It’s not easy to foster relationship skills in managers, who have often attained their positions by demonstrating superior technical competence or highly competitive personality traits. Ironically, 
training people who achieve leadership positions to be effective leaders can be challenging because the best approaches to communication and conflict resolution require that supervisors cede the “command and control” style that may have helped them reach a position of leadership in the first place.
In the book, The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner describe the qualities of the best leaders:
Leaders find the common thread that weaves the fabric of human needs into a colorful tapestry. They develop understanding of collective yearnings; they seek out the brewing consensus among those they would lead. They listen carefully for quiet whisperings and attend to subtle cues. They get a sense of what people want, what they value, what they dream about. Sensitivity to others is no trivial skill; rather, it is a truly precious human ability.
The Gallup Organization calls the process of building empathy creating “emotionally engaged” employees.
In Follow This Path, Curt W. Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina write:
Emotionally committed employees form teams that deliver exceptional outcomes. Customers recognize the passion and commitment employees feel toward them and cannot help but respond in an emotional way. This emotionally driven reaction builds a bridge between employees and customers that creates engagement. This engagement becomes the key factor that drives sustainable growth.
What Are the Characteristics of Effective Training?
With the focus on management, and specifically leadership training for managers in skills and tools that create a more committed, satisfied, and productive workforce, it is a given that a solid training program for managers is needed as a part of organization and leadership development.
Gordon Training has developed a set of benchmark “best practices” criteria, based on decades of research in human learning, by which any training program (whether it be in-house or outsourced) should be evaluated. These best practices follow from current research and findings in adult learning theory.
1. Lay The Foundation First
Before rolling out specific training or initiatives that attempt to improve operations at the microscopic level, organizations need to ensure that management and staff are equipped with fundamental communication and relationship management skills. Numerous studies have verified that cooperation, communication, interpersonal skills, listening and summarizing are skills that are critical to higher-order team success, and in most cases, these skills must be taught in the workplace.
In their book, The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner write,
“Every leader ought to know how to paraphrase, summarize, express feelings, disclose personal information, admit mistakes, respond non defensively, ask for clarification, solicit different views, and so on.”
These skills are at the heart of emotional intelligence. Cultivating them in employees and managers is the key to all of the benefits of training and development.
An organization that is already able to communicate across levels productively and functionally, and to manage conflicts creatively and beneficially, is prepared appropriately for higher-order training and learning that will require those skills for successful implementation.
2. Encourage Practice and Repetition of New Skills
Emotional patterns are thought today to be lodged deep in the “limbic brain,” the primitive system where such strong drives as self-preservation and pleasure are seated. Essentially, this means emotional patterns are not easy to change, especially in adulthood.
Practice and repetition are important to lasting change. Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in their book, Primal Leadership, argue that the limbic brain is capable of changing its patterns, even later in life, provided the right ingredients are present:
The limbic brain…is a much slower learner—particularly when the challenge is to relearn deeply ingrained habits. This difference matters immensely when trying to improve leadership skills: At their most basic level, those skills come down to habits learned early in life. If those habits are no longer sufficient, or hold a person back, learning takes longer. Reeducating the brain for leadership learning, therefore, requires a different model from what works for the thinking brain: It needs lots of practice and repetition…
The brain’s ability to sprout fresh connections continues throughout life. It just takes more effort and energy to learn in adulthood lessons that would have come more readily in our early years, because these new lessons fight an uphill battle against the ingrained patterns the brain already has in place. The task is doubled–we have to undo habits that do not work for us, and replace them with new ones that do.
Understanding the critical need for continuing practice and repetition and creating a plan of action to encourage these behaviors is an essential part of any successful training.
3. Create and Use Safe Feedback Mechanisms
No organization or leadership training program can be adequately tracked without a fail-safe, anonymous feedback mechanism. Employees must feel completely safe before they will tell you what they really think. Many managers are unaware of how they are really perceived. As Goleman, et al, point out in Primal Leadership:
The higher up a ladder a leader climbs, the less accurate his self-assessment is likely to be. The problem is an acute lack of feedback.…[T]he higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very kind of feedback….[W]hy don’t leaders solicit and encourage accurate feedback?…[I]t’s often because they truly believe they can’t change….The parallel often appears with the people around the leader: If they believe the leader cannot truly change, then why offer distasteful and awkward negative feedback?
Before beginning any change initiative, it is advisable for organizations to either obtain or create the structures needed for truly anonymous feedback.
4. Establish Clear and Regular Follow-Up Procedures
It is difficult for education or training to effect real and lasting change without structured follow-up activities. As adults, people require continued exposure to new concepts, and practice for new skills to take root and grow.
Typically, managers and staff in a large organization with the mandate to change may be sent to a short-term training. On the basis of exposure to new concepts, they may even begin to change the way they work. Unfortunately, anecdotally and statistically, they are almost inevitably doomed to slip back into old patterns.
Goleman, et. al., discuss this honeymoon effect, in Primal Leadership.
A person leaves the program enthusiastic and committed to improving. But, back in the office, dozens of emails, letters and calls await him. The boss and a subordinate have each called with an emergency, and he is sucked into the swamp of demands. All of the new learning slips away as old, knee-jerk responses take over. Soon he is acting the way he always has—not the new way committed to at the end of the training.
The “Training Honeymoon” effect can be mitigated by a carefully planned and structured follow-up mechanism that continues to track trained employees for a full year or more, and continues to re-expose them to the concepts that were introduced through leadership training. Without such reinforcement, any learning will be significantly diminished through lack of practice.
So yes L.E.T. is a superb, time-tested way to begin to transform how people relate to one another at work and prevent and resolve conflict–but those skills need to be modeled, supported and reinforced. So whether it’s you and a fellow L.E.T. Graduate, your team, your department or your entire company that have taken L.E.T.—have a brainstorm session on how you can make sure your L.E.T. investment pays off.
We’ve got some ideas if you’re interested.