The success of your programs hinges on a clear understanding of the difference between learning and development.
Learning
Learning involves increasing knowledge. You can learn in the classroom or by reading a book. Yet, if your aim is to create better leaders, increasing their knowledge is not enough because leadership is all about what people do, not simply what they know. You cannot learn how to dance, how to play the piano or how to ice skate from reading a book or attending a PowerPoint presentation on the topic. How much confidence would you have in a pilot or a builder who had learnt about their craft without ever having practiced it? Yet, most leadership training is delivered using this “knowledge-based” approach to learning. As a result, research 1 shows that less than 15% of what is learnt in a typical training course gets transferred into sustained behavioural changes within the workplace.
Development
The ultimate aim of any leadership program is to change the way people approach their work, and this requires development, not learning. Unlike “knowledge-based” learning, development entails mastering new skills and turning those new skills into habits.
“The great end in life is not knowledge but action”
Thomas Henry Huxley
While there are many aspects that support behavioural development, none is more important than practice. Practice allows leaders to master new skills and embed them into their work habits. To create true development, a leadership program must not only allow time for practice and refinement during the course, but also create an environment that encourages leaders to continue practising and refining new behaviours once they are back in the workplace. Neuroscience shows that with sufficient practice, new approaches to leadership form their own neural circuits within the basal ganglia, thereby becoming a subconscious habit. This process is very similar to what happened when you first learnt to drive a car. Of course, practice is even more helpful when it is coupled with active observation and refinement. This can be achieved through personal reflection as well as through the use of structured observations.
Notes
- S. Cromwell & J. Kolb 2004, “An examination of work-environment support factors affecting transfer of supervisory skills training to the work place”, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 449-71. ↩
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Can you provide the citation for the Australian research cited here? This is all so very interesting to me and I’d like to use this to improve my own leadership and the leadership of others I work with. Thanks for your input.
Neil
I first came across the statistic in work Richard Ladyshewski, a professor at Curtin University in Australia. His research focused on redressing that percentage through peer coaching and journaling. The actual statistic came from work by Cromwell & Kolb – I have now included this reference above.