Every year, organizations invest millions of dollars and countless hours in leadership training. Their intention is worthwhile: produce better leaders and see a return on investment (ROI) in retention, productivity, engagement, growth, the bottom line, and so much more.

Oh, if only this could be guaranteed when you sign the contract and write the check! Sadly, ineffective training leads to an approximate loss of $13.5M per year, per 1000 employees.

If you’re going to invest in your leaders (which I highly encourage), let’s understand why so much money is being lost and where that training is going wrong.

In conversations with our clients, we hear about their experiences with other training programs:

• “We saw no measurable shift in behavior after the training.”
• “We lost money and it didn’t produce the results we hoped.”
• “The content was good, but it didn’t stick after training.”

Ouch. Clearly, ineffective, not to mention so costly. But why?

THE EXPERIENCE IS MISSING

I’ve trained in lots of places with lots of different content. Admittedly, some of it has been dry and boring — but necessary. Thankfully, some of it has been engaging and transformative.

Quite frankly, the two extremes are not as different as you might think. Whether “bad” or “good,” doesn’t matter much if not practiced and experienced in ways that allow whatever has been taught to be replicated, repeated, and applied!

The problem with most leadership training is not content quality. The problem is that the content isn’t actionable. It doesn’t sink in enough to shift behavior in sustainable ways. There was no experience to enable it to stick, to work, to matter.

Leadership training, all training, needs to be an immersive experience with in-the-moment implementation of the concepts being taught and specific, strategic ways in which it can be used again and again once the training is over.

Good concepts and great ideas, though inspiring, are not enough.

Painful rhetorical questions abound when experiential learning evades. How do I apply this? Where? With whom? How can I translate this information into action; into actual behavior? What difference will this make on a daily basis? Now what?

In the absence of clear and obvious answers, the ROI we were hoping for plummets.

Bottom line: results (and ROI) from leadership training rely on experiences, not just intellectual intake.

The 70:20:10 Model for Learning and Development asserts that 70% of our knowledge and learning comes from job-related experiences, 20% from interactions with others, and 10% from formal educational/training events.

If a leadership training program does not create a bridge between formalized training and hands-on experience, it isn’t taking advantage of the most effective ways people learn.

Meaningful connections between content and application are rarely made through one-off, contrived scenarios. Even interactive fishbowl discussions or hypothetical role-playing scenarios diminish learning potential. And while theory is great, you can’t do theory.

Experiential learning allows participants to retain and implement what’s being trained in ways that sustain new behaviors long after the program is completed.

At Fierce, we take this seriously. We acknowledge at the start of every training — both in-classroom and virtual — that we require ‘real play,’ not role play.

We know that no matter how great our content, it is not relevant, actionable, or sustainable without the integration of actual, current, pressing challenges, brought into the room by the very individuals present.

One of the Fierce models I frequently train is CONFRONT. Let’s be honest: whether leaders or not, we tend to avoid the conversations we know are going to be difficult. We play them out in our heads. We anticipate how they’re going to go. And the potential consequences just don’t seem worth the effort or the risk.

So in class, I could easily, even effectively, talk about confrontation, why it matters, why it often fails before it starts, give statistics, and even provide specific how-tos on stepping into those conversations. I could, and I do. But there is so much more.

Participants script out what they need to say… to a real person in a real situation (not a simulation, not pretending, not making something up). Then they practice delivering that “opening statement” with one other person in the room, getting feedback, making adjustments, and doing it again.

This is not easy!

We often prefer to stay in theory, take notes, and hope that, somehow, we will subliminally absorb the wisdom and courage needed to do better. But to hear ourselves speak (out loud)- what needs to be said in a safe, contained environment is a different experience altogether.

It is an experience, period. And that makes all the difference.

I hear leader after leader tell me how powerful the experience was for them, how much they learned about themselves, how practical the models are, how they wish they’d learned them long before, and how they will definitely use them once class is over.

Those comments, combined with what I have the privilege of witnessing day after day — with leader after leader and client after client — assures me that the training has already merited an ROI with far more to come.

GET AT WHAT MATTERS MOST

All leadership programs intend to train people to be more effective. Dig deeper. Identify the programs that offer the how-to, the actual skills, practices, specifics, and repeatable actions that give leaders the capacity to walk their talk.

To communicate effectively through tangible models and practices; to build relationships across, up, and down in ways that produce individual and collective change at a deep, behavioral level. Anything less lessens your training results, your ROI, and most importantly, your leaders’ ability to excel.

And make sure it sticks.

Unfortunately, many organizations still believe there is a silver bullet out there: a training program that will deliver leader transformation after sitting in class for two days. There’s no such thing.

It takes so much more. Experiential learning, hands-on practice, a focus on real issues (not role-play), ongoing support, and significant commitment from the leaders themselves, the organization as a whole, and the company providing the training.

We provide our Fierce clients with the “stickiest” training out there because we know you need and deserve leadership development programs that are more than just a one-and-done event. Training that delivers an acceptable ROI will sustain and reinforce new behavior that lasts and makes a positive, sustained impact on business results.

Don’t settle for anything less.

During the quest for self-improvement, the age-old struggle I often find myself thinking about time and time again is, how do you adopt new behaviors AND make lasting change?

This is the quandary for learning and development departments, tasked with supporting their organizations on how to be more productive, more engaged — happier even — by having employees learn new skills and behaviors and have a system in place that supports long-lasting sustainable change.

The theory is organizations invest in their people through training and reap the rewards of employees who produce more with their heads and hearts engaged. This theory, I would argue, is 100 percent correct, and companies would be better off if they invested more in their people in this way, but one critical piece missing is that we have to redefine a word — training.

WHY REDEFINE TRAINING?

Training is not a one-time event. It’s an on-going experience that involves multiple touch points as individuals go down the hard path of change.

In the last decade, there has been a lot of research on creating behaviors and learning new skills, such as the scary fact that PEOPLE WILL FORGET 90% OF WHAT THEY’VE LEARNED AFTER ONE MONTH. It’s true what they say — if you don’t use it, you lose it!

We know more about the brain and its emotional nature than we ever have before and yet this question, how do you make behavior changes stick, still is a big blue ocean of possibility.

My goal in this blog isn’t to say we have a definitive answer, but to rather help guide your thinking and provide some helpful insight on proven ways we know that support your people on their behavior change journey in order to maximize the company’s investment and your time.

The end goal? Sustainable behavior change.

TIPS TO MAXIMIZE LEARNING

Below are four actionable ways to make the learning stick:

1. Spot the Cue

Learning a new behavior can be like one of those I Spy pictures, where you don’t see the object until someone points it out to you, and then it becomes so obvious.

At Fierce, our data shows that most learners leave the classroom excited to flex their new muscles and yet, what we have heard before from Learning and Development leaders, is that once back immersed into their daily lives, old behaviors start to creep in.

This is when touch points can be critical in setting up your employees for success. For example, with Fierce Conversations, we advise our clients to prompt cues as to when the business wants their learners to use the new skillset.

We’ve had clients ask leaders to use our Coaching model in at least one 1:1 every month. Furthermore, in both our Confront and Feedback model, we spend time in the classroom identifying what conversations are appropriate for what situations and we have the learners identifying conversations they need to have and start the process in the training.

By spending time as a learning team identifying what business results would be better if certain conversations improved and then messaging that back out to your learners, you make identifying the cue of this new behavior so much easier.

2. Simplicity is King

Let’s be honest, in today’s world of Twitter and Instagram, anything that takes more than 160 characters to understand is almost too complicated. While I am all for fighting back against our modern lack of attention span, I think what we can learn from social media is that simpler is sometimes better when you want to make something sticky.

At Fierce, none of our frameworks have more than seven steps or take longer than one page to fill out. The brain can memorize it and, in fact, is designed to be deconstructed even further and made even more simple once you learn the skill set.

We Delegate at four levels, we Coach with just seven simple questions, you can Confront in 60 seconds and make big decisions with your team’s input by filling out one page of information.

The depth comes from the quality of the conversation that arises from the simplicity of the approach. If you make the skillset easy, it becomes a routine that can be applied and followed. Before you know, it’s happening all the time.

3. Make it Worth It

Even the most avid learner has to see the value in spending their time in order to learn and apply something new. People don’t do things without a clear why. When it comes to behavior change, if that why isn’t there, it doesn’t matter if your previous two steps are flawless, you won’t get a commitment. Period.

As learning and developing professionals, you can’t control someone’s intrinsic why. However, at Fierce, we have a few best practices we’ve seen clients leverage with great success to support the reward of using are:

• Tie the why of the training to the larger business strategies and organizational goals. Nobody likes to feel like they’re wasting their time. This best practice ties back to tip number 1 — by helping people understand the why behind the training in the context of the company, they better see themselves supporting those goals and seeing what’s in it for them to make the effort for the change.
• Give champions the chance to share their reward and wins. Inevitably, you will have people who adopt the behavior quicker and you want to give them a platform to share their win. Collective wins can be powerful and having a colleague you respect share how this has positively impacted them can be the best motivators for others to try.
• Literally have a reward! Whether the reward is monetary or recognition, sometimes an external reward helps people focus until other more intrinsic rewards make themselves known.

4. Choose a Training Provider that focuses on Reinforcement

Not every training provider prioritizes the pre or post experience, whether that’s through technology, tools, or strategy, you should partner with someone who has a strong point of view on adoption and sustaining the learning.

At Fierce, we prioritize this with our clients by looking at the bigger picture of continuous change in a strategic way. Pre-training, during the training, and post-training all have an impact on learners prioritizing and changing the quality of their conversations.

When you apply these steps to your learning initiatives, you’ll not only increase the chances of your investment in training being successful, but you’re setting your entire organization up for sustainable and meaningful achievement.

Is fear being used as a “motivation” driver in your workplace? If so, it most certainly is negatively affecting your time, money, relationships, and psychological well-being.

Fear can manifest in an organization in many ways, but it typically occurs with a trickle-down effect, where ineffective leaders employ scare tactics to control the behavior of employees.

The kicker is, leaders who try to hold people accountable through fear may not realize they’re doing it. Or, if they’re doing it intentionally, they may try to argue that fear gets things done. The truth is, using fear as a driving force provides only short-term motivation and short-term resentful compliance.

When employees become resentful toward leadership, stress levels and employee turnover rise, while workplace satisfaction and happiness plummet.

A Closer Look at the Problem

In his best-selling book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink writes that when fear is present in an organization, it can lead to “The Seven Deadly Flaws”:

1. It can extinguish intrinsic motivation.

2. It can diminish performance.

3. It can crush creativity.

4. It can crowd out good behavior.

5. It can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.

6. It can become addictive.

7. It can foster short-term thinking.

The effects of fear-based tactics can negatively impact employee engagement, the customer experience, and even brand reputation—when employees are stressed and fearful, this dissatisfaction can potentially seep into conversations with clients, and their frustrations with their organization’s culture may be voiced word of mouth or via internet, serving as a red flag to potential candidates…Not good!

The opposite of a fear-based culture is a culture where everyone within the organization feels psychologically safe. Coined by Harvard Business professor Amy Edmondson, the term psychological safety is “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” When there’s no fear of punishment, it leads to more innovation, increased productivity, and an authentic environment of candor.

It may be hard to categorize your workplace culture as either fear-based or psychologically safe. Imagine these two terms on a spectrum, and your organization will fall somewhere on this spectrum. Even if you would place your organization closer to the psychologically safe end of the spectrum, any lingering fear that does exist, even in small amounts, can create big problems.

Pink identifies three various levels of motivation:

Motivation 1.0 – To survive.

Motivation 2.0 – To seek reward and avoid punishment.

Motivation 3.0 – To seek autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Many organizations find themselves stuck in a fear-based, Motivation 2.0 workplace culture where leaders and employees are compelled to avoid something, whether it’s failure, termination, or some other unwanted consequence. It consists of punishing the bad and rewarding the good.

In order to move into a Motivation 3.0 workplace culture, leaders must provide trust, growth opportunities, and meaning in order to achieve it. In this type of environment, our work transcends fear and instead becomes intrinsic and purpose-driven.

Identifying a Fear-Based Culture

Some fear-based tactics are obvious, such as delivering a punishment for poor performance. Others, such as a lack of communication, can be harder to identify when you aren’t even aware that there’s an unaddressed problem.

Below are some common characteristics of fear-based cultures:

1. There are things you don’t talk about, can’t talk about, or don’t feel comfortable talking about. At Fierce, we call them Mokitas. Mokita is a Papua New Guinean term for something that everyone knows but no one talks about. The fewer mokitas, the healthier the business. That thing that we know and feel compelled to not talk about because the consequences may not be “pleasant.” In a psychologically-safe culture, no problem is off-limits, and employees feel comfortable discussing issues with leadership. Confrontation takes place when needed, and feedback is given on the fly.

2. Employee mistakes are met with some sort of punishment or unwanted consequence. Rather than supporting employees in their development, ineffective leaders will try to improve performance with fear-based tactics including threats, various forms of intimidation, passive aggressive behavior such as the silent treatment, secrecy, or manipulation. In a psychologically safe environment, failures are met with support and development opportunities. Leaders are transparent and use coaching conversations to help employees identify their own personal values and desires that will aid their development.

3. Leaders are micromanaging. A leader who micromanages is a fearful leader. They’re rarely satisfied with deliverables and nitpick tiny details that can slow project timelines and dishearten employees. They may doubt the ability of employees to handle tasks and fear delegating new tasks, which puts a damper on development opportunities. Effective leaders who want to create a psychologically-safe environment will grant trust and autonomy to employees, acting as a supportive guide for personal and professional development.

4. Siloed and/or One-way Communication. Healthy cultures have top-down, bottom-up, and cross-department communication. If conversations are only happening in one direction or aren’t happening at all, it hinders transparency and openness, which makes it harder to establish a sense of trust in leadership within an organization. Leaders and employees need to be on the same page when it comes to feedback—it’s a two-way conversation. Leaders need to give feedback to employees, and employees need to feel safe giving feedback to leaders.

While the full list of fear-based behaviors is more extensive than what we’ve listed here, these are some of the primary culprits. If you’ve experienced any of these behaviors, it’s time to make a change in your organization.

The Conversation is the Relationship

In 2012, Google launched an initiative called “Project Aristotle” to study the lives of their employees and determine what factors mattered most for creating a successful team. Long story short, Google’s data concluded that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work:

“What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘work face’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘psychologically safe,’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy.”

The study identified that real connections are what create a sense of psychological safety, with communication and empathy being the main building blocks of these connections.

When conversation is skillful, empathic, and nurturing to the relationship, it builds the cohesion and connections that fuel a healthy culture. As we say at Fierce, C=R=C. The conversation is the relationship is the culture. The better your conversations, the better your relationships and culture will be.

Establishing a Psychologically-Safe Workplace

A DECISIONWISE BENCHMARK STUDY of over 100,000 employees found that 34% of employees in the U.S. do not speak up out of fear of retribution. If you want to see a culture shift, “speaking up” needs to be actively encouraged, and when employees do speak up, their perspectives need to be met with respect and consideration. They need to know that you want to know their thoughts.

Psychological safety is shaped by skillful conversations and a growth-oriented, supportive, and empathetic approach to employee performance.

Here are the top three most important conversations to start having now:

1. DELEGATE – Leaders need to muster up the courage and willingness to delegate. Losing control and ownership of certain tasks can be uncomfortable at first, but granting employees trust, confidence, and growth opportunities engages and enlivens teams. Successful delegation also allows leaders to free up time, space, and energy to place their focus where it’s needed most.

2. COACH – Have a one-on-one conversation with someone in your organization to dive deeper and address the most pressing issue. Effective coaching conversations help guide employees to healthy, desired action and allow them to chart their own course of development with self-generated insight. When there is no advice-giving on behalf of the coach, it provides a self-actualization opportunity for the coachee.

3. TEAM – Encourage team members to share ideas openly without filtering or trying to assess whether the ideas have merit. The best brainstorming is unfiltered, and if you’re interested in generating the best ideas, employees need to feel safe enough to express themselves freely.

If you’re an individual contributor and you feel leadership either doesn’t support “speaking up” or they haven’t communicated their support, don’t wait for them to do so. We highly encourage you to bring up the issue to your supervisor. And we know how hard this can be—especially if you fear there might be a consequence to speaking up. However, if you want to empower yourself and those you work with and create positive change, it will require you to initiate what could be a somewhat risky conversation. One conversation can make all the difference.