We recognize that much of leadership training cannot be done solely as an academic exercise, because it can only be exercised in the heat of a real challenge – in the crucible of action and the tension of emotions.
We ensure that every principle or success factor can be distilled into a usable “best practice,” to which we provide a set of “tools” (questions, frameworks, diagnostics, etc.) that then are applied to real life situations. We know that when people are able to apply something immediately, they retain 80% of what they learned three weeks later; but if they can’t apply it, their retention plummets to 20% or less three weeks later.
When possible and practical, for very senior level training we team two top notch people to present programs:
- Thought Leader -- most advanced thinking (typically a "pracademic" who spent many earlier years in the field, then wrote a book, followed by training executives later in their career).
- Senior Executive -- best wisdom of experience (typically a very seasoned leader who has had a wide variety of organizational experiences, and has seen both success and failure, and knows the difference.)
For managerial level training, program delivery is done with a single "pracademic."
For Executive Leadership Programs we have learned that the consequences of sending one single, lone individual to leadership programs can often produce marginal results. Why? Because when they return to work, they are faced with the challenge of having the “corporate immunal reject response” kick in where the corporate culture kicks out the person with the new ideas because they look like a "foreign body."
Thus we encourage teams to come to our sessions, plan their actions together, and then reenter their parent organizations as a critical mass that can effect improvements.
It’s often not enough for business leaders to learn, develop new skills, and create action plans during a session. We know it can be quite valuable upon “re-entry” to have a mentor from the Institute available to coach when necessary and assist with the implementation of concrete programs that deliver measurable impacts -- either to top-line, bottom-line, innovation, flow, removal of non-value added work, or sustainable cost reductions that validates the return on investment from leadership capability building.
