Create the Space recently had the honour of being a speaker for the British Business Forum in Slovakia. The event, hosted by the British Chamber of Commerce, was an opportunity for Slovakian business leaders to hear from British Experts on a variety of topics. We held a talk on Leadership and Development, showing our guests exactly how to make a business training course stick.
During the talk we discussed our award winning leadership development programme for Santander, how it was structured and we optimised engagement and impact to ensure fantastic results. We followed up the talk with a taster session running one of our idea generation exercises. It was a fantastic day and what we saw is that even in the international community, the secrets to engaging learners are the same.
For a training course to be successful you have to make the lessons you are trying to teach stick. Our teaching method is to show, not tell. By showing the trainee how to change perspective we allow them to change the way they see things, this leads to them changing the conversations they have which finally leads to a change in behaviour. But how do you do this?
As we explained during our speaking session, the secret to embedding change in your learners’ minds is engagement. You have to provide your learners with an engaging and thought provoking experience.
The traditional chalk and talk method does not provide the level of engagement needed to embed changes in behaviour in a learner. In order to make training stick you have to do more than stand in front of a whiteboard and spend an hour talking at your learners.
We demonstrated this by inviting the forum attendees to take part in a taster session on generating ideas. It was clear from their comments afterwards that they loved how the session promoted leadership confidence and collaboration and really stuck with them. They told us they loved how interactive the whole thing was – and that’s the secret to engagement. Interactivity.
Interactive training is the best way to make learning engaging. When we involved our attendees in the learning process by running an interactive session with them they immediately came to understand the points we were trying to make. Engaging with your learner allows them to realise the value of what you are trying to teach and is far more likely to result in behaviour change that sticks.
We use these techniques of engaging interactive training in all of our programmes, whether we are using it to inspire continuous improvement and innovation in leaders, helping to foster and develop a safety culture within an organisation or even changing cultures of establishments to focus on diversity and inclusion. No matter which of our programmes we are running we are always focused on keeping our training engaging so that the results stick.
