In May of this year, Findcourses.co.uk matched Cass Art, a London-based art supplies business, with training provider Leadership in Action as part of our yearly Learning at Work Week (LAWW) activities.
After the end, we caught up with trainer Graham Field to find out what he thought about the event, its benefits for the parties involved and the challenges of L&D departments more broadly.
As a company, was it the first time that you had done anything for LAW Week?
Yes.
What was your general experience of the event?
It was great! It gave us the opportunity to speak to a potential new client in a very different way. For us, the best thing was that it enabled us to work with a client who had a similar mindset and was keen to do something in a short, sharp burst. For them, I think it gave them the opportunity to stop and think "what would invite someone in to do?", and use the opportunity offered by LAWW to do that.
That was exactly what my next question was going to be. What was the session on? What did you put into it?
It was about leadership. The people we had in the room work in shops, so our starting point was talking very briefly about situational leadership, just in very general terms - what different people need at different times and so on.
Then we led into 4 themes and "mini-sessions" from that: one was on SMART goals, one was on motivation, one was around coaching and one was around delegation.
That sounds great. And you did this all in an hour and a half?
(Laughs) Yes, we condensed around 2 days’ worth of training into just one hour and a half! It was a bit of a whistle stop tour.
Definitely. But I suppose it did give them a good taste of how a "full-length" training programme could be?
Yes, it did, and the feedback was really positive. Actually one of the main wants that came out of it was "it would have been nice to spend more time on these things", though they knew that it was just a taster.
Well, that’s a good sign surely, that people want to spend more time on it?
Yes, definitely. My only doubt in terms of organising the session was: do you do an hour and a half going really in depth on one topic or do you touch on a few things that the delegates can go away and do some more research around?
In the end my thinking was that, rather than just going in-depth on one subject, it was better to give them four or five things that would stimulate their thinking. Actually, one of the things that was asked for was simple, practical tools they could take away and use, so that was how I settled on those 4 themes. So if we never saw them again it would be something that they could go away and think about independently, or otherwise something to build on with us in the future.
And obviously that’s what we’re hoping for, to build a relationship with them for the future.
Aside from this, what would you say the main benefit for you was?
Meeting the company was being able to show them how we can do things was obviously one of the main benefits.
But as for myself, since I like to doodle and do something a bit creative on flipcharts, I enjoyed working with an arts supplies company because it gave me the opportunity to be very cartoony and creative in terms of handouts and flips.
So they seemed to like the approach, but I also took some learning out of that week myself. I went down to one of their shops to see how they worked, I actually bought something and spent some time chatting to one of their staff too. So that provided some interesting insights, and I really enjoyed being able to apply the kind of creative approach that I like to a company that really appreciated the different style. It made it more interesting to produce the hand-outs and make them double-sided, one side very visual and creative and the other with the more traditional bullet point lists.
That sounds great, definitely an added bonus.
Well, they got a £17 pound sale out of me at least!
And what would you say the main results have been, though maybe you have yet to see their full extent?
The instant results seem to be that all of the participants felt like they’d gotten something out of the session that they could take away and use.
One of the things I did, since a lot of their people are arty or in at least interested in art, is buy some blank postcards and ask them to draw a visual on one side. Something that reminded them of the session. Then we posted them out the following week with the goal of having them act as a trigger for the individuals, either around a personal or a work-related goal, since we talked about both of those things during the session.
Normally I use postcards that already have visuals on them, but because of the nature of the company I thought it would be a good idea to get them to do a bit more. There was one lady, for example, who had the goal of losing weight to fit into a dress for her brother’s wedding, so she drew a picture of the dress on the front. Or when I talk about SMART goals, I use Mount Everest as an example, so a few of them drew pictures of people climbing up a mountain.
Moving on to a more general question: as a trainer, how do you feel that L&D departments are approaching their training need?
I see a balance really. We have some clients with L&D departments that are really on the ball – they think about things more strategically, starting from "who are we as a company, what are we about?" and then thinking about how they can collaborate with training partners to further that corporate vision across a range of different areas. So not just "standard" leadership training but also accredited programmes, bespoke sessions and 360 tools to measure return on investment. And that’s what they are really keen on: ensuring that there are measurable returns on their training investment.
On the other hand, you have some L&D departments that focus more on a specific need that they have now – like Presentation Skills for example – and they try to squeeze that in using up as little time as possible. So basically you develop a solution based on their needs, say it’s 2 days, and they reply with "ok, can we do that in a day or a day and a half?". I suppose that they have the best of intentions in terms of wanting to do something, but then they also try to squeeze training time down to meet the needs of fast-paced business.
I work with the full spectrum, and from a trainer’s point of view what you want is to always give clients the best possible return on their investment. Even with Cass Art, though there was no financial investment involved, I recognise that it was a time investment for the participants to join a session for an hour and a half. So I’m always very keen for them to feel that they get a benefit out of it, whatever we do and whatever their investment is.
So if clients ask me to cut a training session down to 1.5 days, the thought process is: ok, what will give them the greatest benefits? And those are the parts that we keep.
Have you had any observations in terms of what companies focus on? Are they aware of what they need when it comes to training?
That varies quite significantly too. A company we’re seeing later on this week, for example, are very clear about what they want. They’ve already done their own training needs analysis and sent it through, so now we can use that as a basis for a bespoke proposal.
Some individuals are very good at spotting their own needs and can be quite specific. Others may come to you and say "our managers need to be better leaders", which is quite general but still recognising a need. And then others, like a client we have now, can come to you and say "we know we need help, and we know you can help us, but we don’t know how".
What we’ve done in this case is requested access to their people, so that we can talk to management and develop a very bespoke product.
Others don’t want to give you that access, so what they are after is a probably an off-the-shelf product. What we do in that case is always start the session by asking "what do you want to get out of this?" and then tweak the programme as much as possible off the back of that.
So it’s a range really. I suppose that in the end people like ourselves, who do this for a living, may be better able to spot training needs or general areas. But there’s definitely some good people in L&D out there working with these things.
Anything else to sum up?
For me it was a very enjoyable experience – a good opportunity to be a bit more creative, which you don’t often get to do. And the feedback from their side has been really positive as well.
I suppose that a lot of people feel like learning is something you HAVE to do, whereas I think that our approach to it shows that learning can be fun, it can be practical and it can be enjoyable as well. I would say that my experience overall shows that the more you can make it practical, fun and memorable, the more people will like it.