How tailored training and development drives success

Article 1: How tailored training and development drives success

Welcome to the first of a series of articles based on a recent OxTalks podcast in which Chris Oxley (Managing Director, Oxley & Partners) and Bradley Honnor (MatchFit Managing Director) discuss leadership and development training.

In this first episode, Bradley explains the light bulb moment when he realised the potential for reimagining personal development training and created MatchFit to deliver his vision.

Frustrated by the ‘sheep dip’ approach as described by Chris Oxley, Bradley set out to build an approach that is self-directed, highly relevant and outcome focussed.

You can read the transcript of their conversation below. Click the link at the end of the transcript to listen to the full podcast.

Transcript

Bradley: I really thought about what it is that interests me professionally. Throughout the work I’ve undertaken for all of my career, I’ve always been in that people development space, in a variety of ways. I’ve worked as a sports massage therapist and a psychotherapist. And what I found is that people have an innate interest in thinking about how they can improve their life, their experience of life, their experience of work/life.

So working within learning development or organisational development for many years, I started to be quite critical of the development methodology that was on offer. Quite often there’s a process that’s unmeasured or lacking in relevance for the individuals taking part. You might engage in a leadership program where some of it is very relevant, but you’re there for four or five days. Some you’ve done before. Some of it’s not so relevant because you’ve got a field team, for example, and you’re more interested in how best to manage them remotely and the course doesn’t cover that.

I started to think about Richard Branson. Not that I’m comparing myself, but I love the fact that he looks at a service and asks himself how could he do it better. So I was thinking that surely there must be a better methodology to deliver learning and development experiences for individuals and teams. And because of my psychotherapy training, I was very familiar with the concept of phenomenological interventions and, for me, that seemed like a much better way forward. So I took the step from leaving an employed role and moved into going it alone and seeing how people felt about what I was offering as an alternative approach.

Chris: You touched on the ‘phenomenological’ approach. Can you explain that a bit more?

Bradley: It’s about understanding that every individual is completely unique. And, for those listening, that won’t be a great surprise. But what is surprising is that we don’t always treat individuals as individuals. We tend to group people together and assume the content is going to be relevant for leaders, rather than looking at that specific leader in that specific context of where and how they are working currently. And from here, really starting to think about, what does that individual need in terms of their development.

The starting point of that phenomenological approach is to really engage with them and to see what it is they want to work on or want to look at, and then shape the interventions and approach to their development around that input. So it’s very specific and very relevant. It’s very behavioural. Leaders drive change, but behaviours drive leaders.

So what are the behaviours that will help this leader engage in a development activity? What are the behaviours that they’re looking to address themselves? And then it’s about shaping the content and approach specifically around those challenges. And that way we get great buy in. Individuals are really engaged because they’re shaping the development experience themselves. We’re facilitating and steering that, but the direction comes from them. It’s a self-directed experiential learning process. And I’ve found, through delivering our services in that way, that people get a great deal of value, because there’s no generalisation of what a good leader should be.

Chris: It seems like you’re involving the people you’re supporting in developing their own journeys. Is that, right?

Bradley: Very much so. I’m the first to stand back and say: I don’t know until at least we speak and really engage together, what you need, what your interests are, what’s going to spark that fire, what’s going to capture your interest. And a way to really do that is analyse the team or individual or organisation, and to start looking at what people are talking or thinking about, and where they feel their challenges are. And then we can present those things back to that individual, team or organisation so they have an independent view of the issues.

If we are working with a leader, we can talk to them about what they feel they need to address. And there will be a number of directions that we can go in, a number of priorities we could approach. But in their minds, in their context, in the environment in which they are working, they will know what’s most important. And by the very definition of that conversation, that individual or team or organisation is engaged, because they know they’re setting the scenes themselves. They’re setting up the context to those conversations, rather than us coming in and imposing some external, irrelevant, content on them.

For me, a fundamental aspect of what we do is to do the listening before we design and deliver the intervention.

Chris: I’m presuming you’ve seen quite an increase in engagement from that sheep dip approach, and I’ve noticed that, through certain L&D individuals I’ve spoken to, they’re almost fed up with the constant one size fits all. There seems to be a real need now to find something that’s more individual to inspire teams. Christian hunt, who I know, was UBS’s first Managing Director of Behavioural Science, but he come from a compliance background, and was using behavioural science to lead people to be more compliant to rules. It’s looking at those types of strategies, and it feels like there’s some similarities here. Is that, right?

Bradley: Very much so. We’re working with very senior people generally. An organisation we’re working with right now has a £4 billion turnover and are in every country you can imagine. They have an end-to-end service, everything from design to logistics and digital marketing.

They’re very sophisticated, experienced people, and have done a lot of traditional leadership work. But what they want is something that’s much more personalised and relevant to them. And quite often we find those leaders will have exceptional business acumen so there’s a limit to what we can teach them about leading a business. But as soon as we get into the behavioural psychology of what we do, people find that quite fascinating. How could I find more motivation in myself? How do I motivate and engage my team? How do we find a sense of purpose and drive a vision? We find that behavioural science gives what we do validity.

People can see there’s science behind what we’re doing. Because engaging and leading people is a fine line between art and science. There’s a real art to that. There are some nebulous things we need to be doing, understanding and putting into practice to lead effectively. But there is also science behind behaviour and the way we think and operate. So shedding light on the components of performance psychology, and how leaders apply them in their role as a leader, we find is a much more interesting and relevant conversation for these very experienced and senior people.

We hope that you enjoyed this conversation and remember look out for Episode 2 soon. You can listen to the whole conversation here The Transformative Impact of Personalised Development with Bradley Honnor