How does one effectively facilitate leadership training and development? The traditional approach is to lecture. It is perplexing how many leadership trainers and facilitators still root their leadership development expe­riences in lectures with lengthy sermons. Similarly, we often lean into formal presentations laden with slide decks about leadership.

Let’s pause for a moment and change the subject. If you learned how to ride a bicycle, how did you learn? We can assume it was by getting on the bike, having a loved one run behind the bike — holding on and cheering, falling down, getting upset and eventually doing it all over again, until no assistance was necessary. We can imagine that none of us learned to ride a bike from a lecture-style slide deck presentation. It sounds preposterous! Nobody learns to ride a bike from sitting through a PowerPoint presentation. So why do we structure our trainings as lecture-style slide deck presentations?

Like riding a bike, if we want our participants to access the training message, internalize learning and then apply that learning to their practice, we need to leverage experiential learning and host reflective dialogue. If we want to be more effective and impactful as leadership trainers, we ought to ground our leadership learning expe­riences in experiential learning and reflective dialogue.

Experiential Learning and Reflective Dialogue

Experiential learning is an educational experience whereby the outcomes — for us, leadership training — are achieved through personal immersion and involvement in the learning experi­ence itself. As facilitators of others’ leadership development, we craft real-world, real-time, problem-based challenges for our participants. Experiential learning can be defined as a process where participants actively engage in learning through meaningful experi­ences — and reflection upon those experiences — to construct new knowledge, skills and/or attitudes.

Experiential learning activities, on their own though, are not sufficient. The follow-up to experiential activities — reflective dialogue — is the critical component. This is why: our experiential activities enable participants the important opportunity to access the training message and material. The internalization of that learning occurs when our participants are empowered to reflect upon and dialogue about their experience. Without the reflective dialogue, any insight that might have been garnered from the experience may lay dormant in our participant’s minds. When we host reflective dialogue, we create a space for our participants to process the experience. This enables them to call attention to the most important elements of the training — while also empowering them to apply the learning to their practice beyond the training bubble.

Experiential Activates and Reflective Dialogue Questions: 2 Examples

Here is a real-world example of an experiential learning activity paired with go-to reflective dialogue questions:

“Trade Me a Value”

This activity was recently infused into a one-hour training experience for 40 middle managers. The group was exploring the importance of leading from their values. In the “Trade Me a Value?” activity, participants are instructed to utilize notecards to draft their four of their most important values, each written on a separate card. Then, during the activity, the participants’ task is to engage with others to trade their values for what others have identified as their own important values. After some time for trading had passed, we paused the activity and entered into a robust reflective dialogue.

Here are a few of the questions posed to the group:

• What was an original value and why was it important to you?
• What values do you have now? Are they the same or different from your original?
• How did it feel to relinquish your most important values?
• When trading, what was your strategy — what did you do to secure what you deemed to be important or sacred values?
• Which values seemed to be the most popular or desired? What might we learn from this about how we collectively value certain values?
• Beyond this training bubble, what are two strategies you will incorporate into your practice to emphasize and live into these values?

By the end of this training, the participants were highly engaged and absorbed in the moment. This experience created a purposeful pause in their day-to-day operations to think about their most precious values, how those values manifest in their lives, and how to better emphasize these values in their leadership practices. They found it to be incredibly rewarding.

We’ve all heard and read about the importance of authentically leading and living from a value-centered place. I am sure many of us can provide a lecture-style presentation — with slides — to highlight this topic. The power of this experience came in the form of participants diving deep within themselves to identify their core values and then engage in an experiential activity where they were trading — relinquishing their own values and acquiring others’ values — as a way to emphasize the feeling of letting go of their own values and needing to “own” others’ values. The reflective dialogue illuminated for this group the importance of holding fast to and leading from a place of our values. We concluded with a written reflective exercise that encouraged learners to pursue actions — beyond the training bubble — to enhance how they lead from their values. In the post-training assessment and evaluations, this training was highlighted as an important experience because of the nature of the experiential learning and reflective dialogue.

Final Thoughts

How can we expect our organizational leaders to navigate the challenges we inevitably face if those who are responsible for their leadership training and development today are ill-prepared? We can’t.

Too often, we lean into antiquated leadership training and development methods that only limitedly provide leadership learning opportunities for our participants. When we leverage experiential learning and reflective dialogue in our training experiences, opportunities for our participants to access the training message and material, internalize their learning and then apply that learning increases exponentially.