Okay, so welcome to another one of my Todd Talks, which always exists to equip you with actionable ideas that you can use immediately to advance your leadership, make a bigger difference in the world, and help other people do the same. So, if you’re like most leadership learning and talent executives, you probably get pushback from time to time from your internal stakeholders on the amount of time your leadership programs take. And I think this is pretty understandable because in the face of overwhelming workloads, meeting mania, and the Great Resignation, most leaders are busier than ever. However, overreacting to the pressures from your stakeholders to reduce time on your leadership programs can often be a big trap and here’s why. Number one, time is often not the real problem. As a general rule people don’t complain about time if they feel like they’re getting enough value from their time investment. Therefore, complaints about time on leadership programs are usually symptomatic of a lack of perceived or actual value of those programs.
And if you have a value problem with your leadership programs, perceived or otherwise, reducing the amount of time on your programs can actually make things a lot worse. Because caving it on time can actually hurt your credibility because you might be sending an implicit message to your stakeholders, that your programs weren’t valuable enough in the first place to justify the time invested in them. So, instead of decreasing the amount of time on your leadership programs, what we need to do instead is increase both their perceived and actual value. And the way to do that is to ensure that every one of your leadership programs consistently produces three outcomes.
Number one, sticky behavior change that’s noticeable, so the difference that your programs are making is obvious. Number two, significant business impact that’s actually measurable, so that you can demonstrate the substantial value that your programs are bringing to the business. And number three, stakeholder reports in which you’ll showcase number one and number two, to remove any doubt about the value of your leadership programs. Conceptually, this is kind of a no brainer, right? But ensuring your programs actually produce these three things is another matter entirely. So, in next week’s video, I’ll share with you a really helpful methodology that will enable you to do just that.
