Management Development and Training - How do you ensure it is effective?

by Mark Evenden @ Developing People Ltd.

Have you or a colleague attended a management training or development programme but failed to take anything away from it?

Does the management training and development you have in your organisation deliver the results you want, or is it just a waste of time and money?

I have attended numerous management development and training sessions over the years, some very successful and others less so, and my experiences have lead me to a number of conclusions about how organisations can get the most from their management training and development.


1) Be clear about the purpose of your management training and development programme. For example, what is it that your staff need to do differently as a result of their management training and development? What new knowledge, skills or behaviours do they need to learn, develop and subsequently exhibit?

2) Prepare your staff in advance. It is vital that they know what is expected of them as a result of the training, and why they should attend.

3) Strongly sponsor their learning and development. What I mean by that is you need to demonstrate interest and support for their learning as well as regularly review what they have learned and put into practice.

4) Ensure that the management training is relevant. We remember things better when they matter to us, and we will pay more attention to a trainer or a topic when we can apply.

5) Make sure the learning can be used immediately. We forget things that we don’t regularly practice. For example, send your staff on a finance training course just before you need them to prepare budgets or cash flow statements and not 12 months before hand!

6) Ensure your trainers keep the learning interactive. This sounds simple, but sometimes trainers are unaware of how much they "talk at" rather than "talk with” their participants. Ensure your trainers make the training participative, and use creative role plays, case studies, exercises and discussions.

7) Spread out you training interventions over a number of months. Very little is learned by cramming things in. Make sure that after a training session your staff have an appropriate amount of time to put into practice what they have learned before embarking on the next piece of learning.

8) Use ‘group work’ to solve business problems and reinforce learning. Your staff will benefit from working together to solve particular problems, and it will help to build team spirit too.

9) Encourage your staff to read around the subjects that are being taught. . Provide them with additional reading materials, books, articles, internet reference sites etc to enable your staff to further their development.

10) Finally, measure change. Assess the change in performance and behaviour of your staff. What are they doing now they didn’t before? How have they improved their performance and how has it benefitted the organisation?

Most of my observations are really common sense, but it amazes me how infrequently organisations don’t follow these principles and don’t get the results they want. The next time you wish to run a management training and development programme, stop and think how you will ensure that your organisation gets the right return for its investment in management training and development.