Our Deliberate Leadership Program has two ambitious objectives. On one hand, it offers the opportunity to learn the essentials of people management in the framework of five one-day training modules. On the other hand, it aims to ensure that this knowledge actually gets built into the daily management practices of the participants. In order to achieve these two goals, participants select, after each module, which take-aways were the most relevant for their current work situation, and alter their behaviour accordingly. They report back to the learning group at the beginning of the next modul what they have experienced.
One or two weeks after each training day, follow-up coaching sessions help participants refine development goals and make specific commitments for action that lead to making clear progress towards those objectives.
Over the last five years, more and more of our client companies have placed an emphasis on harnessing digitalisation in various fields of their business operations, including training and development. The need has arisen for participants to be able to follow up their progress with a digital tool during their leadership development program, and access previously learned materials quickly and easily in a convenient format afterwards, when they face people management dilemmas. For this purpose, we have blended our mobile microlearning app, Act2Manage, with our well established, in-person Deliberate Leadership Program.
Usage statistics have unequivocally proven that the mobile app significantly increases the learning activity of our participants, as well as the number of commitments they make based on their key learnings. Moreover, they don’t just focus on the topics included in the program curriculum, but engage in various other subjects included in the advanced or professional levels of the app.
Several behavioural science research studies have provided evidence that even small commitments significantly increase the provability of behavioural change, which is probably the most relevant KPI of leadership development initiatives.
The duration of the dual coaching sessions is 60 minutes. The sessions are to be conducted in batches on prearranged dates (3-4 sessions / day).
Each module of the program makes the learning experience diverse and effective through exercises, analysis, questionnaires and experiential learning activities. It’s important to note that the training modules contain “classic” leadership knowledge, as well as research findings from the last 10-15 years.
1. Performance Management (goal setting, feedback & evaluation, supportive communication, performance appraisal)
2. Motivating Others
3. Leader as Coach
4. Assertiveness and Conflicts
5. Stress Management, Time Management, Delegating, Managing Meetings
Most leadership development programs fail to meet expectations as managers have a hard time applying what they have learnt in their day-to-day activities. Act2Manage was designed to provide a solution. The application is an interactive, practice-oriented tool which utilizes gamification elements to support managers in the most frequent management & leadership situations and problems. It also offers follow-up to make sure they put in practice what they have learnt.
Act2Manage provides support for managers by giving them practical solutions to the most frequent management & leadership situations and issues. It also focuses on applying existing knowledge, therefore it can be a great (online) add-on tool to ongoing (offline) development programs in your organization. Read more about our on-the-job solution.
Checking our calendar, we had a kick-off meeting at the beginning of 2021 and started dreaming about the 4.0 version of our Act2Manage leadership development application. And now, we have just released the improved version including most of those dreams. It is a major change from professional perspective as well, we implemented a number of new functions based on behavioural science and neuroscience.
Working with managers over the last decades I am getting more and more convinced that despite trainings (or because of a lot of poor ones) managers have got confused about the concept of management.
It’s always great to see when L&D professionals make an effort to find data-based evidence for the effectiveness of various training and development initiatives. One day, Fuse, a digital learning tool provider (no, not LMS, but a totally different approach) joined forces with the AI Center of University College London to work for Carpetright, an international retailer with 420 outlets and 3000 employees. They wanted to find out if digital learning results in measurable performance improvement in sales.
Over the past twenty years I have had a chance to see hundreds of performance appraisal documents that had a goal setting section. An incredibly high proportion contained low quality, vague goals, such as “keep up with the good work” or “develop communication skills”. All these managers missed an opportunity to actually carry out their primary responsibilities: improve the work performance and output of their people, and help them grow.
