During leadership training sessions, leaders’ questions indicate they seek answers and strategies to face their immediate leadership challenges. That, in return, challenges us, trainers, to provide solutions that help with and beyond those immediate and isolated incidents. Fortunately, there is one ingredient that bridges that gap.
Leadership training that does not work
I speak to leaders regularly about their memories of leadership training and its impact on them. Unfortunately, too often, I hear they find it boring, repetitive in content and disengaged from reality.
That reflects my own experience of leadership training. Since I became a sergeant in the German army almost 30 years ago, nothing has changed. My training at the military, the church leadership training, and, more recently, a certified leadership and management training course had the same content – leadership theories, personal profiling, and generic how-to models.
I quickly learned that people are unique and that those generic models don’t work with specific individuals. But unfortunately, after each time I took part in leadership training, I missed learning how to adapt those theories to my day-to-day challenges. So, frustrated by the lack of applicable content, I began to look into my training experience in other areas for a solution.
The search for a different approach to leadership training
Training people has always been part of my life. As a 15-year-old, I helped my peers improve in subjects like mathematics so they could pass their exams. Then I helped out in my parents’ extra tuition business or covered for my dad when he could not run his IT courses.
Then 20 years ago, I began preaching in churches. In that context, I realised that I naturally did something different. Instead of just teaching people my knowledge, I focussed on teaching people how I got there. I immersed people in my learning experience, and my main goal was not knowledge transfer but to inspire people to start a learning journey and to provide them with strategies to learn. People often remembered my teachings for years, and I wondered what made my style memorable and impactful.
When I started qualifying as an Emotional Logic coach, I began to understand what made my training so memorable – I did not help people fix but feel their problems and provided steps to learn and adapt. The ingredient that made the difference was emotional engagement and emotional learning.
Dos and don’ts of emotional engagement in leadership training
However, emotional engagement is challenging because it can cause people to disengage or engage fully.
In my experience, disengagement happens in leadership training by unconsciously judging participants. Often trainers use statistics and research data slides highlighting common leadership problems. But judging puts people into psychological shock, and people in shock cannot learn because their prefrontal cortex is disengaged.
I engage leaders by helping them see themselves from the outside. Instead of confronting them directly, I create a psychologically safe environment of feeling and learning that validates their experience. My goal is to help leaders to open their minds, heart and will and facilitate them to discover how they can lead by tapping into their unique authenticity.
That moment of connecting with the self makes my leadership training memorable and impactful over the years. And emotional engagement in a psychologically non-judgemental way is the ingredient that makes it happen.
