Five leadership courses, and the work that continued after they were delivered

The brief came with a date on it

One of Pakistan's telecom operators wanted its managers trained in situational leadership, the model Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed, in which a manager changes how much direction and support they give to match how ready each person is for the task in front of them.

They wanted it as eLearning, and the launch date was fixed. It could not move, so neither could anything that depended on it.

The five courses are the part of this project anyone can see. A good share of the work happened before the first module was built, and after the last one was delivered.

Before anything was built, we listened

Before we wrote a line, we sat with the people who had asked for the programme and with the managers who would take it. We asked what they were dealing with. What went wrong with their teams. What they did when it did.

Every case in the five courses came out of those conversations. A manager taking the course meets situations from their own organisation, with the pressures that organisation has, and recognises the problem before being asked to solve it.

We built the programme with the Successive Approximation Model, and in SAM this is the preparation phase: gathering what the people closest to the problem already know before anything is designed.

While it was built, the client signed off every module

On a date that cannot move, the expensive mistake is the one you find late. So we worked in SAM's short cycles of design, build and review, and the client approved each module before the next one began.

A problem in module one got fixed in module one, before it could be copied into the other four. And the client watched the programme take shape all the way through, with nothing left to discover at the end.

Five courses, and how every module ends

Five courses, animated and interactive. Every module closes the same way: on a case and a quiz about that case, with a challenge and a scenario for learners to practise in a virtual setting.

The order matters. A quiz about the module checks whether someone remembers what was said. A quiz about the case asks them to use it: read a situation, decide which style of leadership it needs, and say why. That is case-based learning, and it puts the assessment at the levels of Bloom's taxonomy where a manager's job sits, applying and analysing, instead of recalling.

Delivery was the middle of the work

We evaluated the programme on the Kirkpatrick Model, at all four of its levels.

The first two can be read soon after a course goes live: how the managers rated it, and what they learnt, which the case quizzes measured. The other two take longer. Whether managers led differently back at work, and what that changed for the organisation, only show once people have been leading with it for a while. Measuring them meant staying with the programme after the modules were delivered.

What happened

One of Pakistan's telecom operators trained its managers in situational leadership through five eLearning courses, built with SAM and evaluated at all four Kirkpatrick levels. At Level 4, the level that asks what changed for the organisation, the programme reported 74% leadership effectiveness.

What we would tell someone in the same position

Ask where the cases will come from

A leadership course is only as useful as the situations inside it. If the cases are written before anyone has spoken to your managers, ask who they are about.

On a fixed date, approve one module at a time

Seeing the whole programme for the first time at the end is the most expensive way to learn that something needs to change. Sign off each module before the next one is built.

Ask what the quiz is testing

If a manager can pass the end of a module without reading a situation and deciding what to do, the quiz is testing memory.

Ask what happens after the modules are delivered

Levels 3 and 4 of Kirkpatrick cannot be measured on launch day. Agree at the start who will measure behaviour and results, how, and when, so the answer exists months later when someone asks whether the programme worked.