Disrupting leadership training: Must-have #3 for horticulture Leaders - Socialisation
In the 10/20/70 model, content has 10% of the learning impact, socialisation 20% and experience 70%. The problem with traditional training is that 70% of the impact comes from the content.
Accessible, relevant content is the first 10%, but in our experience you must have a structured social process to enable people to apply the learning to themselves and their jobs.
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Peer Learning
The first ingredient of the social process is peer learning. We call this the Co-lab group in our system. Learning groups are rich ground for learning from peers, and can also provide the support and encouragement that learners need for motivation – peer groups are where people find the courage to change. The best way to maximise the learning impact of the group is to run a ‘flipped classroom’ so that participants have digested the content and completed the exercises ahead of the session. Then the focus is on learning through application and discussion about real-life scenarios, past or future.
A high-performing group will also hold learners to account for their commitments and behaviour. Someone once described their learning group as ‘a bright light, a clear mirror and a kick in the pants’.
Groups are best facilitated by a skilled outsider as then the sessions are more likely to be scheduled, actually occur, run to time and stay focused. In our experience the optimum learning group size is 6, the ideal topic discussion time is 60 to 90 minutes.
Leader Involvement in Training
The second thing you must have is leader involvement, which is almost always missing from traditional learning. We’ve found that engaging participants’ leaders (e.g. their managers) as coaches has been transformative; we call them leader coaches.
Scheduling 1:1 coaching sessions as close to the content consumption as possible gives participants the opportunity to test their thinking with their manager, which is another form of mental effort. They benefit from their manager’s guidance and coaching, but there are even greater benefits that accrue to the organisation. To learn more about effective leadership development in Horticulture click here.
How to Coach Effectively
The first and most obvious way is how scheduling conversations about coaching skills leads naturally into conversations about the bigger picture: culture, strategy, priorities and values. These conversations are a natural way to increase alignment between the organisation and the participant, via the leader coach.
The second area of benefit is more subtle and more fundamental. Coaching is one of the most effective and least-used management techniques. For managers who are accustomed to telling people what to do, coaching feels somehow soft.
One of the reasons leaders don’t provide adequate coaching is that it can be uncomfortable and awkward for leaders to start setting up coaching conversations. Building a coaching session into a development programme takes that awkwardness away: the programme creates the space. Leaders start to pay attention to how they are coaching, and performance always improves when we pay attention to it.
Coaching has to become a KPI for senior people.
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NZ Horticulture: Addressing critical labour challenges
Download our guide to transform the way you think about Horticulture management training.
