Stop treating development training like medicine

Nowadays I am a very average golfer. I used to be quite good as a young lad, but the physical abilities have deteriorated over the years and the mental side of the game doesn't get any easier as you get older. But I really am responsible for this deterioration. Mostly because I am not willing to put in the work to change the trajectory of my performance.?

Every now and then, when the frustration grows high enough, I bite the bullet and go and book a lesson or two with a golf pro. I really enjoy this as they are usually able to straighten me up pretty rapidly and I leave buoyed by a possible future of improvement. But there is a predictability of what will happen from there and that is I won't do the work to engrain the new learnings as a practice. The gains I made in those lessons will run into challenges of life, and I will revert back to my old ways and slowly, or sometimes quite quickly, I will be back to where I was, or possibly even worse. Give it a few months and the cycle will repeat

I now know that I treat my golf lessons like medicine, that I only seek out when the issue gets bad enough and like most medicines, they really only mask or treat the symptom, they don't really understand or deal with the cause.?

Does any of this sound familiar in the world of corporate development programmes. We run our businesses hard with no systematic approach to development. When things get out of position, or individuals are not performing, we set up and deliver development programmes at often vast expense.?

But like my golf swing, we treat these development programmes like medicine - like an injection of new skills - and they usually have an immediate effect. Those that experience this type of training usually come back full of enthusiasm to bring new opportunities and ways of working to life. But the minute they have left that development training, the half-life of its success is already dissipating.

I put that down to the fact that in the business world, we are weak at installing the practices that hold the development learning in place. Our expectation is that now that we know it, it will just start happening. But we get hit by circumstances and a general world of too much to do and within time we are back where we were, or sometimes worse, so we call the development doctor again and the cycle repeats.?

So what do I mean by practices. Most executive teams nowadays are challenged by the need to take on new things that they have never had to deal with before like digital transformation, climate change and generational shifts in work practices like working from home - all of which cannot be done from the traditional functional siloed approach that most teams operate from today. They require much more of an enterprise leadership model with cross functional teams which requires new and collaborative approaches to teams and leadership styles. But collaboration doesn't just happen because you went on a course to learn about how to do it, it is created through practices that happen week in week out.?

To bring collaboration to effect at an exec level I think it needs three core practices:

1. The practice of staying connected?- not at a work level, at a human level. For example at Connetics, as an exec we got together for coffee 2-3 times a week. It didn't need to be everyone, just who was available, but just as a way to stay connected at a human level. We also started every day long development session with breakfast together so we could get connected before we developed together. It is from connectedness that trust will emerge which is a cornerstone of any collaborative model.

2. The practice of performance integrity?- I am not talking about a weekly operations meeting, I am talking about a weekly assessment, checking whether we did what we said we were going to go and having hard accountability discussions with each other if we didn't. This creates a real focus on commitment to the word we give to each other and ourselves.?

3. The practice of learning and reflection - a weekly chance to step back and ask things like what are we proud of, what did we learn this week, what would we have done differently. The key is doing this every week not just when things don't go to plan etc. As we experiment, we need to take time to reflect and learn and adapt. It is the practice of doing this that shifts performance, not the new ideas themselves.?

Our experience is that these things are just not done in the business world, or not done regularly enough to bring effect to the way a team operates together. So while we want to shift to a collaborative model, we are not willing to do the work of what that will take - a lot like my golf game really!

While I don't want to see a reduction on development work being done, more importantly I don't want to see individuals and organisations waste their money by not committing to establishing the practices that match the development. So, before you take on and finalise any development training, lock in the practices that you are willing to commit too, and I am confident the results will come.?

Now, I must book myself another golf lesson!