It was a wonderful assignment with a great client, driven by the firm’s president and COO, who not only commissioned a condensed 3-hour version of the program for himself and all his top reports, but also periodically spent an hour or so at the back of the classroom in several successive programs. A talented and highly-effective human resources manager played a key role in program design, execution, and ensuring selection of the right participants. As news of the program spread from early participants, demand for broader participation led to additional sessions.

“The two-day program involved both theory and practice: Learn something, then practice doing it in a classroom setting, then use the plan you have built with your team as the basis for the “real” plan that your business group will have to submit as part of the company’s standard annual planning cycle (inevitably, participants in subsequent sessions found that the deadlines got progressively closer and eventually became very soon indeed!). As Dr Samuel Johnson once wrote, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Most of the participants, primarily from sales backgrounds, appeared very motivated and they were fun to teach.

“The content consisted of a sequence of lectures by myself and Dave (a marketing executive from the firm who had teaching experience as an adjunct professor), organized around the steps in developing a marketing plan, beginning with a SWOT analysis and ending with the plan itself and implementation issues. Conventional, stuff? Yes—but mind-changing for this historically sales-driven and operations-dominated company. And even those participants who held business degrees were, for the most part, unfamiliar with a services marketing conceptual framework. As the program evolved, so too did the structure and content of each session, without radical departure from the original concept. We pruned the lectures a little and added more breakouts.

“This sandwich approach was, I believe, the secret to the program’s success. In the past, outside a case-based environment, I’ve sometimes lectured too much. PowerPoints, useful though they are, can become terribly seductive for the presenter but mind-numbing in excessive numbers for the participants. A passive audience member is a recipient, not a participant. Active people get tired of sitting in a room listening to talking heads, however talented. Song-and-dance routines can hold their interest longer, but content and learning often suffer. After an hour or so in the classroom, participants went into breakout groups of 5-7 people, and were assigned an exercise based on the prior lecture and nearly always built around the company’s own data and processes. Then back they came with their conclusions, which a couple of groups would be asked to present, subsequently facing questions and critiques from the instructors and other groups. Dave, I, and a couple of his colleagues who had secondary teaching roles, made a great team, ensuring that content, exercises, and delivery brought new knowledge but were always tailored to the company’s industry and the president’s new strategic thrust. However, relevant examples from other service industries often served as useful reminders that the marketing and customer-orientation issues faced by this company were not unique to its own industry

The immediate participants’ evaluations were very good. But more important was an evaluative study commissioned a year later by HR, after all but the last session had concluded, which identified significant impacts on the company’s subsequent performance and even calculated (using plausible assumptions), a return on investment that was quite impressive.

Follow-up Evaluations Are Essential in Executive Education.
“For the life of me,” concludes Christopher, “I cannot understand why so few companies take the trouble to follow up on the longer-term impact of their often huge investments in execution education and staff training.

“End-of-session evaluations provide a quick reading of how things went, often being strongly influenced by the relative dynamism of the presenter and level of excitement generated by the program, but not always reflecting how relevant and important participants will find the content in the future. By definition, such such evaluations cannot tell you whether the program resulted in relevant behavior change, let alone its impact on the bottom line. Hence, I believe HR must take responsibility for conducting one or more follow-up evaluations up to a year later.”