The Best Leadership Training Technique That You're Not Using
Great leaders are teachers. And the first thing great leaders teach their employees is the difference between good work and great work.
It sounds absurdly simple, but the research is clear that most employees simply don't know whether their performance is good or great. For instance, a Leadership IQ study of 30,000 employees discovered that only 29% of employees say they always know whether their performance is where it should be, while 36% say they never or rarely know.
Here's a quick test: Ask five employees to tell you the difference between good teamwork and great teamwork. Or good and great accountability. Or good and great communication. Sometimes employees will admit they don't know. In other cases, every employee will give you an answer, but all of their answers will be different. How can your company achieve great communication, accountability, teamwork, or customer service, if you haven't clearly defined what separates good from great performance?
The Leadership Training Technique
Fortunately, there's a leadership training technique called Word Pictures that will turn your managers into great teachers. Word Pictures paint a clear behavioral, verbal picture that teaches employees the precise differences between "Needs Work," "Good Work," and "Great Work." This training technique will force managers to think deeply about the differences between good and great work. And it demonstrates to.
This isn’t another hokey role-play exercise, nor does it involve memorizing a bunch of scripts. This exercise requires managers to think deeply in order to define the differences between good and great of performance. And it’s the deep thinking that will turn leaders from tellers into teachers.
Imagine that one of your managers is frustrated because their employees aren't delivering the best customer service. They've delivered everything from constructive feedback to pep talks, but customer service is still subpar.
Here's how you can use Word Pictures in a leadership training class to turn that manager into a world-class teacher and immediately fix customer service.
Step 1: Ask the manager, "What's a specific example of bad customer service that you've seen recently?" Maybe they answer, "When a customer asks questions that my employees can't answer, they just transfer the customer to a different person or department, saying things like 'Just go ask so-and-so,' and nothing gets resolved."
Step 2: Ask the manager, "What's a good way of handling that situation that you've seen recently? Maybe it's not perfect, but it's definitely better." Now the manager says, "Someone who's good at customer service will tell the customer that they don't have the answer but that they'll go find the answer right away. They even thank the customer for their patience while they go get the answer."
Step 3: Ask the manager, "How do your superstar employees handle that situation? What do they do that makes them really great?" Perhaps the manager answers, "My best people thank the customer for their patience, but they also give the customer compliments like, 'That's a really great question.' And afterward, they tell me about all the difficult questions they got so we can try to fix the underlying issues."
Step 4: Now that you've nudged the manager to delineate between Needs Work, Good Work, and Great Work, you can put that insight into a grid like this:
WORD PICTURES
Put yourself in the shoes of a frontline employee: Do you see how easy it is to figure out whether you're delivering good or great work? If I'm an employee equipped with this Word Picture, I can easily rate (and improve) my performance.
From the manager's perspective, can you see how easy it is to teach employees how to be great? Once you've defined the exact differences between Needs Work, Good Work, and Great Work, teaching this to your employees is quite simple.
Of course, the crux of this leadership training exercise is forcing managers to really think through those precise differences. Your leaders intuitively understand the difference between good and great, but they've rarely defined it clearly enough to be useful as a teaching tool.
Once you've defined the difference between good and great communication, accountability, teamwork, customer service, or anything else you choose, your managers can start teaching all those good employees how to become great ones. This is a different approach to training leaders, but it will have a deep and lasting impact on turning your leaders into the type of coaches and teachers that today’s organizations desperately need.
