Does Your Leadership Training Actually Work? Measuring Outcomes for Learning

Measuring outcomes for learning is important to gain support for learning, improve development options and to drive organizational outcomes. So often, Chief Learning Officers and those in Talent Development roles ask, “How do we know leadership training actually works?” To assess whether leadership development efforts are producing meaningful business impact, best practice shows that we should look for evidence across leader behaviors, business outcomes and existing organizational metrics to have a complete view of learning effectiveness.

What Are Cues to Results for Measuring Outcomes for Learning?

When measuring outcomes for learning, focus in a few areas:

Behavioral Transfer (Are leaders behaving differently?) If behavior doesn’t change, a change in business outcomes cannot be attributed to learning. With people-development, behaviors drive results. If you are only measuring outcomes for learning in one area, this is the place to focus. For example, is there a higher frequency and quality of feedback conversations? Do leaders delegate more often? When making decisions, do leaders establish clear criteria and seek stakeholder input? Measuring outcomes for learning in this area will point to specific, repeated actions that were not happening before training.

Experience of Teams (Are teams experiencing a “different” leader?) This measurement area is a twist on behavioral transfer: measure the perceptions of direct reports about their interaction with leaders. Examples of indicators could include team members having increased clarity on priorities and expectations or reduced dependency on their supervisor in order to make decisions.

Performance and Business Outcomes (Is the work improving?) When measuring outcomes for learning, this is THE area to strive to see improvements. It is also one of the most difficult areas to attribute discretely to learning and development. Measuring here may show shorter cycle times, higher customer satisfaction and improved profitability margins for specific leader-led departments. If you uncover a pattern of improvement in development-rich, leader-led departments, this can indicate strong outcomes.

What Measurement Methods Work Well to Uncover Outcomes?

Here are a few ideas of tools and processes that can be helpful in measuring outcomes for learning:

• Pre- and post-development 360 assessments
• Manager observation rubrics, implemented by internal or external individuals
• Pulse surveys tied to specific behaviors
• Engagement surveys (manager-specific questions)
• Team pulse check surveys or live feedback sessions
• Skip-level interviews or focus groups
• Internal mobility or promotion readiness within teams whose leaders have been developed
• Before and after performance trends or business KPIs linked to a comparison of trained vs. untrained leaders

Part of our instructional design process is creating measures of impact, either while we are developing a program, or after-the-fact. PPS International Limited would love to collaborate and idea-share on finding meaningful and easy-to-implement ways of measuring outcomes for learning.

Reach out for a measurement conversation