Insights · 2019
Action learning in leadership development
A leadership course can deliver insight in two days. Changed behaviour requires that something is practised in daily operations between sessions — and that someone asks about it.
Action learning means that leaders work on their own current tasks instead of textbook cases. What is trained in the module must be usable in next week’s staff review, the next whiteboard meeting or the conflict that has been left too long.
We have built this type of programme for e-conomic, Jobindex and Umbraco, among others. What they have in common is not the content but the mechanics around it.
Changing learning arenas
We deliberately move the setting: the meeting room, production, the hotel, the outdoors, a small theatre. Leadership behaviour becomes clearer when the context changes, because habit loses its grip. That is also why a residential programme with real tasks under time pressure reveals more about a leadership team than a day of discussions.
What happens between the modules
This is where the real development lies: assignments with a concrete purpose, a buddy system in which two leaders follow each other, 1:1 coaching — preferably at the leader’s own workplace — and a personal development plan that is followed up and evaluated.
Participants also gather feedback on their new behaviour from both employees and the company’s own management. That is the mechanism that moves a programme from course to changed practice.
The company’s own academy
When the programme is established as the company’s own academy, rather than as a purchased course, it lasts. The leadership language becomes shared, new leaders can go through the same, and development continues after the consultant has gone home.
Written by Mads Cronquist. Originally published in Danish on cronquist.dk (2019) under the title “LeaderShop — virksomhedens eget academy” — here in an edited English version.