The confidence of a business's leadership team is crucial to driving success on an organisational scale, as well as maintaining the continuity of the business through strategic decision making, effective management skills, and retaining staff.
Continuing to develop individuals, and helping to build their confidence can effectively improve their performance and help them to get the most out of their roles.
In particular, experiential learning methods can be utilised in the workplace to develop the confidence of leaders, both within their own roles and also when it comes to managing employees.
What is experiential learning?
Experiential learning is effectively learning through experiences. As opposed to traditional learning methods, it serves to improve learning retention and communication networks throughout an entire hierarchy.
This means presenting individuals with real scenarios in a controlled, safe environment, and allowing them to explore potential reactions without risk of failure. This ultimately allows people to both reflect on their condition responses, and develop more effective ones.
Exploring business scenarios with zero risk
The immersion of individuals in business scenarios allows people to explore their reactions with zero risk. This gives leaders the chance to review their behaviours, and tackle business scenarios that they may have previously avoided or been reluctant to engage with previously.
By giving people the opportunity to “play” at their roles, they are essentially working through any reluctance they have previously had due to fears of the impact of their actions on their employees.
When implemented correctly, these methods give leaders an opportunity to gain confidence in areas of their role that they had been uncertain of previously, as they will be able to draw on their training experiences when it comes to a real business scenario.
Helping to inspire confidence in leaders through experiential learning
Experiential learning can help to boost leaders confidence in not only communicating with their workforce, but influencing their workforce with real impact.
By focusing on communication either publicly or one-on-one as part of an experiential learning programme, it is possible to help individuals to progress in their daily interactions with their workforce
For example, taking part in false scenarios can breed confidence simply through the “acting” element of this activity. By allowing individuals to run through scenarios in front of others loosens reservations about scenarios that previously may have felt awkward or difficult.
Giving leaders the power to be more assertive decision makers
Developing the various skills required of the typical leader in the modern workplace can be made inherently easier through experiential learning. The benefit of this is that it will ultimately help to raise overall confidence giving leaders more conviction in their daily roles, thereby encouraging assertiveness in decision making.
By encouraging leaders to learn through doing they have their decisions and actions reinforced as being correct, which will aid long term progression.
At MDA Training we can offer in-house training, as well as virtual learning, tailored to individual needs.