crucial conversations skills improved
74% agreed their skill level with trust improved
76% agreed their skill level with accountability improved
97% agreed there was value in continuing with Practica Learning

When I spoke to leaders after they’d completed the course, feedback was very positive. Ali said, “I’ve had 11 years here with countless training courses. This has been the best practice ever.”
Dana was exuberant, “This is far superior to any training that’s ever been done. It’s a supreme method to work on obstacles and challenges. I think that all managers should go through this, and it should be mandatory for all first-time managers. The feedback is invaluable.”

Many firms today are finding that they need to build lean, flexible leadership cultures based on foundations of concepts like collaboration, accountability and trust but traditional learning solutions may not break old, timeworn habits.
 
If you want to change leaders’ habits, you need to do more than define new behaviors. You must create opportunities for leaders to practice applying those behaviors in the day-to-day crucial conversations they have with peers and workers, and provide the feedback, coaching and rewards that will help cement the new behaviors.
 
Two months after we ran the course, I asked Dana, how things were going. Take her advice: “Deliberate practice helped bring about kind of permanent behavioral changes our leaders wanted. Today, they’re not any less busy, but, when they have a problem with one of their workers they know exactly how to open a dialogue with them.”