How to Design an Effective Leadership Training that Gets Measurable Results

Do you know how to design a leadership training that provides the skill set needed for succession planning and ongoing development, creates engagement and buy-in from your talent, and lays an effective framework for measurement that will show successes and areas of improvement?

As L&D professionals, you know that you must center the learner experience to get impactful results. However, there can be sometimes a disconnect between performance and outcomes when there isn’t careful consideration – either through needs analysis, performance mapping, or both – of the strategies and metrics you’ll use to determine success. You can overcome that challenge by using capability and competency learning models to function as instructional design strategies that guide your training initiatives.

How do you use your leadership capability models to design more effective training solutions that meet the goals and objectives of your organization? Here are some basic strategies that you can put into practice almost immediately.

Strategies to Design More Effective Leadership Training

Below, we’re sharing an outline of the strategies you’ll want to use to build out an effective training unique to the needs of your organization. Be aware that these are also effective strategies for the design and delivery of employee training and development initiatives. (Bonus!)

Strategy 1-Determine Capability and Competency Skills. Start with a skills matrix, a needs analysis, and performance mapping. Ask yourself what behaviors lead to successful outcomes for any given role.

Strategy 2-Link Performance Behaviors to Desired Outcomes. Have you mapped our processes and identified gaps in performance and skill sets? Not just in terms of competencies, but also in the critical thinking, judgement, and experience needed to confidently make decisions – the capabilities. Really focus in on how action creates impact, and you’re on your way to designing an employee training and development program that moves the needle on progress.

Strategy 3-Use Experience-Based Learning Methods. Your learning audience needs demonstrations of processes, real-world scenarios to think about, and practice to acquire and retain skills. Any enhancements and interactivity you can provide to help your learners immerse themselves will pay dividends in engagement, effectiveness, and speed to mastery.

Strategy 4-Take Advantage of Technology to Support Data Gathering. You can use digital platforms to contextualize learning, and then analyze the results during and after participation. Use of assessments and measurements of participation are ways to accomplish this. You can also choose to integrate your LMS with other databases within your organization to get more data to analyze for purposes of improvement.

Strategy 5-Create Integrated Supports to Prepare for Post-Training. Some examples of resources that may be used within the course, as well as afterward on-the-job, include at-a-glance study and reference guides that can be organized, accessed, and downloaded for future reference. These may include planners, videos, landing pages, and tear sheets.

Start here, and you’ll have a good foundation for building and measuring an effective leadership training. However, this is just the beginning. For more in-depth discussion and analysis, including strategies for design, we’re providing a webinar with more information – Leadership Capability Models that Define Behaviors for Positive Business Impact.

If you’re reading this before Tuesday, Oct. 25^th, you can sign up here. After that, you can still contact us to get the information here.