Three Reasons Why Traditional Leadership Development is Failing the Horticulture Industry
Last year $2.9 billion was spent on leadership development training from external providers around the world, mostly on traditional workshops (State of the Leadership Development Industry, TrainingIndustry.com). By this we mean multi-session, medium- to large-group, off- or on-site, instructor-led training. And yet, according to Brandon Hall Group, 75 per cent of organisations rate their leadership development efforts as ineffective.
Michael Beer, Magnus Finnstrom and Derek Schrader wrote a Harvard Business Review working paper in 2016 called ‘The Great Training Robbery’. They concluded that training in most companies doesn’t translate into changes in individual and organisation behaviour or improved financial performance. ‘Put simply, companies are not getting the return they expect on their investment in training and education.’ They argued that senior HR and leadership execs are ‘complicit’ in this robbery, because no-one is willing to face the uncomfortable truth about the real value of training.
What’s the uncomfortable truth about instructor-led workshops for developing managers? Simple: the learning doesn’t stick.
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Workshops Have Limited Follow Up
First, it’s based on an obsolete learning model. Workshops are convenient, but they don’t cause anyone to learn unless they want to. As Seth Godin says, ‘Lectures are administratively convenient for the institution: industrialised teaching, fitting everyone into the same box, memorised the rules and the knowledge — people have memorised their way to ignorance.’
Workshops are essentially a ‘download’ model of learning — an instructor gives you the information and you try to remember it. We call it the sheep-dip approach — put everybody through the same workshop and hope they remember something from it 6 months later when it’s really needed.
People don’t remember and don’t apply what they’ve learned because there’s limited follow-up: learners, when left to their own devices, quickly revert to type, especially under the pressure of the peak season.
Because participants’ own managers aren’t usually involved in the workshops, there’s no accountability for behaviour change. There’s no consequence if people don’t advance in their skill development, so they stop. More to the point, leaders don’t have the option of coaching their people because they don’t have access to the content, or there’s no follow-up structure or they are themselves not sufficiently skilled as coaches. Too few programmes link management trainees and their leaders, missing a vital opportunity for learning, coaching and alignment.
Read more about Horticulture leadership development that works here.
Workshops Have No Peer Learning
Another vital opportunity is lost because workshops are a workplace form of classroom where the individual goes to learn from the teacher. Adults don’t learn like that. They learn from each other, their peers, their managers and, most importantly, from practising and reflecting on their own experience in their job. Traditional programmes don’t build in group learning structures or a process of continuous learning from experience.
As the authors of the Harvard Business Review article ‘The Future of Leadership Development’ say, little of what is learned ends up being applied.
‘Not only is the majority of training in today’s companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed.’ - Steve Glaveski, Harvard Business Review, October 2019.
Workshops are Impractical
Finally there are the practicalities. Workshops are expensive, collectively representing hundreds of days away from work. A lot of multi-day training is compromised because people simply can’t get to all the sessions.
For geographically dispersed companies like many horticulture operations, logistics and costs of travel are a significant burden. Also, the further people are away physically from their workplace, the further they are away mentally, and it gets harder to retain the real-life context.
And in seasonal industries, it is simply impractical to run development workshops during the peak season. As a result, there’s no way to extend the learning and skill development into the time and place when it’s really needed.
That’s the key point: The fundamental problem with workshops is the gap between when and what is learned and when and what is needed.
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