Time to Train or Time to Realign?

Written by Em Preston.

Often at Bloom, we're tasked with crafting bespoke workshops for organisations, tailored to their specific needs and challenges. This is something we absolutely LOVE to do. It's an opportunity to engage with leaders who not only have a hunger for learning and development but also actively seek to collaborate in designing sessions that better resonate with their context.

The value from co-creating workshops alongside leaders, rather than prescribing solutions can be truly incredible.

Don’t get me wrong, I've been involved in some awesome pre-designed workshops in the past, where I have walked away having learned a lot. But, there’s something to be said for the deep and lasting impact when you're able to better grasp an organisation’s challenges and work hand-in-hand to address them.

Recently, I was collaborating with a leadership team who asked me how they might improve our managers management skills.

This isn’t an easy question to answer, considering the varying experiences and backgrounds of the managers, and the multifaceted nature of management itself.

Initially, I was inclined to propose a coaching workshop, drawing from my own experiences of how positively I had found coaching workshops on my own management skills. However, I then (ironically) decided instead to adopt a coaching mindset and delve deeper into the underlying issues prompting their request for training.

I asked them:

• "What leads you to believe that management training is the most effective path?"

• "What specific challenges do you believe management training will help alleviate?"

• "What does effective management training look like?"

I’d opened a can of worms. Yes!

It became super clear then, that the leadership team hadn't fully articulated the challenges they aimed to address through management training.

Recognising this, we spent some time collaborating, aligning and clarifying what we all believed the challenges were that were actually trying to solve.

We came to this:

"We want to build confidence in our managers, empowering them to make autonomous decisions rather than constantly seeking approval."

We then decided that the type of workshop we needed to run wasn’t a training at all. It was a realignment session between the managers and the leaders, to establish expectations and openly discuss ways that between each other, they could feel more confident in their decision making.

Because of how refined we managed to make the problem before we engaged in 'training', the results from the session we ended up running were super specific and relevant with some deep and impactful discussion.

Imagine if I’d have just prescribed a coaching workshop instead of taking the time to truly understand the issue?

How many times do we give the solution to a problem before truly understanding it? And how often are we participating in workshops that aren’t relevant to us because someone else's personal experience thinks it will help solve a misunderstood problem?

Before you invest time and money in training, ask yourself whether it’s time to train or time to realign? And if we are going to opt for training, how can we make sure we can better understand the skills we are asking our people to learn and why we are asking them to learn it?

Remember:

• The best workshops are the ones that really connect.

• We can better engage workshop participants if what we are working through is really relevant for them.

• The more we understand the problem we are trying to solve, the better chance we have of finding a solution that really works.

Happy realigning!