Training leadership teams or work teams as a group can magnify results.

How do you select people to participate in training? Sometimes employers let their people self-select, choosing from a menu of options; others mandate certain training courses for certain types or levels of employees. While all training can be effective at improving someone’s personal skills and performance, we’ve seen added benefits of having teams go through training together as a cohort. This can be especially important to foster teamwork and a sense of unity as we face the COVID-19 challenges of working apart.

“We know that every business and every business leader faces progressive, universal challenges, and in order for the organization to grow, you have to grow as individual leaders, and as a leadership team. When you’re ready to do that, we’re here to help you make it happen.”

Mike Nally, Founder and CEO
Nally Ventures

The synergy of team-based training comes from a few places:

• Leveling the playing field: Whether in management teams or functional teams, teammates don’t generally come to the table with the same work experience or life experience, so their skill levels naturally vary. Training as a group ensures everyone has, at a minimum, the same baseline.
• Speaking the same language: When teams train together, they gain a common frame of reference in the concepts and skills covered in the training. One of our clients explained the benefits of this common ground this way:

“I knew [training] would be an investment; I didn’t know at the time that it would stick with me and the team as well as it has. I almost feel like I have a secret weapon that I can reference when issues arise. Case in point: I had an accountability issue with a manager the other week who admitted she didn’t have time to do something. I specifically referenced a [training] session about responsibility and accountability, and how that wasn’t an acceptable excuse at this level. She immediately agreed and said, ‘You’re right. I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.’ It was good knowing that even though it was me calling it out, she realized she had gone off track.”

• Raising the team’s collective capability level: Of course, raising the skill levels of the individuals in your organization is always a plus. But those benefits are magnified when an entire team is elevated. The whole being greater than the sum of its parts is the very definition of synergy!

Research from LinkedIn’s 4th Annual 2020 Workplace Learning Report, which surveyed 2,000 learners, 2,932 managers, and 1,675 learning and development professionals, supports the case for group training as a motivator.

Learners of all generations feel motivated to learn in a social environment—with their colleagues—while taking a course.

67% Gen Z
50% Millennial
55% Gen X
40% Boomer

_{Source: 4thAnnual 2020 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn}

Especially now, while in-person training is on pause, online training effectively steps in. In fact, seeing others and learning alongside them during Zoom training sessions can be a lifeline that helps bring dispersed teams together around a common goal and purpose.

The study also confirms the value of what we’ve focused much of our training on all along: “soft skills.” Especially in the age of robots and ever-evolving technology that quickly becomes outdated, there’s tremendous value in mastering evergreen, ever-essential skills, such as communications, leadership, problem-solving and prioritization. Training your teams in these skills is an investment in their futures as well as the future of the organization.

Percentage of Learning & Development professionals focused on these high-priority skills:

57% Leadership & management
42% Creative problem-solving and design thinking
40% Communication

_{Source: 4thAnnual 2020 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn}

What could your team accomplish if everyone was in sync and working from a common base of skills? High-performing teams have common characteristics that we’ll explore in our next post.