Rapid Culture Change is Possible Part 1 (of 2)

Purpose: Show how immersion leadership training makes strategic initiative success possible.



Adults learn through experience. We learn behaviors through experience. This is the flagpole fact of the educational world. This flag is visible for everyone to see, and it’s where educators know they need to be whether they are training hard or soft skills. Deborah Solomon Reid of Tuck School of Business strikes a bell to be heard by anyone considering this most fundamental element of adult learning. “While conceptual learning is important, the major leaps forward—these so-called ‘aha!’ moments when mental maps are rearranged—are most likely to happen when students encounter these theories experientially.” The widespread use of experiential training in the development of the soft skills of leadership and teamwork can transform individuals and your organization.

The question is, “What transformation do you want?” What end state do you envision for your organization, and what behavioral alignment must take place in your employees before that vision can be realized? The answer to that question often traverses the corporate culture. For instance, the characteristics necessary for an agile and responsive company, one of the strategic focuses highlighted by IBM in their 2004 CEO survey, require employees, who value agility and responsiveness. Properly guided experiential training can create fertile conditions for a rapid adjustment in corporate culture, no matter the direction you wish to go. Whether it is agility and responsiveness, sustainability, or lean systems you wish to ingrain, it can be done. However, to reap the greatest rewards you must make two commitments.

First, you must embrace the experiential training model for its ability to quickly influence behavior. Second, because everyone has a role in corporate culture you must commit to training nearly everyone. I acknowledge that this is a tremendous distance to go for most companies. You will see that there are many powerful uses for experiential training that will enhance your company’s performance without a wholesale assault on your corporate culture. Any significant impact on your leadership core should be embraced. However, if you are looking for that sweeping modification, you need to plan and resource for results. Bring a ladder tall enough to at least reach the lowest branches.

Changing values for maintainable strategic initiatives:

Frances Hesselbein said, “Soft skills are now hard,” and she is right. In so many strategic initiatives, particularly in sustainability and lean systems, we must get into the person’s brain and adjust their value system. That’s not easy. Experiential training and immersion training as I’ll define here require a thoughtful approach by leaders determined to make improvements and dedicate the necessary resources to do so.

When I refer to experiential training, I mean a guided experience intended to teach specific lessons. Immersion training is an extended use of experiential training where no other focus is allowed. Immersion training (table 1) uses all available time allotted for the achievement of the intended results. The understanding is that the entire day is a training environment. There are no distractive devices that connect the students to work or home, and there is no happy hour or tee time. No matter the number of days, and more than one is preferable, the objectives of the course have the un-interrupted attention of the students.

Table 1. Immersion training is characterized by:

Reflection - Distraction free environment allows for down-time assimilation of lessons. Facilitates application of lessons in real life.

Regardless of the variables chosen for the realignment of your corporate culture, teamwork, leadership and communication must be the constants. When those components are taken out, all other initiatives suffer. In the IBM 2004 CEO survey, they “recognize that it is the skills of their people and their capacity for change and leadership that will ultimately determine the outcome.”

Bob Doppelt, a leading researcher on sustainability, writes, “Leading organizations are blessed with – or take explicit steps to develop – exemplary leadership at the top and throughout the enterprise. It is not possible to initiate or sustain the tremendous transformation required to become more sustainable without exceptional leadership.”

Warren Bennis put it this way, “Without leaders who can attract and retain talent, manage knowledge, and unblock people’s capacity to adapt and innovate, an organization’s future is in jeopardy.”

If you don’t have leadership, you will lose the capability to fully exploit the preparedness for the new culture that this training makes possible. You can spend all of your training time and effort on sustainability or agility, and your company will become very smart on these subjects. You can use experiential training to make the lessons real, but if you don’t have an expansive, dedicated and perseverant leadership foundation, you will fail.

One of the key advantages you have by making the commitment to a broad immersion campaign is that through the process, you will not only steer your corporate culture, but you will also enhance every aspect of your ability for success by creating a prevailing culture of leadership. Fortunately, leadership principles are nearly universal. The same principles that are used to successfully lead a project team are used to lead a sales organization or a tech staff. The better those principles are incorporated into the operating habits of your people, the more advantage you will have.

In addition to the critical leadership aspect of the training, you will customize your training to include those areas you want most understood and valued. A narrow focus is more effective, and I recommend only one or two. Fortunately, when it comes to cultural issues a short list should be more than sufficient. You are in the process of turning an ocean liner with momentum, so the unsettling notion of a realigning of company values must be prepared for by an extraordinary event. Doppelt’s first intervention for creating a sustainable organization deals with change. “Disrupting an organization’s controlling mental model is the first – and most important – step toward the development of new ways of operating. Little change will occur if this step is unsuccessful.”

The nature of immersion training is that it gets under your skin. It’s disruptive because in order to align the training with how adults learn best, people have to be allowed to fall down, be uncomfortable, challenged, stressed and sometimes broken. This seems to go against our desire to protect people’s self-esteem. Understand that true self-esteem and confidence comes from achievement not coddling. One of the greatest things we as leaders can do to build up the capacity of our people is to allow them the chance for achievement.

Immersion training allows for the complete involvement of each of the participants at every step, whether a leader or follower. It allows for the immediate illumination of the relationship between actions and consequences. It provides the ability to learn how to do things better through educated analysis and experimentation. It allows the consequences of mistakes to be experienced in a training environment and not in the office environment, where they would be much more costly. It compresses the on-the-job learning cycle from months and years down to a number of days. It is an experience that aids in the internalization of positive practices of teamwork, leadership, communication and the variables you choose.

Begin and end properly:

At the beginning and end of this visceral, emotional experience are the critical pieces of instruction and analysis. The format of the experience is of ultimate importance, but in order to keep it from wastefully spilling out of the ends, the classroom time is the cinch.

The introduction is where the primary focuses are defined. It is where their meaning and importance are explained. Next, the students get to actually lead and follow in their experiential environment. They get to make decisions that have consequences. They get to feel the stress of having eyes and expectations on them, and they get to learn what it means to make a decision and stand by it. Everyone gets to operate as a team and learn to depend on each other towards the accomplishment of an objective.

The cinch at the end is when together they get to participate in the important closure of an after action review, or a post-mortem. They get to analyze their experience with respect to the course focuses, and create better ways to perform in the future. The experience really excels when attention is given to building bridges between the lessons learned and the student’s workplace and life.

David Kolb explains in his book Experiential Learning that a cycle of learning exists. It is a good exercise to place our guided experience onto his well-used framework. We provide the opportunity for what he calls abstract conceptualization when we make the introduction of our focus subjects. Our students take these new concepts and use their time as a leader to actively experiment with their implementation as they have a concrete experience. Finally, they have the opportunity to perform reflective observation. It is in this reflective period that we derive lessons learned and build bridges to the workplace and life.

In my book, No Excuse Leadership, I sadly acknowledge that after the nine-week immersion training that is U. S. Army Ranger School, some people fail in life and in work. “The reason is simple – they failed to take advantage of at least two opportunities provided by the school. They either did not think about what there was to learn or didn’t take action on the lessons they did learn.” For various reasons, ranger school does not have a mechanism for such feedback and it is the individual’s responsibility to take that extra step. Fortunately for us, corporate immersion training can use a much shorter period of time utilizing extensive feedback and achieve remarkable behavioral results.

What's the power of rapid repition and how do you get your message received clearly? Find out in Part 2.

To learn more about how immersion team building and leadership training can help you visit: http://www.leadingconcepts.com

Copyright 2005 Brace E. Barber

About the Author

Brace E. Barber works extensively in the field of immersion soft-skill training. His partnership with Leading Concepts, Inc. (http://www.leadingconcepts.com) has allowed for the expansion of this extraordinary level of experiential training. He is the author of the book No Excuse Leadership. (http://www.noexcuseleadership.com) (J. Wiley and Sons Publishing)

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