Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Why do we see so little behavioral change after most leadership trainings?

Billions of dollars have been spent on leadership trainings in the corporate world over the last few decades. Tens of thousand of books were published and offered to managers open for self development. Despite all these efforts, engagement surveys carried out across a wide range of industry sectors yield devastating results.

Over two thirds of employees are far from being engaged in their jobs. And most of their disappointment is closely related to the way they are managed. Why do leadership development initiatives appear to be so ineffective?

Soft skills can not be developed solely by knowledge transfer. It is totally insufficient to simply know the tools of active listening or be able to enlist the attributes of good quality goal setting. Neither does it help a lot, if you discuss a related case study or participate in a training game designed around those skills. Any of these teaching methodologies can only bring the topic in the limelight and raise the interest of the participants. The next indispensable step, however, is very often missing: how can the manager start practicing these skills systematically in her daily work, and where can she reflect on her related real-life experience? Learning does not typically happen at the training event itself. People develop skills by trying things out, practicing them several times, and if they work out, than there is a chance that they can become habits.

People know that they should be doing more sports to become healthier, more energetic and resilient. It is not the lack of knowledge that keeps them from building good habits around exercising regularly. Where they need help is how they can put that knowledge into practice and following through diligently. For some people, it is enough to buy a sports club membership, while others need appointments with a personal trainer to make sure that they actually turn up. While a calendar entry carved in stone helps some of us, others prefer following up their sports activities in a fitness app to see progress. For certain individuals a friend or a sports companion is the solution. In any case, we need tools or external support to actually turn our knowledge into action that leads to change in our behavior.

So when you design or sponsor a leadership development program for your managers, make sure it is not a one-off event but a process that combines group training elements and individual follow-up activities. In our experience, only half of the budget should be devoted to knowledge transfer or group training events, while the other 50% should support participants to put in practice whatever they find relevant from the training. This can be carried out by short, individual follow-up coaching sessions or alternatively, with digital micro-learning tools.

Act2Manage Application

An interactive, gamification-based, practice-oriented leadership development application that provides immediate help and enables follow-up to the most common dilemmas.

Get info and request a free trial!

More blog posts:

Finding a dream job

“Finding” is a sneaky word, isn’t it? It suggests that the goal is out there somewhere, just waiting to be found. Unfortunately, work isn’t something that suddenly appears to us in an epiphanic moment.

Recently, I had a conversation with a young friend about his job that he described pretty poorly.

Read more »

How can you improve the engagement of your team members?

There’s a ton of research out there about how sustainable success comes from creating a workplace that attracts and retains top talent. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Our company’s most valuable asset is its people” more times than you can count. But what exactly are companies doing to protect and grow this “asset”?

Read more »

Developing Collaboration: A Deeper Dive

Over the past decades, numerous approaches have been tested in the world of training folklore to enhance collaboration in organizations. Perhaps the most widespread approach involves the leadership team attending a “team-building training,” where they engage in various playful exercises to experience the difference between collaboration and competition or work together in training activities that are supposed to foster “aha” moments. Examples include trust falls, helping each other through spiderweb-like structures made of ropes, building rafts from plastic bottles or bridges from spaghetti, walking on fire, or participating in fun games in a forest clearing. The experiences gathered “then and there” are discussed afterwards, and everyone hopes that once back at work, all friction or siloing will be resolved for good. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case.

Read more »