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Practice!
Our BLOG on better strategies for long-lasting training results.
WHY THIS BLOG
About Conversations.
Seed communication, harvest Leaders.

What is Conversational Leadership and How Can it Improve Team Performance

Alessandro Guerrini

Leadership couldn’t exist without conversations: being able to communicate with other people is the only way to drive them towards a common goal. A true leader leverages the power of conversation in order to inspire, support, discover and lead his followers. Through empowering conversations, every leader can create a new common abundance-based mindset enabling creative thinking, innovation and continuous self-improvement.

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Managers Can’t be Coaches Without Practicing Conversations

Andrea Laus

By adopting a coaching mentality and approach, managers can help members of their team realize their potential. To get there, Trainers need to implement new strategies to support this journey. AI-based solutions for practicing coaching conversations can help bridge the gap between just learning and gaining true and actionable experience.

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How Can Leadership Conversations Prevent The Failure Of Your Digital Transformation Program?

Alessandro Guerrini

Transform people’s behaviors before transforming your tools. Here we offer ways to leverage the potential of introducing a strong culture of leadership conversation in order to cultivate leadership and ensure the success of your leadership program.

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A Curriculum for Conversational Leadership

Andrea Laus

With the rise in importance of Conversational Leadership as a way to empower employees, HR and L&D depts. are increasingly looking at implementing effective training programs to promote this approach to leadership. However, it is not an easy task unless you adopt a broader vision than merely adopting and teaching some all-seasons best-practices. Let’s see how to develop a structured curriculum that aims at real long-term training result delivery.

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Using Situational Leadership to Manage Different Types of Conversations

Livio Mariani

Why there is not a “one best way” of leading people and how to manage this, according to the most common leadership theories and real-life case studies. Using its emotional intelligence, the Leader has to identify the best approach for any situation.

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How a Behavioral Simulator Supports Companies in Finding the Best Fitting Employees

Alessandro Guerrini

The primary concern of any recruiter is understanding the real attitude of a candidate in work life. SkillGym has developed an immersive tool that provides the assessors with a detailed mapping of the candidate’s prevailing behaviors demonstrated when working other people.

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Building a Community of Leadership Abundance

Andrea Laus

I take part to several think tanks on leadership, and I always try to contribute from the angle and perspective of seeing empowering conversations as a leadership accelerator. In this article I will explore the importance of practicing on conversational leadership in actionable ways to develop an environment that naturally nurtures reciprocal respect, manages stress, dissipates fear and encourages each person to expand their own comfort zone.

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About Training Strategy.
Training should be about improving performance.

Practicing Conversational Leadership: Six Factors to Consider in Designing a Well-Balanced Training Program

Andrea Laus

We all know that to develop conversational leadership skills we need to invest time and focus on practicing along the way, rather than just sitting in a traditional leadership class. Still, it is not always so clear what should be the right way to define the proper schedule of training. Let’s find out.

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What is SkillGym

Elena Ciani

Welcome to the digital role play platform that will boost your sales and leadership enablement strategy.

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Principles Behind SkillGym

Matteo Malatesta

Success doesn’t happen by chance.
Four key principles drive the success of practicing on SkillGym.

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SkillGym Results

Alessandro Guerrini

What you don’t practice and measure, you don’t improve.

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Why SkillGym

Andrea Laus

Effectiveness in sales and leadership is gained through consistent practice.

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Building a Solid Bridge Between Daily Behaviors and Corporate Competency (or Capability) Models

Andrea Laus

Many organizations are struggling with implementing their competency models. On paper they look great, but in practice they sound complex and theoretical and it’s very hard to turn them into daily repeatable behaviors. It is estimated that over 70% of leaders either are not familiar with their corporate competency model or do not use it at all. It’s time to build a solid bridge.

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First-Time Managers Need to Practice Leadership Conversations

Andrea Laus

It’s tough to transition from an individual contributor who does the work well, to a leader who must continue to do the work, plus lead others. Many first-time managers feel they don’t have the experience and the confidence to manage what their new job is about: conversations. Here is why and what they should practice.

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First-Time Managers Upskilling Acceleration Factors

Andrea Laus

Knowledge transfer (online or offline) by teaching what, why, how-to, what not to do and so on, these are all, without exclusion, just premises to practice. Not only that, even practice itself in everyday life, what we call “in-field experience,” doesn’t have the same value of the practice you do with immersive training. Because it lacks some ACCELERATION FACTORS, without which growth is slowed down.

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SkillGym Use Cases

Andrea Laus

SkillGym was designed to support corporate trainers and executive coaches in all the possible scenarios where there is a demand for upskilling conversations. Whether you want to extend a class with follow-up exercises, empower a coaching experience or, as most do, upskill on leadership through consistent practice-based training, SkillGym has a specific use case for you.

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Best Practices for Coaching with SkillGym

Andrea Laus

SkillGym is a fantastic solution to upgrade leadership coaching strategies and several hundreds of coaches around the world are already benefiting of its A.I. driven features. In this article, I collected some of the most important best practices as told by the best and smartest leadership coaches.

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Four Case Studies About How SkillGym Supports Leadership Coaching

Andrea Laus

Quite often executive coaches leverage the power of SkillGym to enhance the quality of their coaching sessions. In this article, we explore four interesting case studies to see how well SkillGym can solve many challenges typical of executive and leadership coaching.

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Boosting Leadership Coaching with Digital Role Play

Andrea Laus

More often than not, I am contacted by executive coaches who are exploring the possibility of integrating their strategy with top-of-the-line digital technology. In other cases, I meet coaches who still don’t know whether or not to try the “digital way,” but are scared by some of the rumors and trends that the coaching world is living in these days. I dedicate this article to all of them, to explore challenges, trends and opportunities of adopting a Digital Role Play solution like SkillGym to upgrade their current strategy for the better.

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Translating Competencies into Daily Behaviors

Andrea Laus

One of the challenges in learning and development is assisting employees in turning competency models into everyday behaviors. The typical question runs along the lines of: “What does ‘inspire leadership’ mean in practical terms?”or “What exactly can I do to improve on this competency when dealing with my reports?”. SkillGym is the ideal platform to support trainees in understanding how their daily dialogues impact their competencies. In this article, we’ll see how easy it is to move from theory to practice.

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Planning Training for Success, 12 Best Practices

Andrea Laus

The advent of a new generation of Leaders at the workplace is shaking the foundation of the traditional and well-established rules and practices of leadership training. We can no longer afford to plan, design and deliver the leadership courses the way we use to do over the last twenty years. The good news: new practices have already established and proven effective – especially with millennial leaders. In this article, I explore some of the most interesting training methods.

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Making a Competency Model Truly Actionable in People’s Development

Livio Mariani

Competency models can be one of the most important elements of a well-balanced soft-skills training strategy. However, many organizations don’t have an internally shared and acknowledged description of the building blocks of their models, which can sometimes generate misunderstandings. In this article, we will try to set things straight, describing how a well-designed competency model can be the starting point of actionable and effective learning strategies for people’s and leadership’s development.

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Flipping the Leadership Development Strategy with Actionable and Scalable Programs

Matteo Malatesta

Even though the HR-Tech industry is growing very quickly and offering a lot of innovative solutions to make learning experiences very practical, too many L&D professionals are still stuck in designing “pit-stop” leadership development programs. How much the L&D strategy is ready to exploit those innovations remains the key element to truly exploit their potentials. Digital Role Play tools are a candidate to become the structural skeleton of each successful L&D strategy.

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Training Conversational Leadership Across Cultures

Alessandro Guerrini

Every culture puts behaviors and values ​​into practice in a different way. The verbal terms used, the facial expressions, and the body language are elements that must be known and analyzed in order to understand the best way to have effective business conversations. SkillGym has developed an efficient methodology to make its Digital Role Plays fit the cultural norms of a specific local area.

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How Practicing on Digital Role Play Improves Performance: a Case Study

Livio Mariani

Training in a virtual environment designed to challenge and improve specific sales skill has an impact on real-life performance of your sales force. This case study shows how a training based on Digital Role Play generates better results compared to a classical training program.

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Why Stimulate Self-Awareness by Using Both Sides of Your Brain?

Anne-Laure Blanco

Everyone tends to agree that, to improve your performance and skills, a good self-awareness is the #1 factor. And raising self-awareness of your behaviors is facilitated by using both the objective metrics of your performance and the emotional side of your actions.

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How to Support the People Development Programs with Artificial Intelligence

Alessandro Guerrini

SkillGym is a cloud-based tool that allows users to improve the behavioral skills through a realistic simulation of business-related critical conversations. With a “learning by doing” approach, SkillGym generates an enduring retention of the soft skills needed to succeed.

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Why Use Interactive Storytelling in Training: Benefits of Role Plays

Anne-Laure Blanco

Improving skills during adult training is easier when people get involved through storytelling. To achieve that goal, you need adults to actively participate to training and be given a purpose… and Digital Role Plays are a great way to do this.

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Self-Awareness: the Single Factor Influencing the Speed of Leadership Development

Andrea Laus

Lots of evidence shows that people with a high level of self-awareness are much more drawn to self-improvement and are more eager to deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them. So, focusing on increasing the level of Self-Awareness can be great leverage toward leadership development as a whole.

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From Critical to Empowering Conversations: Practicing Increases Self-Confidence

Andrea Laus

The way to master conversational leadership goes through humble and consistent practice, developing self-awareness and confidence. It’s easier than you think to grow better leaders in your organization.

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Three Case Studies and One Strategy to Keep Users Engaged with Digital Learning

Andrea Laus

So many digital learning programs are launched with great enthusiasm, only to realize in short order that they go unattended. Our obsession is about consistently engaging trainees over time, to ensure efficient results with regular practice. Have a look at these three case studies showing how to leverage habits and win the learning traffic quest.

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8 Ways Your Skills Will Improve by Practicing on Digital Role Plays

Andrea Laus

If you follow my series, by now you should know how much here at SkillGym we trust in the power of practicing in Critical Conversation using a Digital Role Play system to develop leadership.

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8 Key Metrics to Ensure a Successful Practical Training on Critical Conversations

Andrea Laus

No doubt that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. However, quite often it is not easy to identify what is worth measuring and what simply adds complexity to the scenario. Let’s see how to optimize training metrics with the perspective of our field experience.

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About Neurosciences.
The reasons behind the way we change.

The Neurosciences Underlying the Models of Digital Role Play

Livio Mariani

Recent studies have widely demonstrated how emotional learning based on the repetition of experiential paths affects the parts of our brain that stimulate instinctive and automatic reactions, making us act through impulse of the amygdala. The reactions generated while using the amygdala (also called “prehistoric brain”) are faster compared to the ones generated when we use the parts of the brain that act rationally. Moreover, the use of emotions in training is proven to improve retention and recall of what has been learned. In this article we will explore the state of the art of neuroscience that deals with the relationship between neurobiology, training and behavior.

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The Science Behind SkillGym

Andrea Laus

SkillGym foundations are grounded in years of research and well-established theories and models.

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SkillGym as intrinsically motivated learning: a neuroscientific explanation

Elena Ciani

I recently had the opportunity to practice critical conversations with SkillGym. During this period, I realized that I enjoyed using this software, and that I was genuinely guided by the will to do better and improve my performance (expressed in percentage). This led me to wonder: Why am I so engaged? What’s going on in my brain? So, as I often do, I tried to find a neuroscientific explanation. In this article, we’ll talk about the intrinsic motivation in learning and pursuing a goal-oriented behavior, and we’ll try to identify which parts of our brain can be involved in this process while using SkillGym.

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Our Brain Doesn’t Tell the Difference Between Simulation and Reality

Anne-Laure Blanco

The efficiency of simulation in training courses for all kinds of users and subjects is due to two main factors: the brain learns more efficiently when it replicates what it learns and see; and if the simulation is realistic, it sees it as the reality, whether it is a flight simulation or a conversation to improve your leadership performance.

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Digital Role Play Stripped Bare

Andrea Laus

Digital Role Play is becoming increasingly popular topic of discussion in the L&D circles. But what is it, exactly? How does it work? Is it effective? What is the role of the L&D in ensuring smooth implementation? Let’s discover in detail the key characteristics of this type of learning tool.

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The True Learning Scope Behind a Digital Role Play

Andrea Laus

Much too often, Digital Role Plays are used the wrong way. Either as a quick follow-up to traditional class-based training or as a tool to instruct or even indoctrinate trainees on sales scripts (or customer-care or management). These strategies are the fast lanes to training failure and a wasted investment. Let’s discover how a Digital Role Play-based training program should be planned and designed as well as why it can revolutionize the way you empower people’s conversational performance.

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About Digital Role Plays.
The essential ingredient of any leadership training program.

Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership

Andrea Laus

Digital Role Plays are a relatively new area of development of digital learning, aiming to provide a solution to HR and L&D professionals to help employees practice critical conversations in a more efficient way than with traditional face-to-face live role plays.

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Making the Best of SkillGym Analytics

Andrea Laus

Any L&D pro would agree that competency models are one of the most important elements of a well-balanced, soft-skills training strategy and certainly the most useful of the KPI when it comes to measuring well-performing skills. In our experience, however, they are neither the most intuitive way to describe soft-skill related performance to trainees, nor the most complete way to represent such performance in practical terms. This is why SkillGym has developed a multi-dimensional approach to measuring the outcome of a leadership conversation, which is the best place to see and measure soft skills in action.

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The Backbone of Digital Role Plays: Behind the Creation of a Simulation

Anne-Laure Blanco

Digital Role Plays are powerful tools to efficiently train and improve Leaders’ skills and performance on critical conversations. As they are now part of trainers’ and trainees’ daily life, a good design of these role plays becomes more and more critical. In this article, we will see that a very precise process is needed to optimize their impact and efficiency.

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Building Authentic Characters for Effective Digital Role Plays

Livio Mariani

SkillGym characters’ behavior is based on the most accredited psychometric models, making them act as authentic people in any scenario that the user will simulate. This makes Digital Role Play a powerful and scalable resource to train and improve leadership skills.

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Learning Theories Support SkillGym Methodology

Livio Mariani

Adult education needs to be addressed with paradigms and strategies that take into account the specifics and needs of the adult learner. Here at SkillGym we rely on the most accredited theories to design our learning experience.

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Make SkillGym the Barebones of an Effective L&D Strategy

Matteo Malatesta

How to leverage the flexibility of SkillGym methodology to integrate the features of the Digital Role Play system into an effective L&D strategy and to utilize them as empowering agents of the leadership development of every organization.

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SkillGym Digital Fitness: Pure, Adaptive Leadership Training

Andrea Laus

Tweaking and optimizing a training program along the way is becoming one of the trend topics of Learning & Development. Let’s see how we deal with this challenge here at SkillGym, from when we implemented Digital Fitness, our answer to the growing demand for Adapting Learning.

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How AI Helps Delivering a Better SkillGym Training Experience

Andrea Laus

AI is spreading all around us in so many applications today, and when it’s well-designed, it helps. We started working on our first algorithms quite a few years ago and today SkillGym is a very powerful, adaptive and authentic training solution thanks to our continuous effort in AI research. Discover how it can help your strategy to deliver better conversational leadership training.

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10 Reasons Why You Should Consider SkillGym for Your Next Leadership Development and Maintenance Program

Andrea Laus

We trust so much in the idea that the 80% of the effects that great Leaders have on their teams goes through their ability to manage conversations, that we have devoted all our efforts over the last ten years on the development of a better and better SkillGym.

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