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

Have any of your staff attended a management training or development programme but failed to take anything away from it?

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

Have you ever attended a course and wished you hadn’t bothered?

Most of the answers to these questions are quite straight forward and with the right amount of thought, planning and preparation, you can ensure that you get the results you want from your management training and development interventions. For example, the following hints and tips can be used as a guide.

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

2) Prepare your staff in advance. They need to know what is expected of them, as well as what they can expect from the programme.

3) Strongly sponsor their learning and development. Ensure that you demonstrate interest and support and regularly review what they have learned and put into practice.

4) Make the programme relevant. We remember things better when they matter to us, and we are more likely to pay attention to a trainer or a topic when we can apply it to our own lives.

5) Make sure the learning can be used immediately. We forget things that we don’t regularly practice. Have you ever been on a finance training course but then forgotten how to prepare the budget or cash flow statement because the course was 6 months ago?

6) 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) Space out training interventions. 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.

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

10) Measure change. Assess the change in performance and behaviour of your staff. What have they improved? How has it benefitted the organisation?

The next time you wish to run a management training and development programme, stop to consider which of these points you could include to make your programme more effective.

If you would like more information on Developing People Ltd's Management Training courses, please telephone us on 0845 406 2349 or email markevenden@developingpeople.co.uk .