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How could a lack of leadership development be hurting your retention? Find out from Cara Silletto on thie week's Contributor Wednesday.
Development is no longer an option. It is a must-have.
Workforce thought leader Cara Silletto, MBA, CSP, works with organizations to reduce unnecessary employee turnover by bridging generational gaps and making managers more effective in their roles.
Learn More ▶The best time to start leadership development is today.
On this week’s Contributor Wednesday, Cara Silletto breaks down why leadership development is no longer optional, and how to build a program that actually drives retention and performance. She makes the business case with compelling ROI data, showing how investing in leaders reduces turnover, improves productivity, and strengthens workplace culture.
Key Topics Covered
Meet Our Contributor
Cara Silletto: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carasilletto/
Learn more about the Employee Retention Ecosystem
employeeretentionecosystem.com
Watch More BTG
00:09 - 05:33
Cara Silletto
Welcome to Bridge the Gap podcast. I'm your contributor host Cara Silletto, and if we haven't met yet, I'm the president and chief retention officer at Magnet Culture, a firm dedicated to reducing unnecessary employee turnover. And I'm the creator of the employee retention ecosystem, which I've been talking about this year as a contributor each month. For this Bridge the Gap podcast.
I hope you've caught the episodes we've done so far this year. And today we're going to talk about the importance and the how to of building and launching your own leadership development program for your leaders to make sure that we are not promoting people into these management and leadership positions at every level without giving them the tools to be successful, to retain and lead their staff.
So what I'm going to do today is start big picture. So executives hold tight and hang with me because we are going to talk about the investment and the business case behind investing in your leaders. We're going to start there. And then I'm going to dive into a little bit later some of the nitty gritty details of even the event planning and project management and instructional design of how to build a great workshop.
So when we get to that point, I'll let you know. You could pass this along to your HR training team and make sure that they have all the tools they need to fill in any gaps for your next build. So first things first. Development is no longer an option. It is a must have. Some people think, especially when times get tight.
I understand budgets, but sometimes when times get tight, we think, well, we'll cut leadership development because it's a nice to have, not a need to have. But I'm going to argue in a few minutes with some investment numbers of why that is not the case. And the first and biggest argument that I would say is that today's new workforce, no man's they expect leadership development and professional development at all levels.
It's not a nice to have. It is a recruiting tool and it is a reason that people will quit if you do not have those programs in place to provide that knowledge, that learning and those stepping stones for folks to work their way up, not just with actual promotions, but also just learning more on the job and being invested in in that position.
So leadership development can no longer be on the back burner, even though we've got a million priorities. I totally get that. But we absolutely have to make sure we're putting this and keeping this in the budget year after year. All right. So the biggest barriers I see the number one barrier is who owns leadership training at a senior care organization.
I see it all the time. There's a lot of that finger pointing operations team is saying, we need these leaders to be better equipped. And oftentimes they're pointing to H.R. Who is up to their eyeballs in other projects, other issues, and trying to do more retention initiatives. And probably they don't have the capacity to take this on. So sometimes I see the chief operating officer in that operations leadership team or even regional directors of Ops.
Sometimes I see them take on more of the leadership training, but more often than not, it ends up landing in the air space of some kind. Now, let me let you in on a little secret. Not all our people are training people, so they do not have the instructional design skills, which means how to build an effective course and effective content.
They often are not the best facilitators. Now, sometimes they are. I see great HR people that are great facilitators, but they don't always have that skill. And then they also have to be project managers and event planners to run the program and figure out the workbooks and the the travel. If you've got folks going from one building to another, lots of logistics that go into that, even down to the snacks and the coffee in the room.
The morning up right. So something to consider and I've seen a lot of groups do. This is should you hire a training manager or a trainer. You know, someone who can do both the build and the facilitation and managing that program as well? Or is it better to outsource? That could go either way. I've seen a lot of effective programs in all different directions, and in fact, I'm going to show you kind of a spectrum of options from DIY internal build it, keep it, evaluate it yourself all the way over to complete outsourcing.
So I'm going to give you some examples of of those in just a few minutes. But let's talk about the numbers for a moment. So I pulled some reports here and wanted to let you know that at the Association for Talent Development in 2025, they reported out saying that per employee investment in development was $1,254 per person in 2025.
All right, let me repeat that. I know that you're listening. You're probably driving. So it is in 2025. They said that on average, companies were investing $1,254. The $1,254 per employee on training and development. So that is on line, you know, compliance training and onboarding that is in-person classes. That's going to conferences. And of course, that $1,200, it's going to be more for management, who again goes to conferences and external events and maybe a little less for our frontline staff, but on average $1,200.
05:33 - 10:17
Cara Silletto
So I want you to think about that for a second. Have you taken your FTE number? Right. If you took your employee number and and times that by $1,200, is that what's in your training budget? Is that what's in your professional development and leadership development bucket. Because if it's not, then you're well below the average of what most organizations are investing in that space.
Okay. So that's one piece of information for you. Another is that research.com came out with their leadership development report in 2026. This is just a couple months old. And they actually found that for every dollar invested in leadership development this isn't just all professional development, but specifically in leadership development. They were finding that every dollar invested brought the company, on average, a $7 return, $7 ROI on every dollar that was invested in leadership development because it came back as less turnover, less mistakes, less deficiencies, things like that.
Right. So it makes you a lot more productive when we have better leaders who can head off those mistakes from from our whole team and head off any conflict that causes a lack of productivity. And everybody, you know, dealing with drama around the building, we don't want any of that. So there is definitely the case to be made that leadership development should not be cut, because you actually get the ROI on the back end for this.
Now here's a third resource. Training magazine said that as of 2025, that 28% of training is now back in person. So if you think of all the training you do and it's my experience in health care, so much of the training is online, which is fine. There's a lot of that, especially for compliance and check box needs. We have a lot of online options, so that's good.
But Training magazine also says that the most popular type of training is in person, and it's climbing back. Coming out of the pandemic. It's climbing back every year as a higher and higher percentage. So I wanted to bring up a really important point here, especially with leadership development. But any kind of professional development that you're doing that's maybe outside of the compliance realm, do not discount the value of the networking because I'm going to tell you that a lot of retention comes from your staff and leaders, your entire team having work friends.
All right. Just think about that term, your work friends. That is so important, particularly to our younger workers. You know, even those under 40, I would say the millennials and Gen Z, for example, I have talked to so many people in our programs and classes over the years that say, look, I don't really love my job or this company or my boss, but I stay because of my work friends.
I am not leaving them, and I love coming to work with them every day. So don't discount the value of people getting together for these trainings. Even if you're teaching a topic, does not matter what the topic is before and after and during the break and in the small group discussions, these folks are building trust with one another.
It is a true team building activity and trust-building activity to have in person or at least live courses. Even when we run virtual classes. If I've got buildings all across different states, when we get all the directors of nursing on one call to learn about emotional intelligence, they still build relationships with each other from this live interaction.
Okay, so make sure that you are not just having everybody do self-study and on-demand type of courses because there's value in learning best practices from one another, and that added team building and trust building time that comes into it. So look at your budget. What are you spending per person on development? What kind of ROI are you getting for your leadership development?
And are you maximizing the training opportunities to build more team camaraderie and trust over time, which will help your retention? It's going to make people want to stay and work with their work friends. All right, so there is a few pieces of information for you on the case, right? If you've got to make your case, maybe you're not the one with the budget purse strings.
You've got to go convince your leadership team who put the dollars in the right place for this. Those are some talking points for you. All right. Now next, why do we do training to fill the actual skill gap that exists? I can't tell you how many executives call me and say, man, our leaders, they're just not great communicators.
10:17 - 15:26
Cara Silletto
They're just not great leaders. They're managing their team. And managing the responsibilities, but they're not actually leading and certainly are not retaining the people that we need to keep. So a lot of organizations, they're going to training for, you guessed it, change in behavior and being more effective in their roles every day, whether that's bridging the generational gaps that we're seeing or improving their communication skills.
Oftentimes they're telling me that leaders lack emotional intelligence. Sometimes they don't even understand different styles and why people are showing up in different ways. You know, introvert, extrovert things like we see on the desk, behavioral styles assessment. And if a leader doesn't understand their own self as far as they're self-awareness, there's very little chance that they're going to have that team awareness and understand that one size doesn't fit all.
And I have to communicate and lead others in a different way because if we grow up with just our lens of how we see the world and how we communicate and how we work, it's hard to lead others and adjust our style. For people who don't think and act and work like we do, right? So you've got to have that self-awareness, that team awareness, adjusting your style.
All of those skills are needed for people in leadership positions. So you might want to kind of think about what skills are missing and what training do people actually need to improve those skills. It's fascinating, but I'm going to say something basic people don't know what they don't know. So we'll talk a little later about how to pick which topics and what level of training people need.
But just remember, they don't know what they don't know. And so we as an organization and an employer are going to have to fill that gap. So another question is, well, how do I evaluate this training, Cara? How do we make sure that we are getting results from it and that people are changing their behavior? So if you haven't ever heard of it, there is a model out there called the Kirkpatrick four Levels of Training evaluation.
So I'm going to walk you through this real quickly. The first level of training evaluation. So after a course how do we evaluate it. The first level of courses. Did you like the class. Smile. Thumbs up. Yay right. Great class. Great facilitator. That was I had a good time. This was worth my time. You know, those kind of.
They call it smile sheets that people fill out afterwards. That is just the first level of evaluation. That's their reaction level to the course. Did they enjoy it? Did they feel like it was worth their time? Well, that's an easy one to capture, but that's probably not what you're looking for as an organization for this investment. The second level you're definitely looking for and we're going to keep climbing, but the second level is learning.
Did they actually gain new knowledge from the class. So that's going to be tested by either a quiz, an exam or even what we do in a lot of our courses is just the verbal. What takeaways did you get from this class? What moments, what insights? What is your new perspective on things? Have we broadened your lens? Did you learn something new and think, I never thought of it that way or I never saw it that way.
That is a whole other level of learning, which is great. And what's the time? We can easily measure those two. Now the third level is behavior change. Did behavior change actually happen because of attending the training. So this is really important. And this one can be measured if you go check on them later. Right. So we might encourage you to check in at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and ask through a simple survey or checking in, you know, face to face with folks of what did you change coming out of that class?
Did you change your your mindset, your behavior, your attitude, your communication? What did you change and what kind of results did you see from that? So, for example, when we teach, one of my favorite things to teach is about switching from drive by check ins with your people to more genuine check ins with your people, which I think you could imagine the difference between a drive by check in.
Hey, how's it going? See you later. Versus a true sit down even just five minutes, not 30. But when we teach that a lot of times after 30, 60, 90 days, if we check in with a manager, they will say that they change their behavior with their check ins, that they started to have more genuine check ins. And then a really cool result is they learn more about their team.
Their team felt more supported. They got more depth from their team of what their team actually needed. Instead of just hearing, I'm fine, I'm good. Because when people say that, it means their manager doesn't have time for them. But when you do a more genuine check in, then the staff start to realize, oh, she's really asking. Like she's really here to help.
Okay, well, yeah, I actually have an issue and I could use your help. And so they build that connection and that support and your staff start to feel more heard and, and truly supported on a daily basis. Right. So that would be like a behavior change. And what kind of outcome that manager is seeing or feeling or hearing from the behavior change.
15:26 - 20:11
Cara Silletto
Now level four of the Kirkpatrick model is what the business leaders are looking for. And that's going to be business results. What kind of ROI and outcomes are we getting that are helping the business move forward. So that's going to be did that behavior change result in reduced turnover. Now I will tell you, before the pandemic I used to be able to clearly isolate if we did a training program that it reduced turnover by 12% or whatever that metric was, because the training program was the primary initiative that was happening around retention.
Now, coming out of the pandemic and after the great resignation from 2122, you know, we're years past that now. And today I see companies doing all kinds of retention initiatives all at the same time. We're reviewing comp, we're doing leadership development, we're revamping onboarding. You know, we've got all these things going on and there can be things negating the retention initiatives like, well, we can only give a 2% or 2.5% pay increase this year because times are tight.
Well, that right there can negate all the other investments that you did. If folks are upset about the compensation. So it is very, very hard, not impossible, but very difficult today to isolate training specifically to that retention ROI. It is possible, but usually it costs a lot of money. There are companies out there actually. We have some partners we refer to.
There are companies out there that can come in and analyze that, but that's going to cost you a lot more money to get to that level. Now, if you're working on culture and retention and leadership development as a whole, right. So if you look back at our employee retention ecosystem model that I talked about a couple episodes ago, if you look at retention more holistically like that, leadership development is going to help you get to those numbers.
And so you can measure that over time, but it's probably going to take more of a holistic approach rather than just saying, if I spend these dollars on training, I better get this ROI back immediately, or, you know, a very straight line to that business outcome that you're looking for. So just something to think about. It is possible to measure, but most of the time what our clients ask us for or what they're looking for is the learning, the knowledge that they want their leaders to have and more of that behavior change that we want them to actually implement what we taught in the class.
Right. Big shocker. That's what we're trying to accomplish. All right. So let me talk about that spectrum of should we DIY this? Should we teach it internally. We would build it, teach it, evaluate everything internally versus the other end of the spectrum is completely outsource it. Right. So sometimes companies just say we're going to bring in a leadership development company and let them be our training arm solely.
They run it, they teach it, they build it. All the things. Now somewhere in the middle would be a collaboration. You might work with an external partner to customize programs for you, or maybe you teach some of it and they teach some of it. So I'm going to give you some examples of of these different areas. But you can also use multiple collaborators.
Some companies will bring in multiple trainers on different expert topics and put together a bigger program that they couldn't have built internally. And they just know that they don't have the expertise. So you can do anything from all by yourself to completely not at all on your own. And some things to think about. There are do you have access to great content?
Do you have folks internally who are experts or you have access without stealing other people's material, by the way? But do you have the access and the expertise internally, even your own best practices to share and to put into a course? That's one question. Second, do you have great trainers internally? Do you have folks who are really great facilitators that just have that charisma and can captivate a group of leaders for a long period of time, at least 90 minutes, if not a half day or full day without them checking their phones, you know, without them getting distracted and doing other things.
Also, do you have the capacity to build it? That takes time to really create those programs as well and then to run it. There's a project management component there of actually running your training courses as well. And then take a look at your budget. Does it make more sense? Depending on how large you are some organizations, it makes a lot more sense to just hire a full time trainer and bring somebody on to run that versus outsourcing it, because you only need to run a few classes a year, and it'd be way cheaper to just have somebody who already does training do that for you.
20:11 - 25:15
Cara Silletto
Okay, so not a lot of options there. And then how much do you want your training programs customized for your internal language? If you want a lot of it to be really specific to your company way, you know, the way that you do things, the language that you use, oftentimes it is best to build it yourself and teach it yourself.
Because if you bring in an external company, it costs a lot of money to pay them to customize it. So if you're not willing to take really great expert content off the shelf, I mean, I hate that term, but, you know, take what they're learning from others and with other organizations even, and bring it in. Then you may need to do it internally.
All right. Now we do something kind of in between there. We don't really customize our training because the topics are so specific in our expertise. Right. Retention and generations and communication and emotional intelligence. Those types of topics, those topics are industry agnostic. But because we do so much work in senior care, close to 80% of our work is in senior living, senior care, that spectrum of senior care, we do what we call personalizing.
So we're going to make sure that every single example is senior care specific and senior care applicable. But the lessons, the strategies themselves are more industry agnostic or leader level agnostic. Okay. So that's something to think about as well. Now you can bring in there's tons of leadership development companies out there. And something you may want to ask them is how applicable is your material to senior care.
Or are they sure about that? Because I've seen some groups that do a lot more training in, let's say like a white collar desk worker environment. And unfortunately, I saw a group come into senior care and want to talk about working from home. And it was like, no, no, no, no, don't talk about that. Right. We don't we don't let our front line work from home.
We rarely even let leadership works from home. But sometimes those topics are not transferable. So if you're going to use an external group, you just want to make sure that they really understand this, this profession, this industry, and that they at least are customizing it and making sure it's applicable to your space and your need and your your language.
Right? I mean, we change little things, like a lot of our clients will say what we call our employees, team members or associates, or they have certain terminology that they would want our training team to use. That's no problem. That's an easy, simple switch. And doesn't require any cost of customization. But if you're bringing in a company that works with a lot of insurance companies and companies and things, their training might not apply to managers who are managing that low wage, frontline, hourly tethered worker that has to be on site to work.
So you just want to check with them on that applicability. All right. Okay. So now we're going to get into a little more nitty gritty and some examples. So executives I give you permission if you don't want to hear the details you're welcome to pass this along to your HR operations team or training department if you've got that as well.
And I'm going to dive into different details and other things to think about as you build out your program. Okay, so as I said earlier, that middle ground is more of a collaborative approach. And we've got a client in North Carolina, Cantera, that we've been working with for years. They built this beautiful Inspire Leadership Academy. They chose to make it very cohort based, meaning the same group comes in and stays together from start to finish.
They've got about a half a dozen buildings across North Carolina. So they like to make it a road show, and they rotate every in person class from building to building, which means their folks do have to travel, but they're identifying high potential and newer managers to be in this program every single year. This is a group that collaborates with experts, so their H.R leader and her team, they run the program and and they choose the topics and they even teach some of it.
They start with a company overview and they end with legal and ethical issues that they've specifically want to talk about for their company employees. But in between, they bring in our team to talk about retention strategies and generational differences. They bring in somebody else to teach about change management and some leadership 101 skills, and they've got several folks that they bring in throughout those eight visits, the eight different classes that they have.
So that would be an example of kind of a collaborative space where they're running the program, they're building the majority of it, but they're getting the expertise by bringing in external folks for certain topics. Now, they also allow folks to nominate themselves to be in the program. So instead of just saying you, you, you, you, you, they have a nomination program which adds a bit to the administrative side.
25:15 - 30:26
Cara Silletto
I won't lie, but they have found what she calls some hidden gems of people that really stepped up and hadn't made themself known as a future leader and they were able to self nominate and get into these programs and really blossom, which is so cool. All right. So her program also includes some assessments and some coaching programs and, and different things that are built in.
Some of them, I even see them do a group project over the six or 8 or 12 months that they're together, which is really cool. And then this group at Cantera, she said they also invite their past academy graduates to come to lunch whenever they're in that building. And that way it builds those work friends. It builds more camaraderie, and the different cohorts get to meet each other over time, which is really cool.
All right. So there's just some ideas on a on a more collaborative middle ground type of approach. Then you need to decide like Cantera, do you want a prepackaged cohort based step one, step two, step three type of program where the same people go through together? Or do you want more of an ala carte leadership development program? You know, we have some clients who call us and say, well, we want to run six classes or eight classes a year, and we will tell you for each class who's going to attend, because maybe they have certain people, they want the skill gap worked on, or maybe they just want to be able to add new people
as they get hired, right? Of course, we all are struggling with the retention not only of our front line, but sometimes of management. So if you do a cohort based program, just remember that a lot of times you can't throw people into the middle of that program. It's really meant for a start to finish approach. So if you do more all we're going to run a leadership class.
You can even name it. You can put a brand behind it. But we're going to run leadership development classes year long. And then as new leaders come in or leave, we will adjust our our kind of attendee list, write the participant invitations with that. But with that approach, just remember the topics need to be standalone so they don't have prerequisites.
They don't kind of build on each other to be less advanced to more advanced over time. Instead, they would just need to be standalone topics, which is totally doable. Just something to think about when you put this together. All right, now another option two is to license content. So you guys are probably familiar with some of those programs out there where your trainer or your H.R.
Person could go get certified in, you know, crucial conversations or there's there's all different things out there, you know, I can't think of them all off the top of my head, but there are certain programs you can get certified in and then teach them internally. So that's another option. In fact, we've done that with with a group out of Missouri.
They have a trainer, but she didn't have the capacity to build brand new classes. So they called us and said, can our trainer teach your classes? So we did a licensing agreement and a train the trainer time with her to make sure she had the PowerPoint, the facilitators guide, the workbooks, everything she needed, and they were able to save a ton of money by her then going building by building and teaching that to their folks internally.
We even allowed her to make that customization that they wanted to do some tweaks to her own PowerPoint and make it really their own right. So that might also be a middle ground for you. I would be remiss if I did not bring up the line. So I want to I want to give you a word of warning with AI and then some ideas of using AI.
So first things first, one thing that AI is causing a lot of chaos around and some problems is if you ask AI to build you a leadership development class like, oh, I want to teach emotional intelligence, so build me a class can do it. The problem is it is using probably copyright material. It is using other some emotional intelligence expert content that you don't have the right to use and to teach.
So it's really scary when you start to do the instructional design and build your courses using AI, because it's typically not great at avoiding protected content. And you could be at risk, which none of us want of people finding out coming after you to say you can't teach that content. That's my intellectual property, whether it's trademarked material or copyright material.
So that'd be really careful. On the building side, if you want to build a class, I will tell you I can absolutely expedite, especially for your busy HR team can expedite your leadership development plans in a lot of ways. Here's a little list, little checklist for you. It can definitely help you brainstorm the potential topics and a training plan.
You know, I've done that with a client where we said, hey, build a 12 part training plan that includes these kind of topics, and, you know, how often should we have it and what would the classes be called? You know, again, you can pull ideas for the topics, the name, the content, the descriptions, and and just also try to make sure that it's not using anything trademark, for example.
30:26 - 35:12
Cara Silletto
But it can definitely help you brainstorm. It can also help you figure out how to evaluate the training effectiveness and make those post event surveys asking about behavior change and knowledge and things like that. You can use AI for the event planning side and the project management side. Hey, I'm running a class for my folks. What all do I need?
Make me an event planning checklist of everything from coffee and and breakfast or snacks to the room set up and the materials. Do we need flip charts? You know, all of those kind of things. And then you could also use AI once you have your content. Let's say you do have people internally that can put together best practices and expert material.
Then you can have I take your PowerPoint or your material and create a workbook, create materials and activities and scenarios to to role play different things like that. And then even, you know, we started using AI to make our certificates at the end of certain programs because it can speed up some of those things as well. It could design the certificate.
You can it can populate the certificate with all the names. If you put in the attendee list, little things like that. So I can certainly help you save time, but be careful not to use it too much on the content development side, because you may be going into some scary territory there. All right. So next up we're going to get into some more of kind of the nitty gritty of your plan.
So who should be invited to the class. What content to include identifying those skill gaps and then the timing location and some more of those event planning details. All right. So I'm breaking this down so you guys can do this yourself. These are all the questions that that I can think of that you need to just have a meeting.
Sit down. If one person is running it they can do it themselves. Or get your team together and say, here are the questions we need to decide on how we are going to run our leadership development program. All right. So and also these are great if you already have a program in place. These are great questions to ask.
Are we missing anything or is there a better way to do this more effective way or more efficient way to do it as well. All right. So first up who should participate. We want to look at all those different leadership levels. They're training for executives. There's training for directors. There's training for managers and there's training for supervisors. And sometimes those things are different right.
There's different skills needed, different level. So really think about what level should participate in the classes and who's going to be invited in. Are you really preparing people to be promoted? Are you trying to find those high potential future emerging leaders, or are you in need of filling skill gaps of current managers and directors? Do you need to kind of backfill what you thought they knew or what they should know for their position, but that is lacking?
So think about that piece as well. And then are you going to select folks by their their job, their role or by tenure? How long folks have been there? One of our clients decided to make, you know, their larger group that got, I think, maybe 26 buildings, and they decided to do a group for a cohort of training for emerging leaders that were not yet leaders or were very new leaders.
They did. A mid-level people have been leaders like maybe, you know, more than one year, up to five years. And then they did one of leaders who had been there in their leadership roles for more than five or more than ten years. So sometimes you could do it based on tenure as well. And then are you going to do that nomination process or more of a selection?
And finally, is it mandatory or optional? Are you going to say if you're in this role or you've been here this long, you have to be in this class and I will tell you that there are pros and cons to both, but I would say that a mandatory training is where you're really going to see culture change, because people will opt out if they're not lovers of training.
Right? Some people have had bad experiences with boring training. Unfortunately, they ruined it for all of us. And so they're like, I got to go to training. You know, anybody with that kind of attitude is not going to sign up, and chances are they might be the ones who need it the most. So a lot of times we're going to want to make those training programs mandatory.
And that way it also builds consistency of those skills and that collaboration and camaraderie across the team as well. So there you go. Who should participate? Next question. What content to include is what skills are needed. And then you can ask them, you know some managers will say, I really wish I was better at x, y, z. You know, I wish I was better at giving feedback or I wish I was better at handling difficult situations.
35:12 - 41:09
Cara Silletto
Sometimes they'll tell you, but a lot of times they don't know what they don't know. So another good question or way to survey is ask the people above them or below them. What do you wish your team knew how to do? What do you wish your managers knew how to do? Or what skills could they improve upon? And those folks will often tell you what they think others need.
Which is pretty funny because, you know, we're all pretty judgy. And then also, here's something else people are going to be at all different levels. Some folks are individual learners, and they've continued to teach themselves over time. Others stay away from continuous learning and improvement. And maybe they're stuck in a few years ago or a decade ago with their skills and their leadership plan.
But don't be afraid to start with the basics, no matter who it is. Okay to start with the basics. And we'll even say if we know we've got some more tenured folks coming in or more effective folks coming into a basic class, we call it a refresher, because even really great leaders oftentimes will stop being a great leader because they're busy and they're great leadership skills that they know they should be using.
Those skills go on the back burner, and we're just going to bring it back to the front burner. All right. So oftentimes you can have kind of basic refresher classes. And that never hurts to put folks through it. Even even folks that come through our classes that have great experience, what they tend to do is they tend to share their best practices.
They tend to be more of a contributor to the class and also take away some new nuggets. But they love to share that and help build more consistency of their effectiveness across other leaders. As well. So it's a win win for everybody. So then if you're going to do that skill building, you need to really think about what classes, what skills are needed.
So generational dynamics, communication feedback team building disc behavioral styles, emotional intelligence professionalism change management resilience. Right. There's all these different things. And next you need to think about the timing of this because I think it's funny an executive called me a couple years ago and I'll never forget him saying I need them to know all of this. Right?
He looked at our catalog. It was like, I need them to know all of this yesterday. So he thought he wanted to move as quickly as possible. We want to have classes immediately. Boom, boom, boom, boom boom. Let's just get them all done. When in fact it turned out that you cannot learn new skills that quickly. You can't learn that many new skills that quickly they start to get muddy if you're trying to change your behavior, and then the next week you're told to change different behavior and then different behavior and then different behavior.
So you do have to give your folks a runway, a realistic time frame of when you can hold these classes. So I've seen some like micro training weekly programs where you meet quickly for six weeks in a row. That tends to be if you're trying to accomplish something specific, very quickly. But most of the time with general leadership development, where we're consistently improving their skills over time, you're usually looking at either monthly training, sometimes by monthly meeting every other month, or even quarterly.
You know, most of the time when folks end up choosing quarterly training with us, it's simply a budget issue. It's we just can't afford to do 6 or 8 classes a year. We just are going to start with four. So that's fine. Starting there is is better than nothing. But usually that monthly or bi monthly is where you're going to get more consistent improvement over time.
And then by the time you're done with that year of training, you look back and say, wow, look at the six or 8 or 12 topics that we covered and all of the improvement that we're seeing in that area. So thinking about that is important. And then is it going to be virtual or in-person or even hybrid. You could do a program where maybe you start an in in person and then the rest of the classes are virtual in between that.
That would be an example as well. All right. So don't forget when you put your program together, especially if it's cohort based. But even if it's just kind of every year certain classes are offered. Kick it off with setting expectations, very specific expectations for attendance and participation. And contribution, how people should show up. So you want to have kind of a an introductory letter or email that says, here's what we expect as we go into these classes.
And then when people hit a certain milestone, either the end of the program or once they finish six classes or 12 classes, you want to celebrate that. So have a cake, have a party, have pizza. You know, at the end of some of our programs, we made these special lapel pins. They're about the size of a quarter. And it says retention champion.
So when they get through a certain number of classes, they become a retention champion and get celebrated in that way. So you can make little company pins or giveaway swag and really celebrate that milestone for folks as well. So I'm going to go one level deeper for you if you are listening to this today, or you want to send this to the person who will be building the actual workshops or building the training, I want to give you a few quick tips of what to include in there.
All right. And you can definitely use AI for some of this. First of all, if you're going to do half day and full day workshops, I highly recommend doing three hour half days and a six hour full day max to all these people have a day job that they need to check email and they are going to have to fight fires during their breaks and things in between.
Unfortunately, that's just the way it is in our particular profession. That's how that's how our training classes go. Don't try to shove 7 or 8 hours into a day. It's too much for their brains to absorb and just max it out at 3 or 6 hours for sure. So of course, you got to figure out what content you want to transfer to them.
41:09 - 45:06
Cara Silletto
What knowledge do you want them to have? Add in discussions and activities. If you're going to teach a half day, three hour class, you don't build three hours of content. Who? Tell them it isn't a lecture. All right, so you want to build in discussion questions, activities, maybe scenarios to run. Hopefully you're also going to give them before they walk away.
Some tools, some templates, some scripts to use when they need to pull those talents out later. Right. That new skill that they have, they have their tool, template or script right there. Hopefully at the end of every class, you're helping them with an implementation plan. So what are you doing the next 30 days or the next two, three, four weeks to implement and practice and build a habit out of this new skill that you've learned today.
And then afterwards you can actually give them some homework, or we call it an action guide, a four week action guide of what to do next, how to practice and implement those things. So hopefully you also have that kind of tangible workbook that they have to refer to. And it has some homework in the back of where to go from here.
All right. So those are just a few workshop best practices. If you're going to build something yourself that you might want to consider as well. So all righty I know you're overwhelmed. This was quite the detailed podcast here today. And you may have to go back if you were driving and kind of write this down or maybe share it with some other team members if they're the ones who need to hear that.
But let me tell you, if you don't have anything in place now, or maybe you just want to start tweaking what you have, just start small. You don't have to tackle a huge program and say, well, we're going to make a 6 or 12 month program and get all the details and all the content ready before we launch that.
I recommend doing it in bite sized chunks, so just start with 1 or 2 classes and launch those, get those started, and then build class three, build class four and do it over time. In fact, if you make a six class plan, you don't have to have the sixth class built until the fifth class is taught. And then you could build it.
Now you want to be careful not to run out of time and do things at the last minute, but you can build these programs over time, so don't overload yourself in thinking I've got to do it all as one big project before we can hit go. That's not the case for this as well. Okay, so just start small, schedule 1 or 2 classes and move yourself forward with now I'm going to I'm going to close up here with that good old ancient proverb that says, you know, the best time to plant a tree if you want shade was 20 years ago because now you would be reaping the benefits of that.
Right? But we can't go back in time and do that. So the second best time to plant a tree is today. If we know that our leaders need more support, more resources, more skills, the best time to start leadership development is today. And to get this ball rolling. Because six months from now, 12 months ago or 12 months from now, we will have wished that we started 12 months ago and that we had already instilled those skills in our people.
So really think about trying to move this to the front burner, get it on somebody's priority list and making that happen here in the next quarter for sure that those conversations started. So reach out to me if you have any questions. I'm the only Cara Silletto on LinkedIn, so I'm really easy to find. It's Cara with a c, c a r a, so I hope this was beneficial for you from big picture thinking all the way down to the detailed execution of building your own leadership development program for your organization.
My name is Cara Silletto, and I want to thank you for listening to this week's Bridge the Gap Contributor Wednesday. I hope you'll join me for more episodes to help you reduce employee turnover by transforming your leaders into retention champions.
