We have been asking ourselves this constantly as we strive to make all of our development programmes a joy from start to finish. This is important to us as we really believe you, your team and your organisation should feel positive and fully engaged in any development programme.
We really believe that everyone has the opportunity to grow and develop and we want that development experience to be an exceptional one.
To help us understand this in a little more detail we have had to take an in depth look at what we do, how we do and most importantly asking lots of why questions:
Why is this important for our clients?
Why is this important for our team?
Why is this important for us as a business?
Why is this important for our clients?
This made us really look at the drivers and motivators that our clients have. We work really hard to understand these things and we do this by:
Looking at outcomes, we speak to senior teams about why they want to run training.
We speak to people we are training (before we write the training material) to understand why they want to attend (and what concerns they might have).
We look to understand if organisations are looking for a quick fix or if they want a longterm partnership and culture change (the latter is where we spend our time).
We understand why this important now, and why this is important in the longer term (this helps us support the strategic and operational development needs).
We provide a degree of challenge to ensure that our clients “why” gives them the best return on investment, return on time and the best outcomes.
Why is this important for our team?
We really want our team to be fully engaged and love what they do, we help them really engage by:
Letting them shape delivery methods and approaches for each client (hands on discovery led learning, not death by PowerPoint).
Helping them creating useful workbooks for the development programme that have longer term use and benefits (long term learning, background reading and actions plans).
Supporting them in delivering material that will stretch learning in each session (we very often get calls months after delivery telling us about the long term benefits of doing this).
Why is this important for us as a business?
The temptation here is to talk about the surface level outputs – happy clients, referrals, repeat business, and yes these are all important to us. There is something much more important though, it’s knowing we have done a great job for our clients and that we have helped individual, teams and firms improve in a significant way. Hearing and reading feedback that talks about the cultural shift, improved performance, better engagement and positive outcomes is what its all about for us. These are the things that keep us coming back for more!
As a footnote, it’s worth noting the things that really don’t make development programmes a joy, and they are:
Sweets – who doesn’t like a good sweet? Lots of people, we now offer fruit and healthy snacks as we go.
A good lunch – a big lunch just leaves you wanting to snooze! A healthy light lunch.
Fun (without learning) – its nice to go away with a smile, but where is the learning?
Learning (without fun) – we need an element of fun as this really helps with learning and embedding what is learned.
Training done to you – You might have experienced this, training that is simply forced onto to you while you are held prisoner for the day. This is painful for you being trained and it’s painful for trainer to deliver, we simply don’t do this.
Development programmes should leave you enthused, informed and curious about what next, what else to learn, and how else to grow. Let us know what makes training and development programmes a joy for you. We would love to hear your perspective and share some of the things we have learned over the last 13 years.
To find out how your development programmes can be more of a joy, speak to Nevil: nevil@newresults.co.uk, connect with him on LinkedIn or visit the website www.newresults.co.uk