Scaling leadership development programs comes with a unique set of challenges and pitfalls, some easier to overcome than others. With a few principles and a strong facilitation network, global organizations can scale their leadership training without sacrificing quality.
Pitfalls to Scaling Leadership Development
Talent development and learning teams often run into pitfalls such as:
- Needing to manage multiple stakeholders in various locations who are responsible for coordinating and scaling leadership development programs, but who have limited time and expertise.
- Lack of access to facilitators with qualifications in leadership development and specialized learning methodology, while also being multilingual and located within traveling distance to locations.
- Ensuring consistent, high-quality facilitation, while adjusting to important cultural nuances that are often overlooked in design in favor of having a single, standardized program.
- Having compressed training schedules by offering training to large numbers of employees so as to make noticeable change. This puts project management and resource pressures on the typically slim-staffed talent development and training teams responsible.
While there are certainly other pitfalls, these challenges are most common to organizations that are rolling out large-scale training.
Ways to Improve Improve Implementation and Quality
Often, organizations will approach scaling leadership development by designating internal resources to facilitate including using managers or HR as trainers. Others partner with multiple vendors to gain global coverage. While both these options can be successful, sometimes quality dips.
In the 25 years of delivering our global, high-volume, client-designed training, we have overcome these predictable pitfalls, while keeping quality and impact high. Here are just a couple of the strategies that build and maintain consistent high-quality delivery:
- Where possible, assign a lead project manager as the consolidating point of contact for the program on both the client and consulting firm teams. This aids in streamlining decision making and communication across the network of faculty and operations teams.
- Designate Master or Regional Trainers who learn the program and the organization well, and who monitors feedback from a variety of sources.
Working with Facilitation Teams
The single most important aspect of ensuring quality while scaling leadership development, is to use a proven, skillful and well-managed team of facilitators. Questions you can ask in order to gauge the strength of a facilitation team:
- How do you identify and recruit trainers to join your organization?
- What actions do you take to onboard your facilitators to the culture of the client organization?
- How do you bring facilitators up-to-speed on a program?
- What metrics and data sources do you use to measure facilitator effectiveness?
- What interventions are in place if there is a problem with facilitator performance?
Learn more about our global facilitation network and visit SyNet Americas’ page for more about our expertise in leadership development and how it can help your organization in scaling leadership development.