What’s a leader to do? Today, with their broad spans of control, leaders are frustrated that they can’t spend enough time with each of their employees. And yet, today’s economic environment demands that managers maximize employee productivity.

Leaders are challenged to build skills and provide counsel, while also motivating and inspiring employees to take action.

What Got us Here Won’t Get us There
Historically, role plays have been the holy grail for developing these skills.  But role plays demand time away from the job, and the quality of the practice and feedback is widely variable.

The industry had high hopes for solving this challenge with innovative, new simulation technologies.  Early generations of branching simulations offered flexibility and delivered consistent quality.

Think about the endless directions a coaching conversation can take. Unfortunately, the limited outcomes of those early simulations didn’t cut it. Interactions in these simulations presented few choices (nodes) and because they were preprogrammed, were highly predicable.

For a while, it appeared that “Level 4″ simulations, which use game engines with rules and probabilities, would come to the rescue.  They have similar benefits to that of a live role play, but can be done remotely online at a time convenient to the learner, while still delivering a consistent experience and feedback.

Alas, none of these technologies could provide the chief advantage of an in-person role play: realism. The role player could respond in the conversation ad hoc, as they saw fit. We can’t do that with a computer.

Or can we?

Introducing a New Age in Coaching Skills Training

Imagine a coaching skills practice session so real that you will forget that you are interacting with the computer. Hundreds of nodes and voice recognition deliver the most immersive simulation you have ever experienced.  Couple that with coaching best practices defined by one of the world’s best-known authorities and a simulation designed by one of the premier designers in the space.  Taken together, it represents a breakthrough in Coaching and Leadership Development the likes of which we haven’t seen in a decade.

We’ve got it here at Blueline Simulations. And you have to see it to believe it. My own experience has made me a believer. I want you to experience it for yourself. Give me a call today, and I’ll give you an exclusive peek at the next level of coaching skills training.

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During a recent client engagement I was reminded once again of how critical effective coaching is to success in the workplace. While conducting a gap analysis to identify failure points in a new sales process, one refrain was stated loudly and consistently: “our coaching on the new process is inconsistent, at best.” Unfortunately, this is a theme I’ve heard all too often in my career.

Numerous studies have shown the significant impact that effective coaching can have on performance. One frequently cited study by Olivero and Bane, showed that, “After training alone, the average increase in productivity was 22.4 percent. When training was reinforced with coaching, the average increase in productivity was 88 percent.” And a 2001 case study by MetrixGlobal found that “coaching produced a 529% return on investment and significant intangible benefits to the business.” And if the financial benefits from employee retention were included it boosted the overall ROI to 788%.

Given that coaching delivers such dramatic impact, why is it so underutilized in so many organizations? There are a number of answers to that question, including: increasing spans of control limit coaching opportunities, competing priorities, and simply a lack of focus on employee development within the culture. The one that I want to address here is a lack of comfort with the skills required to coach effectively. While many managers are comfortable with setting goals, allocating resources and developing or evaluating reports, they are often hesitant to engage in a performance coaching dialogue.

While traditional classes devoted to coaching provide the context and process for coaching effectively, they fail to develop mastery. Most training sessions can offer only two or three opportunities to role-play a coaching conversation. While this may be sufficient to reinforce the key concepts, it falls far short of developing unconscious competence. Role-playing rarely provides the variety of emotional responses one is likely to encounter during actual coaching conversations, either. And unless there is an immediate opportunity or need to engage in coaching after the training, the limited proficiency that is developed will have faded before the leader can apply the skills in a critical coaching situation.

Fortunately, the latest in Level 4 coaching simulations addresses all these shortcomings. This new rules-based simulation utilizes voice recognition and hundreds of “nodes” to deliver the most immersive experience ever developed.  Learners encounter a wide range of “personalities” and emotional responses during the practice sessions. This allows sufficient practice to develop unconscious competence while never delivering the same experience twice. And it has the added benefit that leader’s can use the sim for a just-in-time refresher prior to a developmental coaching session.

Blueline will be launching this new off-the-shelf simulation in the next few weeks. Considering the significant return on investment, shouldn’t you be exploring this very cost-effective means of boosting organizational performance?

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The point of all training provided by an organization is to improve people’s performance on the job. For this to happen, employees must use what they have learned when they are working. In their 1992 book, Transfer of Training, Mary Broad and John Newstrom evaluate the impact of three key resources on skills application – the facilitator/designer of the training, the trainee, and the trainee’s manager. Their analysis showed that the largest contributor to whether people actually use what they learn on the job is the manager. And the biggest factor was not what the manager did after the training (like coaching) but what the manager did before the training occurred.

Since Broad and Newstrom’s work was conducted nearly twenty years ago, and there have been a lot of innovations in how we deliver training, including eSimulations, virtual classroom, social learning, and mobile, I was curious to ponder whether  the role of the manager in learning transfer has changed?

Based on a three-year study of over 10,000 learners by KnowledgePool, not that much. Their research shows that “where learners receive line manager support, 94% go on to apply what they learned”.  Apparently, managers do still make a key difference

The question this raises for me is, as we move to more “bite-size” and ubiquitous training through social and mobile learning, how do we continue to ensure that we tap into this critical resource to ensure learning gets transferred? As stated above, Broad and Newstrom’s work indicated that what a manager does before the training session occurs is even more critical to learning transfer than what they do afterwards.

In 1991-92 its very likely that a manager would have had significant opportunity to interact with the trainee before a training session, if nothing more than to ensure there was coverage for their absence to attend a class. Even if the training was offered via elearning, it is likely the manager was aware of when the employee was going to take a particular course.

Now jump to today (and even more so into the near future).  The trainee may be just as likely to complete a 5-10 minute mobile learning session while waiting in line at the cafeteria or bank drive-thru. Or perhaps, they’ve spent part of their lunch time browsing through recent postings in their favorite Community of Practice portal. Will the manager even know that they have engaged in learning? It may be that self initiated training like this will consistently have a high transfer of learning, but I think we are failing our clients if we don’t continue to find ways to engage managers and tap into the impact they have in ensuring that what is learned gets used on the job. Just as we are developing new and innovative ways to deliver training, we will need to find new and innovative ways for manager involvement.

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