If you were to be asked what you’ve learned in the past year that you feel you’d need to pass on to a successor, the probability is that you wouldn’t point to something you learned at college or university or in a training program. Most significant learning for adults happens when we reflect on our experiences (or those of other people) in life outside the training room.
Training has its place, but it’s what happens “outside the box” that produces most learning. Research reinforces this. The two factors that produce in the most change in behavior as a result of training have nothing to do with the content or process of the training program. They are the expectations that are built up ahead of time and follow-up afterwards. For these reasons, (although we present and “perform” as well as other trainers during our courses) our training programs focus more on pre-work and follow-up than on events in the training room. Key to the effectiveness of structured training programs is the involvement of participants and their work teams in pre-course and follow-up activities. Rooting our training programs in the workplace thus, we are committed to custom-designed learning rather than “off-the-shelf” packages.
When we get work teams involved in the learning process, we build “learning organizations”. This are corporate cultures where people readily share their experiences with each other so everyone can benefit and do a better job. It needs to be reinforced, of course, with a reward system that focuses on not just doing a good job but doing better. Employers must reward learning and improvement as well as performance. This is in sharp contrast with organizations with “blame cultures” when if something goes wrong the question is “Who did it?” In learning organizations, the question becomes “What can we learn from this for the future?”
At The Magi, we have a passion for encouraging and facilitating learning. This shows through in all our training and learning activities.
We will custom-design learning programs to meet your organization’s specific needs in terms of leadership and “people” skills. Such topics as Leadership, Communications, Managing Meetings, Stress and Time Management, Conflict Resolution and Negotiating Skills may be widely appreciated.
As an example of our unique perspectives, however, we offer training programs in “Followership” as well as “Leadership”. By definition, a leader must have followers, but how many leadership training programs take into account the needs of followers and who, when, why, where, what and how they will follow? We help leaders (who are nearly always followers themselves) learn how to be follower-leaders.
