Part 5: How to ensure your programs produce lasting changes in leadership behavior and business impact

Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground over the last five articles and videos:?

• In the introduction to the series, we talked about the pushback many of you get on the time your leadership programs take and how caving into the pressure can actually be a big TRAP because it doesn’t solve what the core problem usually is—the perceived or actual value your leadership programs deliver to your organization and the people going through them.
• I also warned that caving into this pressure can actually hurt your credibility because of the implicit message that doing so may send to your stakeholders: that your programs weren’t valuable enough in the first place to justify the time invested in them. More often than not, the better response is to figure out how to increase the VALUE of your programs and demonstrate their indisputable impact on the business.
• We’ve also talked about how the tried-and-true approaches to developing leaders are struggling to deliver the value organizations need and increasingly demand. The research is clear on this point. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent globally every year on leadership development, the effect on both leadership effectiveness and organizational performance is at best scant. Why? Because as renowned Harvard professor and change guru Michael Beer points out, leaders revert to their old behaviors soon after the programs are over. The picture is arguably bleaker in the public and non-profit sectors.

This should be deeply disturbing to all of us. At no other time in human history has our ability to survive and thrive been so dependent on the effective exercise of leadership. This is why we need to step up as a field, training buyers and providers alike, so that our companies, the world, and all of us get and can give the leadership we all need.

For those of you who resonate with this and feel compelled to answer this call, I believe my Real Work Process can help you regardless of the leadership behaviors you’re trying to cultivate or the providers with whom you’re partnering. Why? Because I’ve spent nearly three decades honing the methodology and dozens of organizations have used it to significantly improve both leadership effectiveness and organizational performance.

So today, I’m going to share with you the fifth and final step of the Real Work Process: “Real World Results.”???

But first, a quick review of Steps 1-4:?

• Step 1: Real-World Problem Selection – Help leaders (and their managers) prioritize their development by having them bring and work on tough, business-impacting challenges during your programs. This makes your training programs immediately relevant and valuable right out of the gate. (Learn more about this step by reading Step 1: Real-World Problem Selection .)
• Step 2: Real Behavioral Data Collection – Help leaders understand how they behave under real-life pressure. This is critical because if we don’t give leaders a clinically accurate and clear picture of how they actually behave, they (and we!) won’t be able to figure out what needs to change in Step 3. (Learn more about this by reading Step 2: Real World Behavioral Data .)?
• Step 3: Realization – Help leaders recognize their gaps and opportunities, along with the costs of those gaps and the upsides of those opportunities. It’s critical to generate these realizations early in your programs both for learning motivation and because most leaders aren’t sufficiently self-aware to benefit from being developed. (Learn more about this by reading Step 3: Realization .)
• Step 4: Reinvention – Help leaders unlearn old patterns and begin to develop new ways of thinking and behaving that are much more aligned with proven practices, their own values, and your organization’s expectations. (Learn more about this by reading Step 4: Reinvention ).?

Step 5: Real-World Results

The previous steps in our process only take about a 2-day workshop to complete. And, frankly, the results are impressive: a 15% sustainable improvement in leadership capabilities (on average). But, if you truly care about helping your leaders both master new behaviors AND regularly apply them to drive better business performance, you’ll need a few “pull-through” levers to implement after the 2 days. ?The 3 most effective levers we’ve seen are:?

1. Breakthrough Action Plans (or BAPs)
2. Workouts Led by Master Coaches
3. The Sharing of Success Stories

These can take a few different forms, but here’s how my faculty and I typically implement them for our clients…

Pull-Through Lever 1: BAPs

Two of the most interesting things that happen for leaders when they go through the Real Work Process are:

• They are much more motivated to tackle things they would have otherwise avoided.
• They recognize more opportunities to make a difference, both inside and outside of work.?

They capitalize on this newfound sense of optimism and possibility by:

• Committing to tackling up to 5 business challenges within 60 days of the program.
• Capturing these commitments in a personal BAP.
• Asking their managers or peers to hold them accountable for following through on their BAP.

For a group of say 40 leaders going through one of your programs together, this will generate solutions for up to 200 opportunities to improve the performance of your organization all within 60 days. Even if only half of these are implemented effectively, that’s a lot.?

But these are still only quick wins. To guarantee the long-lasting impact of your programs, your leaders have to master new behaviors and regularly apply what they’ve learned to real business problems. This is where the next two pull-through levers come in.

Pull-Through Lever 2: Workouts Led by Master Coaches

In a nutshell, these are short, small-group problem-solving and continuous learning sessions that your leaders will attend once a month after their 2-day workshop. These sessions will be run by their managers or peers whom we’ve trained up as Real Work Process Master Coaches or, as our clients call them, MCs.

Just like during Steps 1-4, your leaders are going to bring and work on tough, business-impacting challenges that are just beyond the reach of their current leadership capabilities to solve.

During the Workouts, each leader will:

• Get great advice from their peers on how to tackle their challenge.
• Role-play what they’re actually going to say to mobilize critical stakeholders to address their challenge.
• Receive in-the-moment coaching from the MC that will take everyone's capabilities to the next level.

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about MC-Led Workouts is that they make our clients less dependent on consultants. When these MCs are properly embedded into our clients’ normal work rhythm, the organization has a reusable and reliable mechanism to both keep developing their leaders and ensure real-world problems continue to get solved.?

Pull-Through Lever 3: The Sharing of Success Stories

Taken together, the BAPs and the MC-Led Workouts will generate numerous behavior and business performance breakthroughs for nearly every leader going through your programs. The next step is to capture and disseminate these stories because they’re a great source of inspiration and learning for other leaders in the program and across the wider organization. Showcasing these stories to your stakeholders is also a great way to indisputably position the value and impact of your programs.

You Play a Critical Role…

And that wraps up Step 5, which concludes this article and video series. Whether you’re a training buyer or provider, I believe that your work is supremely important. Because our world is starving for better leadership—from both the powerful and privileged as well as all people, regardless of their level in the hierarchy or place in society. The stakes have never been higher.??

I hope my series has both inspired you to make your programs better and provided a way to improve them because you play a critical role in ensuring our companies, communities, and countries get the leadership that all of us need.

Dozens of clients have used our Real Work Methodology to significantly improve both the performance of their organizations and tens of thousands of leaders globally. I know it can do the same for you, your organization, and your leaders.

If you’d to explore how we might help, please let us know via this link .