Is Leadership Training Worth It?
The Gist
Researchers at HBR looked at companies that sent managers of different levels to multiple types of leadership trainings. When they followed up on the impact of those trainings on the organization they found that, even when individuals felt inspired after the trainings, it was often difficult to apply the lessons and techniques in the workplace, or to maintain them long term.
Why? Multiple reasons, primarily centered around these managerial and organizational barriers
Lack of strategic clarity -vague/poorly defined goals and expectations
Top down leadership style - company wide decisions are centralized in the c-suite
Cross-functional conflict - isolated departments leading to poor collaboration
Organizational systems/processes set stage for success or failure - policies and practices have an outsized impact on outcomes
Researchers emphasized that leadership trainings have traditionally fallen short because the primary focus has been on the leaders, and not the systems in which those leaders are functioning. Significantly, whether or not a training program targeted the organizational environment strongly dictated the success or failure of the training as a whole.
Our Take
We have personally experienced the unfortunate outcome of a mismatch between where the training focus should be, versus where it actually is. Addressing this industry oversight is one of the main reasons we started Tabula Rasa Global. As stated in the article, no leadership or culture change could hold when “the individuals had less power to change the system surrounding them than the system had to shape them.” We couldn’t agree more.
The Brain Science
Why does this happen? Organizational environments include physical spaces but also the forces (policies, procedures, expectations, actions) that surround an organization, and affect its performance and operations. Those forces have an impact because humans are highly affected by more than just our visible surroundings - we’ve all experienced the stress of unrealistic deadlines or unclear objectives, and the comparative ease of a manageable workload with well-defined expectations. You can thank our earliest ancestors for instilling our innate drive to seek both physical, and more relevantly, psychological safety and comfort. Obviously then, problems arise when we are exposed to systems that do not safe-guard the psychological needs of those primitive parts of our brains. For companies utilizing leadership trainings, if the environment doesn’t support your desired changes, the changes don’t stick. Your employees won’t tolerate the mental toll for long, and will go back to what they know, quickly. Worse, over time an unstable work environment can erode away at their overall job performance.
The Takeaway
The hard reality that organizations face is that when your work environment doesn’t support your expectations, the negative affects can be subtle and difficult to recognize, even by those impacted. Helpfully though, they have clear side effects: increasing turnover, an uptick in the use of sick days, low morale, decreased collaboration, and poor productivity - just to name a few. Sound familiar?
Understanding and addressing the complex and nuanced relationship between your workplace environment and the effectiveness of your workforce is where Tabula Rasa Global excels. We know the brain, we know people, and we are here to help.