Management Training - How to Make It Stick!

How often have you been on a Management Training course and failed to implement what you were taught?

Many organisations struggle with the same issue – there is no point spending time and money on Management Training and Development if the participants don’t put into practice what was learned.

But how can you encourage your managers to ACT?

The key to ensuring Management Training is successful is quite simply to:

1. Make it relevant and useful.
2. Provide appropriate sponsorship, follow up and support.

Make it relevant
It is vital to make the Management Training relevant to the participants by ensuring that they can apply what they have learned immediately when they return to work.

For example, you may send someone on an advanced Excel course so that they can learn how to build complex spreadsheets. However, when they return if they don’t have an opportunity to apply their learning immediately, they will soon forget it. Habits are only formed by people continually practicing what they learn.

Sponsorship
The second element to ensuring success of a Management Training programme is sponsorship. To gain commitment from managers to use their learning, it is essential that Senior Managers sponsor the Management Training effectively. For example, senior managers should:

• Demonstrate public commitment to Management Training and the benefits it will deliver to the organisation.
• Regularly review with participants how they have applied their learning.
• Sanction any inappropriate behaviour from the participants (e.g. participants not turning up to training sessions).
• Regularly sell the benefits of training and development.
• Target and hold their managers accountable for delivering improved performance.
• Accept the significance of their role in the success of any Management Training.

By ensuring that Management Training programmes are sponsored appropriately by Senior Management and the content is relevant and useful to the participants, will ensure that the participants THINK and ACT differently as a result of their learning.