In another article (“Boosting leadership coaching with Digital Role Play“) I already explored how powerful SkillGym can be when it comes to supporting executive and leadership coaching activity.

We have seen that there are several ways to leverage artificial intelligence (A.I.) for the purpose of upskilling managers in conversations during and in between coaching sessions.

In this article, we will explore case studies to see in practical terms how professionals around the world are already taking advantage of this amazing solution.

CASE STUDY 1: LEVERAGE DIGITAL TOOLS TO SHOW MEASURABLE IMPACT

Joseph is an executive coach dedicated to helping leaders grow their interpersonal skills.
He is 46 years old, a professional certified coach and has over 10 years of experience in the field.
He mostly works with companies belonging to the Fortune 500 and he coaches executives in their forties.

His coaching format is one of the most classical:

• Define the plan by investigating the “as is”
• Set goals and then work on the various aspects of the plan by listening
• Ask questions
• Challenge with dedicated role play sessions and support growth with powerful questions

His traditional means of measuring the outcome of his work is by conducting either a structured feedback session or, where possible, a 360 focusing specifically on the area of interpersonal skills.
Each case is a little different, of course, but this is how he describes his most typical approach.

The initial indicators that something was changing began around nine months earlier, when some of his clients started to ask with increasing frequency and a common thread in their requests that, “They needed to see the needle move,” said Joseph of a commonly occurring phrase.

The most common requests were about finding a way to relate his activity to some performance indicator that could be tracked along the way. “At the beginning it was only one or two…but then it went on the rise,” he continued.

“At the beginning it was only one or two…but then it went on the rise.”

When those requests started to become more than just a wish, he realized that he needed to put some thought into how to shift the way he was delivering.

He took the subject seriously regarding a coaching program that was oriented more toward the “move the needle” idea. He wanted to be able to identify a balance of significant indicators to be defined, agreed upon and consistently monitored by means of some sort of digital tool.

The initial idea was to find a way to be able to steer the program along the way based on the signals coming from such metrics and to be able to simultaneously show positive and encouraging progress together.

He needed a more predictable final outcome than from the traditional ways of evaluation in a coaching program.

Since Joseph was deeply into interpersonal skill development and was absolutely convinced of the importance of role play as a coaching strategy, he researched in this field for techy tools that could help.

His choice was for SkillGym due to its powerful way of delivering a library of stories to play with and enough data to be extracted from the digital tracking of its usage.

In this way, Joseph could simultaneously provide the coachee with consistent practice (since, according to him, improvement comes from the application of knowledge to practical situations) and collect enough information to build the metrics needed to “move the needle.”

In fact, he noticed that the platform was providing many types of different data, even more than what he could possibly handle.

And certainly, more than what he needed for his first attempt with this new strategy.

Thus, he decided to focus his attention on just two key metrics that seemed suitable for providing meaningful information about the impact of his work.

The first was the level of CONFIDENCE with which the coachee was dealing with the conversation in the role play and the second was the level of AWARENESS with which the coachee was able to judge his own performance against the quality measured by the platform.

The way he packaged the Confidence measure was quite simple: the higher the overall score of the digital role play at the end of the conversation, the higher the confidence in the task.

He just made sure that such score was in fact measuring the quality of the impact of the coachee’s behaviors on the approach of the virtual character.

As for the AWARENESS, Joseph thought about integrating a certain number of questions to be asked to the coachee at the end of each role play, so as to compare his self-assessment to the evaluation of the platform. The higher the match, the higher the awareness.

After a few weeks of trial, Joseph was able to pivot his traditional format, making room for a consistent ritual based on practice, measurement and adjustment of the exercise.

The idea was basically to define the main goal with the client and then link it to the two indicators of his program: confidence and awareness.

These would then be measured consistently across the sessions by asking the coachee to play specific role plays that were scheduled in between each meeting.

During the coaching session, Joseph and the coachee would discuss the outcome of the simulation by always referring to those two metrics and comparing them with two different benchmarks.

• One was the result achieved by the same coachee during the previous session (the so called “self-benchmark”) where the scope was to measure a trend of improvement.
• The other one was a comparison with the average result achieved by a cluster of comparable coachees, as registered anonymously by the platform across all users enrolled by several other coaches in the country.

This second indicator served to set a baseline and indicate where “the rest of the world” was at.

After each session, Joseph and the coachee had enough data to help define what the next role play should be to sustain a challenge, thus dynamically adjusting the schedule of practice.

After 6 months from the beginning of the new program, Joseph was ready to collect some comprehensive feedback from the field.

As expected, comments were mixed and generally fell into two categories: Signs of appreciation and alerts of possible issues (most of these signals had already been collected and managed in some manner by Joseph along the way). But Jospeh used the final brainstorming to draw some important conclusions on how to better define this new approach.

One coachee became enthralled with the amount of data the platform was providing beyond the two key indicators chosen by Joseph and started to ask Joseph for help in learning how to influence such measures.

Joseph decided to clearly define his role here as a coach, not a trainer, for the coachee.

His reported thought was, “I am here to raise questions to help you find your way, not to explain my way to you,” in a wise attempt to delineate the fine line between training and coaching people.

Of course, some leaders complained about the extra effort of playing schedule role plays. To this, Joseph remarked that “moving the needle” requires two ingredients: metrics (of course) and, most importantly, effort to practice. “No pain, no gain.” After that, most of them found the time.

“I am here to raise questions to help you find your way, not to explain my way to you.”

CASE STUDY 2: LEVERAGE DIGITAL CAPABILITY FOR REMOTE PRACTICE

Melanie is 42 and she is an executive coach (professional certified coach) supporting emerging leaders and high-potential employees with career development advice.
Her coaching format includes two live coaching sessions of 90 minutes every month, over a cycle of six months.

Each session with the coachee always includes one role play focusing on interpersonal skills and, of course, the relevant debrief time.

For quite a few years, especially when working with emerging young leaders, Melanie had been receiving many requests about evolving the traditional way of delivering her coaching advice.

In particular, her clients were increasingly asking about two seemingly divergent needs:

• On one side, they wanted more practical activity, including more role play time to try to discuss situations. They felt that practicing was an efficient way to unleash new skills.
• On the other side, however, they were struggling to fit a meeting into an ever-busier schedule. They were asking to reduce the time spent together!

“Go digital” was a common request. They were used to accomplishing a lot of activities with the help of digital technology, which was helping them to compress more into their time while still being present, which was still not happening in their coaching sessions.

Melanie decided to try a different way of packaging her service by moving part of her activity online.

The idea was to cut by half her physical one-to-one presence while doubling or even tripling the opportunity for her coachees to practice. Of course, she knew that she still had to stay in the picture, which led her delivering added value by making herself available online to support the remote practice activity and other matters as needed.

The idea of looking at SkillGym was quite natural: She had to remove herself from the practice delivery of role play, otherwise she could never add more role plays without doubling her personal effort, which could never be sustainable over time. She decided to adopt SkillGym because of the three following features:

• She needed a flexible way to let her coachee book practice sessions along the way. She wanted something where her coachee could automatically receive invitations to schedule one role play and decide when to fit it in their schedule. At the same time, she wanted to make sure that, if the coachee did not show up for the scheduled role play, the platform was smart enough to send reminders and propose to reschedule.
• She wanted a solution robust enough to allow for comprehensive monitoring of the practice activities that the coachees were involved in. She wanted something that allowed her to review the role play at any time and to understand where any help was needed.
• Finally, she thought that a good remote collaboration system within the platform could allow for an asynchronous way to deliver powerful questions. There was no need to discuss a role play face to face.

It is quite interesting to look at how the coachee became engaged in the new remote and self-paced practice activity. Basically, the idea was that:

• The fictional character (let’s call him “Mark”) would interact with the coachee well before starting the role play.
• He would directly write an email like: “Hi, I am Mark, and I would like to ask you for a quick feedback session on XYZ. I know you are busy, so please click the link below to open a doodle with a few slots, let’s see if we can make it.”
• If the coachee did not respond, Mark would send another attempt.
• Finally, on the scheduled day, Mark would write a confirmation email like “Hi, it’s Mark… and it’s today at 5 p.m., just to let you know I’ll be there.”
• Sometimes if the coachee did not show up, Mark would write again to say, “Hey don’t worry, I guess you got trapped… let’s reschedule, I was quite busy too.”

The result was stunning: 85% of the time, the coachee was reliably there on time. And for another 10%, just a second try was enough to find the right fit in their “busy” schedule.

The majority of the coachees explained to Melanie that they felt obliged to respect an appointment. They were acting as if it was a real schedule with a real person! Very efficient.

Also, it is remarkable how certain smart features of SkillGym could solve the fact that Melanie was not there when the role play was played.

She was able to access a recorded version of the interview, move through it and, with the help of augmented reality, review any blind spots in the conversation.
Blind spots may be aspects such as the reaction to stressed body language, the way a certain behavior was applied or even the recurrence of specific patterns and approaches.

It took seven minutes on average to open a role play, review it, find a spot and post one or two questions on the chat board.

The coachee would be notified that a message was posted and access it when they were available, read the question and reflect on their own. The option to reply as needed was available, of course.

In this way, Melanie could manage up to three times the number of role plays with the same amount of effort without needing to block time slots in both her and the coachee’s schedules.

In the end, her new format became very popular with her clients, especially the millennials.
She reduced her in-person sessions down to 1 per month with the same duration of 90 minutes.

During that time, they both had more time to discuss how to apply certain behaviors, as witnessed in the role play, beyond the boundaries of the specific context.

She increased the quantity of practical exercises without interfering with her leaders’ busy schedules and she was still perceived as available and helpful when needed, with even more laser-focused powerful questions working as eye-openers on blind spots.

Needless to say, the comments coming from her clients were very enthusiastic: EFFICIENT was the most popular keyword. They felt like their time was more valuable.

“GAME” was another popular keyword.

The Digital Role Play was perceived as relaxing time during which they could learn and be entertained at the same time.

There were, however, two issues that Melanie reported to have encountered in the process. And apparently, they were two quite divergent issues.

• First, some of the coachees started to think that the role play was rich enough with information that “they could even go alone” believing “I don’t need a coach anymore.” Ultimately, however, it was not what played out. In the final review, she was rated very high with regard to remote support, and for the question, “Do you think remote support is a key element of your online experience,” the score was also high.
• Second, many other coachees were asking for more asynchronous help, sometimes forcing Melanie to turn her advice session into a longer remote discussion. But it was always focused on the subject and, in the end, Melanie says, the possibility to differ the answer made it easy to keep the pace.

To summarize, Melanie gave us the following very simple indeed claim to define this shift to “Blended Coaching,” she did nothing more than moving online those activities that, once well supported by technology, did not require her presence anymore.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that coachees reported in the final survey that, on average, they felt much more comfortable with self-paced role play not only in terms of practical organization of their time, but also from a point of view of lower pressure perception when making mistakes.

What is important, however, are the three key lessons that Melanie learned, which helped her to keep solidly on the path forward :

1. The coach can’t be cut out: coachees still have the need for discussion
2. Remote practice can be fun
3. Sometimes, real time isn’t necessary: waiting a day for my review of the role play is OK

CASE STUDY 3: LEVERAGE DIGITAL TOOLS TO DEVELOP FEEDBACK SKILLS

Tom is a professional leadership coach with 3 years of experience in Digital Role Play.
Tom was assigned to Kate, a middle manager of a mid-size company, in charge of a team of 20 people.

He was called because the annual performance appraisal suggested that Kate was below average in her commitment and feedback skills.

Her reports were much less positive than the other colleagues in the company in terms of Kate’s commitment to providing on-time and straightforward feedback about their activity. Kate was aware of this situation and quite aware of the reasons behind this.

Some of the things she told Tom during their first session were: “Often…I know I should give feedback…but I always find other jobs to do” and “I don’t feel comfortable.”
She basically reported to Tom that giving feedback was somehow outside her comfort zone.

So, Tom and Kate decided on one specific goal for their coaching sessions: helping Kate become more confident, expand her comfort zone and include the key activity and responsibility of regularly providing her reports with consistent feedback on their performance.

Tom decided to work on this subject by introducing SkillGym to let Kate practice with typical performance feedback situations and to discuss these conversations during their coaching sessions.

“Often…I know I should give feedback… but I always find other jobs to do” and “I don’t feel comfortable.”

Tom’s idea was simple: Confidence comes through practice and role play represents a very good form of “safe” practice to warm up and prepare for real life.

Tom was expecting two key advantages from using digital role play: Kate could play “alone” so that the safe environment would be perceived as even safer, and they would have a lot of material to work with by using powerful coaching questions.

Tom scheduled a consistent practice schedule for Kate in between coaching sessions. As a follow-up activity after six months, they met about their coaching program.
The idea was that a regular number of simulated feedback sessions would avoid overwhelming her normal schedule with too much exercise.

Kate ended up playing a total of 22 conversations over the six months, each one taking an average of 17 minutes to complete. Tom and Kate discussed eight of those conversations during their coaching sessions.

Before the coaching session, Tom spent around 10 minutes reviewing the metrics of the conversations played by Kate in search of interesting triggers to discuss during the session. During each session, either Kate or Tom proposed reviewing some passages of a specific conversation.

Tom’s method included:

• Listening to some passages
• Reviewing the underlying behaviors
• Asking Kate questions about why and how she applied those behaviors
• Letting Kate focus on the key points behind her decisions
• Stimulating her with questions that helped Kate to find a better strategy for the next conversation

On average, this role play debrief took around 20 minutes in each session where they decided to focus on a conversation.

The joint review showed a couple of recurrent elements that became powerful triggers in the debrief. The “virtual reports” of Kate consistently appreciated her approach, especially when it was oriented toward supporting them to do better.

On the other hand, Kate noticed that some of her specific behaviors, such as asking open questions, consistently triggered the same type of welcoming body language in the counterpart.

Of course, Tom leveraged those triggers with powerful questions such as: “What would you do to get those same reactions in your next role play?” or “Why do you think your report appreciated that question?”

Also, and this is very important, Tom started to ask if the same reaction was emerging during Kate’s real-life feedback sessions, which were becoming increasingly frequent.

In fact, as Kate’s confidence grew (see the blue line over the months, crossing the evolving perceptions of Kate as noted by Tom) she was involved in more occasions with real-life structured feedback sessions with her reports (the green bars).

In fact, the more Kate was involved in building her confidence through role playing, the more Tom noted two different types of perceptions and comments coming from Kate. She was more confident because she became aware that her activity was perceived as useful from her reports during the conversation.

Additionally, she appeared to have increasing control of the situation, just like if playing the role play on a consistent base was building in Kate’s mind a collection of Deja-vu situations that she was becoming increasingly familiar with.

The more she played, the more she knew what to expect in the next conversation. According to Kate, this exercise was “One accelerator of experience” for her.

Tom, who was still providing services to the same company, ran into Kate again later on and he was happy to know that the following year, her performance appraisal highlighted a much more confident Kate with regard to her skills and commitment in giving consistent feedback to her reports.

According to Kate, this exercise was “One accelerator of experience” for her.

Tom and Kate reported three main elements of Tom’s strategy to be relevant to the result:

• The first was consistent practice. Kate noticed that, even though at the beginning she was somehow “forcing” herself to find the time to play, the more she played the easier it was for her to consider this task as something she could manage.
• The second was the use of A.I.-based role play, which gave Kate the feeling that even playing the same role play more times, each time something different was going on. This, she said, helped to keep striving for the result, instead of playing using a known plot.
• And finally, the ability to reflect on what happened looking at the situation from outside. With Tom’s help, Kate learned to visualize where she could improve and, most of all, where she was providing value to her reports.

At the same time, Tom reported one main issue that at the beginning risked impacting his strategy. In fact, Kate often told Tom that she had no time in her busy schedule to play.

After the initial few weeks…when Kate actually didn’t play at all, Tom decided to ask Kate to consider each Role Play as a real feedback session and to schedule it on her weekly busy schedule.

This approach changed the situation. From that point on, Kate planned each conversation with 2 weeks advance notice, which meant those conversations became a part of her routine.

Tom learned to stress the idea of scheduling virtual conversation on his coachees’ schedules right at the beginning instead of suggesting free practice.

CASE STUDY 4: LEVERAGE DIGITAL TOOLS TO RAISE SELF-AWARENESS

Linda is a leadership coach working inside a large corporation.
She has over one year of experience using Digital Role Play and she reported a very interesting case study with Jeffrey, a first-time manager in the same corporation, in charge of a team of 12 people.

She was assigned to Jeffrey as part of his induction activities. Even during the first coaching session, when Linda and Jeffrey played one face-to-face role play, Linda noticed that Jeffrey had little experience with Leadership Conversations.

In fact, in the debrief, Jeffrey had the tendency to overestimate his own performance, while Linda noted several weaknesses that he did not. Some of the quotes by Jeffrey that Linda noted: “I did well, she doesn’t want to understand,” justifying why he did not manage to reach the conversational objective; or “I have my way,” “I know what he needs.”

All in all, it was clear to Linda that Jeffrey had a problem with self-awareness regarding the real outcome of his critical conversations.
So, they decided to focus on this issue as one of their objectives and to find a way to help Jeffrey develop a more critical approach to his way of judging his own performance and behaviors.

Linda decided to work on this subject by introducing SkillGym to let Jeffrey practice with critical conversations, with the specific goal of paying attention to the difference between Jeffrey’s perception and that of the virtual report.

In fact, SkillGym made it possible to listen to the virtual report while debriefing with a colleague about the conversation he had with Jeffrey.

On top of that, Linda would dig inside some parts of the conversation using the replay features to review the details of Jeffrey’s awareness of specific behaviors. Linda decided to use SkillGym mainly in face-to-face sessions.

She wanted to observe Jeffrey’s behaviors on her own during the simulation, to have more elements of discussion and to make up her mind about his approach to provide her with a clearer vision to ask interesting questions during the joint review.

The method was very simple:

• Linda would present the situation.
• Jeffrey would take a few minutes to prepare the meeting and then play the meeting on his computer.
• Linda would attend discretely.
• After the conversation and BEFORE getting feedback from the simulation, Jeffrey would face a structured self-assessment time.
• The digital role play selected specific moments of the conversation, asking Jeffrey to reflect on his own approach and performance and to rate them on a scale of 1 to 4.
• Immediately after, Jeffrey would listen to the opinion of the virtual report on the same topics.

After this exercise, which lasted on average 15 minutes, Linda would take another 10 minutes discussing the outcome with Jeffrey.

She started asking about Jeffrey’s perception on the virtual report’s feedback and why it was diverging from Jeffrey’s self-evaluation.
This part was very important because it forced Jeffrey to compare his position with that of an objective tool.

Then Linda would expose Jeffrey to some metrics coming from the system.

In particular, the Digital Role Play calculated the AWARENESS INDEX, measuring the distance between the two evaluations (Jeffrey’s and the simulation’s). This index was taken by Linda and Jeffrey to measure their progress, with the goal in mind to move from an initial 52% to a more reasonable 80%.

Then Linda would focus on some specific passages from the role play and by replaying the conversation, she asked to Jeffrey to explain the relationship between some of his behaviors and the relevant impact in the virtual report.

This was mind blowing for Jeffrey. He could:

• Frame the situation
• Focus on what happened from a third perspective, and
• Start to see the point of view of the other person

Specifically, Linda found one interesting pattern to work on by asking a series of powerful questions. She helped Jeffrey to understand that most of the time, he was receiving one answer from the virtual report that was intended to be one example to explain the report’s opinion. Jeffrey tended to consider it as a mere justification.

At the same time, triggered by this perception, Jeffrey tended to answer harshly and, would still consider his own answer as the right and balanced way to refocus his report’s priorities.

Then, when the counterpart manifested a frustrated reaction, Jeffrey’s interpretation was that of an attack. Once Jeffrey understood this recurrent pattern, it became easier for him to focus on certain perceptions and work on them to rebalance his point of view.

After just a few sessions where Linda and Jeffrey applied this coaching strategy, Linda started to notice a shift in Jeffrey’s approach.

In fact, as a first step, he started to improve his skill of self-evaluating his overall performance. Later on, this ability evolved as Jeffrey developed a more critical approach regarding the details of his own behaviors.

Jeffrey became increasingly in tune when listening to the weak signals coming from his virtual report.
In five months, Linda was happy to notice this result

Jeffrey’s appraisal on his own performance during critical conversation was much more mature and almost matching her evaluation.

Linda and Jeffrey reported that three main ingredients from SkillGym impacted the result:

• The first was Linda’s strategy of “reflect and listen.” In fact, she asked Jeffrey to self-evaluate his performance and, immediately after, to compare such evaluation to that of the simulation. It was the starting point for change. Noticing a diverging score was the way to look for a solution.
• The second was the use of video-based role play. Part of Jeffrey’s commitment was that of investigating the body language of his counterpart in search of weak signals showing a diverging perception of the quality of the ongoing conversation. Playing a digital role play, where the counterpart was a professional filmed actor, was a great element in this exercise.
• And finally, the opportunity to reflect on what happened; reviewing together the situation from outside helped Jeffrey to visualize where he could improve and, most of all, where he was misperceiving the reality.

When asked about lessons learned, Linda reported that she faced the following issue with Jeffrey in the beginning: He was trying to justify the mismatch in evaluation score saying that, “Anyway this is not a situation I would normally experience.”
Something that showed he would not accept the evaluation of the Digital Role Play.

Linda decided to ask Jeffrey to simply start from that situation and immediately after, find comparisons to real life situations that were similar.

Jeffrey started to notice that, no matter what, he could see a lot of similarities between that virtual situation and those of his real life daily experience. Linda learned that it was much better to use this approach from the beginning in order to leverage a de-contextualized situation to reconnect to real life immediately after.

What’s next

Wow, what a long series of case studies. Sorry if I went too long, and thank you for staying with me so far! 🙂

If you are searching for a Digital Role Play solution that meets your needs, please check out our website, which contains plenty of inspiring content including pre-recorded webinars and articles. Of course, we would welcome the opportunity to continue this conversation with you; all you need to do is book a 1-hour discovery call with us.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Written By

Andrea Laus

Andrea has 20 years of experience in the industry of digital learning. Since over 10 years now he designs and develop interactive simulations featuring video and AI to bring immersive and authentic digital experiences to leadership coaches worldwide.

Contact Andrea

Three clear trends are emerging in the domain of executive and leadership coaching and they are destined to reshape the competitive landscape forever.

ONE – Digitalization of coaching
Coaches will differentiate themselves in the future by connecting through platforms and being able to meet almost anywhere and anytime regardless of their physical location.
Coaches will engage clients through micro-learning sessions, gamification and will add value by providing clients access to content beyond their individual counsel.

As our culture changes, so will the delivery methods of coaches to clientele. The days of in-person coaching are dwindling.

Webinars, online training, and digital coaching delivery methods for clients will become the norm.
Professionals will want coaching that is easily accessible and fits into their schedules.

Be prepared to diversify in order to remain valuable and relevant.

TWO – Ability to show measurable results
What will set successful executive coaches apart from others in the coming years is their ability to demonstrate measurable results.
Savvy clients will only choose executive coaching organizations that can clearly demonstrate how they helped their coachees move the needle.

Pre- and post-360 interviews, smart metrics, structured feedback and other tools will be used to quantify and qualify results.

THREE – Foster the gathering of experience in interpersonal skills
Experience is the best teacher. In the future, executive coaching will move from just explaining to supporting experiences. People will desire to learn in a format that is memorable and fun.

Breakthrough thinking and new information will be driven by executive individualization based on what experience the executive needs in order to achieve new patterns of action.
Since organizations will be placing a premium on those skills, it’s very likely that executive coaching will be in high demand and focus even more on those types of skills than today.

If the three aforementioned points have not sufficiently scared those who still avoid these subjects…prepare for the next unpleasant truth…

You are not there when it matters!

When things happen, when your leaders engage in the most critical conversations with their teams, when skills turn into words and words into decisions—you are not there.
Period.

You don’t know what really happened. All you have is a biased story told by one of the parties: the leader you coach, sitting in front of you, maybe a week later.
It’s not easy to help, when you miss the action.

In this article, you will learn how role plays can evolve thanks to technology based on artificial intelligence (A.I.).

You will read about how you can extend your coaching experience through remote and augmented coaching and why the best coaches around the world have already integrated SkillGym into their coaching strategy.

SkillGym is by far the most innovative and advanced collection of simulated critical conversations for leaders.

Thanks to the perfect blend of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, interactive video, storytelling, automation and metrics, SkillGym is the best companion for executive and leadership coaches when it comes to helping leaders gain confidence in critical conversations and boosting their performance through actionable practice.

SkillGym can become your time machine: Assign simulated life-like role plays and review the entire conversation, shadowing the situations that matter with the help of augmented reality, artificial intelligence and interactive video.

You can sit side by side with your coachees and dive deep into the most specific behaviors and then move on to how that specific approach influences their inner feelings and emotions.

You can deliver best-in-class powerful coaching questions based on the review of real action witnessed in front of you.

You can embrace a totally new way of conceiving leadership coaching sessions, where you can deliver extra value through discussion while truly impacting your coachees’ confidence and performance through consistent post-session practice.

How SkillGym supports Leadership Coaching

SkillGym offers executives and leadership coaches all the tools to engage their clients directly in conversations. It allows you to transform your traditional support into evidence-based coaching.

Astonishing Stories
SkillGym’s comprehensive curriculum covers all the elements that are required to master Conversational Leadership and defines the most typical situations worth practicing.

Our professional storytellers are capable of turning those situations into authentic, engaging and life-like stories by bringing the daily leadership challenges into actionable exercises.

Thanks to the perfect blend of training methodology and interactive technology, SkillGym brings these stories to life, ready for consistent practice-based leadership training.

SkillGym is an interactive video—no puppets, no avatars.
Human beings come alive in a seamless experience, where you are totally immersed in the situation. You can feel their emotions, see their hesitations, hear their whispers.

Actors each have their own personality and a story carefully designed to make you feel like they are one of your people.

The simulation is played in real time with no pauses or freezes. Everything that happens is entirely influenced by the way you play.
Twelve A.I. algorithms deliver an authentic and immersive Digital Role Play experience through dynamic flow of emotions and the evolution of the interactions.

Augmented Replay
Augmented Replay is one of SkillGym’s specific tools that allows you to select any past critical conversation played and review it step by step to see what happened and how the user behaviors influenced the outcome.

It is as if the coach was there with the coachee while they played the critical conversation, however without the psychological pressure of being actually there in real time, which allows the coachee to express their own natural approach without inhibitions.

Augmented Replay allows users to move along the conversation and stop on the most significant steps, allowing for a general overview of the ongoing quality of the conversation. This allows the coach to choose what to focus on: What was done correctly, the low-performance areas or the ups and downs of specific turbulent conversations.

At each step, it details what happened and why, showing which behavior generated which reactions in the counterpart. Additionally, the option of showing or hiding the augmented reality opens the possibility of a push or pull discussion.

There are several aids in the augmented replay: It is possible to understand where objectives are placed throughout the conversation and to assess if each objective was achieved or not and why.

The performance curve then allows you to identify where it may be interesting to focus your attention. Steps that are highlighted in blue draw attention to something interesting that happened there.

This allows you to focus on the individual step to facilitate understanding the action-reaction connection between behavior and engagement including detailed aspects of the conversation.

Meaningful Metrics

SkillGym helps you measure and track over time the two key metrics that underpin the efficient development of all skills related to leadership:

• CONFIDENCE: It can be defined as “the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something.” When referring to the world of leadership conversations, confidence becomes the degree of courage, determination, fearlessness and self-perceived experience with which leaders approach a conversation, particularly a “critical” conversation, with another person.
• SELF-AWARENESS: We simply ask the trainees to rate the quality of their performance and we compare these self-evaluations with the scores provided by the simulation’s algorithms (i.e., confronting the self-perception with the real outcome). The closer the two scores are, the higher the trainee’s self-awareness.

In addition, we measure and trace over 50 specific skills along with their associated observable behaviors, which are connected to conversational abilities. Most importantly, we connect them to every single element of the dialogues that take place within the simulation.

What’s next

What else can I add? If you are looking around to find the Digital Role Play solution that suits your needs, please look around our website. There is plenty of inspiring content including pre-recorded webinars and articles. Of course, we would be delighted to continue this conversation with you; simply book a free call with us..

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Written By

Andrea Laus

Andrea has 20 years of experience in the industry of digital learning. Since over 10 years now he designs and develop interactive simulations featuring video and AI to bring immersive and authentic digital experiences to leadership coaches worldwide.

Contact Andrea

In a prior article (“Making the best of SkillGym Analytics”), we already explored how powerful SkillGym analytics can be when it comes to turning conversations into metrics.
We have seen that there are several ways to measure one’s conversational performance, from the broadest “confidence” and “self-awareness,” down to the most detailed competency model KIPs.

However, one of the main challenges when practicing is finding the exact connection between what was said during the conversation and the result in terms of scoring competencies.

This is where the Augmented Replay becomes helpful. Let’s see how this amazing tool can help you quickly improve your confidence, self-awareness and overall performance by analyzing your past conversations.

Enter Augmented Replay

SkillGym’s Augmented Replay allows the entire conversation to be reviewed after it has been played. The idea is to attend and listen to the action from a third-party position in order to review the performance and reflect on the details.

The two main aspects that users often want to review are:

1. Their own behaviors throughout the conversation. Imagine a way to review each sentence, identify the underlying predominant behaviors and rate their application in terms of quality (along with some input on what other ways were available to deal with that specific step of the conversation).
2. The character’s body language. This is one of the main challenges for most everyone: recognizing other people’s body language. The most advanced Digital Role Play platform allows for this feature.

Since this article focuses on the former item, let’s start by saying that the most intuitive, still most powerful feature of Augmented Replay is the possibility to start/stop the action and move along the conversation to find the specific steps that you would like to review.

It may seem trivial, but before entering the Augmented Replay, the user experience is that of real-time action with no possibility to step back during the conversation. And it makes good sense since, while practicing, we want users to feel the authenticity of real life.

But once the real-time practice is completed, having the option to browse through the conversation is essential to be able to reflect, discuss and learn.

Navigation is ensured by the bottom bar, where each step is a rectangle and, at the far left, you can find the play/pause button.

Deciding which steps to focus on depends on the scope of your analysis; you may want to look at those steps:

• Where you performed very badly, to learn what happened and find a way to improve
• Where you performed very well, to double down on those best practices
• Where your behavior impacted the competencies you most need to improve on

In all of the above cases, the blue curve just above the bottom bar can give you a good idea of what to look at in the search for the right step to analyze.

Once you find the step, you can either:

1. Open the detailed view showing which behavior was behind the sentence you chose at that step
2. Open the detailed view showing the body language of the character while listening to your sentence
3. Open the detailed view showing the character’s answer and summarizing the entire step in terms of your behavior, the character’s answer and the impact of the step on the overall trend of the conversation

From competency to conversation and back

I opened this article focusing on how trainees can connect the dots between a competency model and their daily behaviors.

So let’s look at a few passages in order to learn about this point from SkillGym. Imagine that your competency map looks like this:

You certainly want to learn why you scored low, for example, on the competency called “Communicate efficiently”.

The first step is to look at which behaviors are connected to that specific competency.
You can see this in the SkillGym Launcher.

The next step is to open the Augmented Replay and look at the steps where those behaviors were associated with your sentences.
In our example, at step 15:

It looks like your sentence did not perform well on the behavior called “Accept arguments.”

So the next thing to do is to enter into the details to discover which sentence of yours underperformed that way:

At this point, you have a clear connection between the score of one behavior connected to a specific competency and your actual choice in the simulation.

You can also delve deeper here:

• For example, looking at the body language of the character while listening to that sentence, or
• Analyzing the impact of your specific behavior on the character’s next reaction

All of these triggers will help you to turn any abstract concept of a competency model description into a very real and tangible daily action, the same as talking with your employees in a certain way versus another.

Of course, several behaviors will impact a single competency and that would happen in more than a single step of the conversation.

Thus, I would recommend focusing on one specific competency at a time and looking at all the possible interactions you had during that interview that somehow affected that specific KPI.

Using the Augmented Replay for this purpose is a fantastic way to gain and improve self-awareness, but also the understanding of how close your daily behaviors are to your competency model.

Of course, we would be delighted to show you SkillGym’s solution in a 1-hour discovery call.

Written By

Andrea Laus

Andrea has 20 years of experience in the industry of digital learning. Since over 10 years now he designs and develop interactive simulations featuring video and AI to bring immersive and authentic digital experiences to leadership coaches worldwide.

Contact Andrea

Designing a successful training program, especially in the area of leadership development, is not at all easy these days.

Leaders seem to have already learned everything you can tell them. Let’s face it, most leadership training programs out there revolve around the same boiler plate concepts.

At the same time, it seems like the way they are delivered -the outdated formal class-based education- never stops being the number one choice of trainers.
Despite evidence clearly indicates that it is neither enjoyed by trainees, nor is there any significant proof of practical results -aside from those flashy and useless vanity metrics- that can be shown to sponsors.

Leaders seem to have already learned everything that you can tell them. Let’s face it, most leadership training programs out there revolve around the same boiler plate concepts.

Still, too many L&D managers continue to rely on obsolete formats and tricks to enroll, train, entertain and develop Leaders.

We are already facing a new generation of Leaders

The situation, however, will become increasingly unsustainable in the near future, since the new generations of Leaders are on the rise and they expect things like:

• Actionable training activities vs mere knowledge transfer
• Measurable results vs happy classroom time
• Clear effort/outcome balance
• Interactive sessions
• Technology as a natural way to gain both in knowledge and experience

As many of you already know from following my series in this blog, here at SkillGym, I am passionate about understanding what makes good strategies truly great.
Hence, I couldn’t refrain from observing the way our clients have implemented their training strategies and, most of all, how those strategies have shifted over time to leverage the best practices that were acquired on the go.

The result is one reflection and 12 rules that are derived from what 12 outstanding companies are doing when delivering great leadership training.
I am confident you will appreciate these.

My hope is that some of them may be the inspiration for your next program.
That would make my work worth doing and, certainly, this article worth reading.

We can’t afford to continue with the status quo

Let’s start with the one reflection I have prepared for you.

It’s very simple: we can’t afford to continue to plan, design and deliver leadership courses as we have done for the past 70 years.
Times change, people change, the world changes too.

So often I feel like the only ones who don’t recognize this compelling urgency to refresh the way training is conceived and delivered are the same people in charge of making it change: HR and L&D departments that spend every day passionately working on the very difficult task of developing people.

We can’t afford to continue to plan, design and deliver leadership courses as we have done for the past 70 years.

Guys, the clock is ticking.

A new generation of Leaders is already here, and many more will come soon.
And they are not, mark my words please, they are not the same as their predecessors.
These up-and-comings are smart, more technology oriented, less formal and much more demanding for purpose and actionable results.

So please, take a look at what I have seen being done at some of the greatest companies already delivering 21st century-style successful leadership training.

I have been following those 12 companies for over two years now, carefully analyzing:

• The type of training programs they designed around leadership
• The way they enrolled and involved trainees
• The program around which the courses were delivered
• The techniques and the strategies of delivery
• The way they measured effort and results
• The way they kept trainees involved and engaged over time

Many of those courses were great ones, appreciated by trainers, trainees and their sponsors.
Many were just average, and some were absolutely fiascos.

Through it all, I took note of something that was definitely contributing to the success.

The secret is not (just) technology

You may think that, since I founded a company delivering hi-tech for experiential learning, the scope of this article could be to praise the use of technology as THE way to deliver successful training.
But that’s not actually the case.

As I pointed out in a previous article (“Three Case Studies and One Strategy to Keep Users Engaged with Digital Learning”), we ourselves have learned that lesson the hard way.
Technology is definitely a very important ingredient to consider when planning good and balanced leadership training as a means of delivering the experiential part.

Technology alone won’t make any difference if it is not well blended within a comprehensive strategy. But I don’t want to put the cart before the horse here.

I am sure that the following part of this article will provide you with a lot of elements supporting this statement.

The framework of my research

Before entering the details of the 12 ideas that follow, let me give you a general framework to understand the context.

All of the following best practices are somehow related to the following elements:

• They all refer to the design of training programs revolving around soft skill leadership development.
• All are connected to courses where the average participant was a millennial -age range 30-40 y.o.
• They all refer to programs that include some form of practical activity that follows, anticipates or sometimes overlaps formal education.
• Most of the time, the ratio between knowledge transfer and practical activities in those programs was unbalanced in favor of the latter, sometimes with a ratio even greater that 2:1.
• Almost all of them were collected by me, by analyzing the activities from the privileged position of being one of the partners of the design, providing our SkillGym solution as one of the tools for practicing what they learned and learning from what they practiced.
• Therefore, all of them refer to program where technology-based learning was one of -but never the only one- the key ingredients of training design.
• The companies from which I took these lessons belong to the most varied industries -ranging from banking and insurance, to car manufacturing, to oil and gas, to pharmaceutical and many more. This is just to say that the type of industry type is not a correlation factor.
• Finally, they represent both SME and large corporations in size.

Ok, let’s start.

1. Tease trainees early on

Like any other initiative, training has to be ‘sold’ to trainees the right way.
The age of mandatory training is over and with voluntary training, enthusiasm and participation cannot be taken for granted.

I am not saying that you need to become a marketing expert, however, take a look at how media services are promoted.

Think of Netflix: they announce their series months in advance and keep on teasing the audience with bits of information that make their desire grow until they literally feel the need for that show.

I have seen several examples of how teasing trainees early on with a good dose of F.O.M.O. ‘marketing’ can turn the odds of overbooking a voluntary-based training course upside down.

In most cases the best strategies are the simplest:

• Roll-up banners placed in high traffic places
• Online short trailers delivered by email or placed on the intranet homepage
• Emails with curious details
• Involve well-known (also internal) testimonials

Do not forget that teasing requires recurrence. So, you should plan for a service that can make it automatic to ping your candidate trainees.
Again, without becoming an expert in inbound marketing, you can rely on digital solutions that allow users to pre-enroll with the scope of starting an early and automated campaign to develop awareness, attention, interest and action.

I have seen it in process, and it works.

2. Turn trainees into training experts

Another very important strategy is about raising the level of your trainees with regard to the insights of your job.

Adults want to know why they need to put efforts into something. They need a clear purpose.

This part is often left unattended.
If no methodological background is shared with trainees, the are left feeling like ‘it’s not their business’ to know why a certain learning strategy is applied, how it works and how they will benefit from it.

The most successful strategies I have seen include one dedicated module -it can easily be a pre-recorded video and won’t normally last longer than 30 minutes- that explains:

• What learning strategy will be used and how it works
• Why this strategy versus another
• What types of benefits it will bring
• What type of effort is expected from both sides to make things happen
• Benchmark data to show how efficient this approach will be

In this way, learners become more aware of why they should be involved and what will happen along the way.

Onboarding the trainees to the training methods and on the reasons why is one of the most powerful engagement strategies I have seen.
As humans, we want to be part of something and sharing this part -which I realize is not an intuitive thing to do- turns passive audience into active players or “owners”.

3. Plan in months, not weeks

The impact of leadership training should be about rising awareness, improving in self-confidence and self-awareness as well as changing habits. This does not happen overnight.

It takes time. And it does not happen passively.

The most successful leadership training programs I have seen are those where the outline is planned in months, not days or weeks. It means designing a program that is 80% practice and 20% knowledge and the 80% practice is spread across months where trainees are gently nudged to consistently do something that, time after time, will gradually change their approach and, therefore, their results.

Of course, it takes longer, of course it will cost more effort and, sometimes, money -but not necessarily if well design and supported by smart technology.
However, it’s the only way I have seen, in years of experience, that can really turn concepts into action.

For example, the introduction of technological tools such as:

• Automatic scheduling of self-paced activities
• Smart measuring of weekly/monthly progress (see below about the importance of selecting smart metrics)
• E-learning modules to consolidate knowledge
• Digital Role Play (yes, we are in the business of Digital Role Plays) to practice

can help trainers not only to stretch the duration of the training experience, but also to provide meaningful activities and manage the continuous engagement in a semi-effortless way.

4. Focus on few, actionable metrics

No metrics, no measure, no improvement.
This is an old saying that remains very true. However, the opposite is also very true: too many metrics equals no metrics.

Balancing the quantity and type of metrics is a challenging task.

Once again, the best designed and most successful training programs I have seen are those including a great balance of quantitative and qualitative metrics, supporting:

• The understanding of the dynamics of delivery
• The delivery of proof-of-progression

I recently wrote an article fully dedicated to a reflection on leadership training metrics. It’s here (“8 Key Metrics to Ensure a Successful Practical Training on Critical Conversations”) and it’s worth reading to delve deeper on this specific point.

5. Adapt the schedule to individuals

Once you decide to design your next leadership training program with an 80/20 approach, where the “80” is the quota of time dedicated to long-term practicing, you need to define a schedule of practice.

It means setting up a calendar where you help your trainees to organize their training activity in terms of:

• How often
• When
• How much
• On what

they should practice.

Now, imagine having to organize this -which is absolutely a must-do if you want to ensure long-term commitment and engagement- for each of the many Leaders involved in the many training programs you have in parallel.

Two problems:

• It takes a lot of time, so you need automation
• It cannot be considered a one-off activity: the best results come from adapting the schedule on the go, preferably for each individual

This is a lot of manual work, if you don’t leverage technology here -and most probably also very difficult to achieve because you would need to analyze a lot of data on the past activities to significantly plan the future ones.

I dedicated a full article on how well technology can help to define adaptive individual schedules of practical training. Read it here (“SkillGym Digital Fitness: Pure, Adaptive Leadership Training”) to have a broader perspective of how to master this single best practice.

6. Read the sentiment about your approach

Of course, when a training program evolves from a few weeks into several months, you need to find a way to check the sentiment of your trainees along the way.
This is very important, not just to make sure that they are still alive and active, or merely to enjoy some vanity metrics showing how well your design is being delivered.

More importantly, you need to understand pretty early on if any adjustment should be considered.

A well-structured survey system will certainly help you; I would recommend the following principles:

• Define a standard set of questions to ask, ideally between 5 and 10
• Include open-ended questions (1 or 2) to collect opinions and suggestions
• Stick to the same questions every time, to ensure comparability and trend-based analysis
• Define a calendar where you will send the survey at least every quarter (if your program is less than 6 months, of course, you can change this)
• Explain from the onset (remember the best practice No. 2 “turn trainees into experts”) the importance of this approach according to a win-win and reciprocal engagement-based way of fine-tuning the program along the way
• Read the answers (it seems trivial, but I have seen many cases where the data are available, and no one cares) and act accordingly

7. Involve the top management

Little to add here.
I am sure you already know about this best practice.

And I am sure that you’ve been frustrated several times by not being able to stress to them enough the importance of their direct endorsement; unless you are lucky enough to work in the perfect organization.

However, it is not just about getting their endorsement, it is also about reporting results the right way. So, on one side, choosing the right metrics is very important; but defining a schedule and a “ceremony” of reporting are equally important.

Old-fashioned leadership training is by nature deficient of significant performance-related metrics, so the idea of presenting metrics to the top management did not have a large diffusion in the past.

The advent of digital training technology not only allows for better measurements, it also provides a lot of space for better marketing of those metrics upstream.
Again, it’s not a matter of vanity, it’s a practical issue: if you can deliver meaningful performance-oriented metrics and you do that on a consistent basis, you will create the conditions where they will feel the need to endorse your next training program, because they will perceive the value to them from your initiatives.

8. Consider individual contributors

This one is my favorite.
You can recognize a 20th century leadership design approach by the fact that leadership and management are almost two synonyms.

And the direct consequence is that leadership training programs are almost always dedicated to in-role managers or occasionally to the so called “high potentials”, who are destined toward formal authority roles and thus you are committed to prepare them early on.

Instead, a 21th century leadership culture is permeated by the idea of “influence without authority”, where individual contributors not only see the concept of leadership totally separated from that of authority, but they also expect to be considered as an active part of the process of influence.

I can’t go in-depth about this fascinating subject here (I will write one dedicated article soon) however one very successful best practice I have noticed in the development of leadership across the organization is definitely that of including Individual Contributors in the leadership training program planning.

Designing specific programs for them will make the flow of leadership fluid across the organization and will certainly contribute to improving the quality of your results as an L&D designer.

9. Plan formal education on evidence (aka “Flip your strategy upside-down”)

This is the hardest of all.
The reason is that it is 100% counter-intuitive. My colleague and friend Matteo wrote an excellent article (“Flipping the Leadership Development Strategy with Actionable and Scalable Programs”) on the idea of “flipping the training strategy”, which I recommend reading.

The article offers a very interesting reflection on the fact that it makes sense to evaluate a complete flip in the L&D strategy assuming long-term practice as a main activity to exploit the behavioral metrics that you want to address and develop with leadership training.

In a well-balanced strategy, “pit-stop” learning activities should be considered as an effective response to specific needs that emerge based on evidences collected in the scheduled practice.
In this way, they become timelier, more impactful and appreciated by learners in addition to being extremely measurable (as you can monitor their impact on the practice itself).

10. Promote peer2peer support

Collaboration is an excellent means of developing leadership.
Incidentally, the longer a practice activity lasts, the more the resources you will likely need to bring in for remote support.
Trainees will certainly come up with questions and support requests.

What I have seen is that the large majority of those inquiries can be dealt with using a peer-to-peer approach, which generates two different consequences:

• On one side, you will be less involved directly, with a significant reduction of resources you need to put in
• On the other side, peer-to-peer support will amplify the effect of practical training, benefiting both those who are in need and those who provide help

Again, turning your trainees into experts on your methodology will increase their motivation and commitment toward being an active part of the program.

11. Promote a diary

One of the classic problems of leadership training is that you teach about something that it is very hard to measure in terms of direct results on the organization performance, especially in the short term.

When introducing long-term practice, for example by means of scheduled on-line Digital Role Plays, you should also introduce the idea of keeping a diary of how leaders manage their daily activity in real life.

For example, ask them to keep track of:

• How many conversations they do weekly
• With whom and why
• How they perceive their own performance
• How well they managed the conversation’s objectives and phases

You will be amazed by the results, already after few weeks.
In fact, this task will nudge them to:

• Connect the idea of leadership to that of people management through meaningful and possibly inspiring conversations
• Think in terms of preparing their conversation in advance
• Plan their conversations in terms of measurable strategies

At the same time, this approach will help you measure their improvement in terms of self-confidence and self-awareness, providing smart benchmarking on how effective your training activity really is -remember the part about reporting meaningful metrics upstream.

Finally, real life will pair your scheduled on-line training thus doubling the impact of on-the-job training, whether simulated or real-life.

12. Read the sentiment about your outcomes

As you do read the trainees’ sentiment on the way you deliver training just like you read the sentiment of your management on the metrics you deliver.

The same approach as discussed above, simply using a different target for a different purpose.
Resist the temptation to being isolated by bringing in the entire chain of stakeholders and easily turning your activity into one of the founding gears of the organization.

Some final reflections

It’s never easy to plan for success.
And it’s not just about applying a set of someone else’s best practices.

However, looking at what others are doing, with a genuine spirit of curiosity and an open and growth-oriented mindset is the right way to improve on a daily basis.

I hope this (long) article was helpful to you. It was certainly to me: reflecting and collecting the materials to write it helped me to structure some of the vast evidence I collected from around the world about the fact that you need to manage an increasing number of variables to deliver quality if not excellent training programs.

By the way, if you are intrigued about how digital technology applied to leadership development can really help you to make a huge difference in the way you deliver your training programs, here are two articles for you:

• The first (“Digital Role Play Stripped Bare”) is an overview of what Digital Role Plays are and how they can be integrated into a more traditional leadership training program.
• The second (“How Practicing on Digital Role Play Improves Performance: a Case Study”) is a very interesting case study showing the extent to which you can actually influence the real and day-by-day performance of your trainees by introducing a more practice-oriented training activity in your programs.

And finally, if you would like to know more or if you have unanswered questions, why not book a 1-hour discovery call with our experts here?

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Written By

Andrea Laus

Andrea has 20 years of experience in the industry of digital learning. Since over 10 years now he designs and develop interactive simulations featuring video and AI to bring immersive and authentic digital experiences to leadership coaches worldwide.

Contact Andrea

When a company wants to affirm its own culture, most of the time it goes through representing, communicating and training around their corporate philosophy expressed as a set of values, competencies and behaviors, the so-called “competency model”.

Looking at the competency model of a company should immediately depict its attitude and vision, showing how they want to appear to the world and face the daily challenges of their market. Core values, ethics, expectations that every company depicts in its model should clearly define its identity and the requirements it has on the managers and employees.

Looking at the competency model of a company will immediately depict its attitude and vision.

A broad spectrum of meanings

However, when there is a need to describe the set of the competencies related to a role, the literature and the plethora of online articles have a very wide range of interpretations around the terms: competencies, skills, behaviors, intentions, attitude, and abilities are very often used as synonyms or correlated in many ways, but there is no constant in assigning the same meaning to the same term.

If you compare the competency model of many companies, you will notice that what someone calls “skill” corresponds to what others call “competence” or “behavior”, depending on the meaning established by the model creator.

There is not always a shared and acknowledged description on the terms, which can generate misunderstandings when it comes to soft skills training.

The concepts of “competencies”, “skills”, “behaviors”, “intentions”, “attitudes”, “abilities” are often used as synonyms or correlated in many ways, showing a lack of a shared and acknowledged description.

 

Looking for constants

In such a scenario, we notice, however, that there is one constant that connects all the models: the presence of a conceptual hierarchy. A model has many levels of complexity to organize the concepts from the broadest to the most specific one.

Usually the broadest is a domain of competencies or values, and the smallest is related to the observable behaviors expected, that are often declined in different levels of shading from the optimal to the worst one.

For example, a company could value at a broader level the “Communication” domain, which is comprised of many competencies including “Active listening”.
This competency is made of many skills, one of which is “Ask questions” and this skill may have different levels of observable behaviors like “Ask open questions” as the optimal choice, “Ask closed questions” as the sub-optimal and “Not asking questions” as the worst one. When a model has this kind of grading, the levels are usually from 3 to 5.

Let’s try to get things straight

That’s not enough however.
If the aim of a competency model should be that of orienting the behaviors of the people belonging to that organization, such scope is normally addressed by designing soft skills training programs.

Clearly, in order to design and deliver truly effective (and efficient) training, there is a need for a very clear interpretation of the different elements of a competency model in order to be able to conduct the measurement correctly and design training programs that can actually improve the performance of the learner.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines competency as “the quality or state of being competent: such as a the quality or state of having sufficient knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength (as for a particular duty or in a particular respect)”. Similarly, the Cambridge dictionary defines the same word as “the ability to do something well”.

Looking for the term “skill”, the first defines it as “the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance”, while the second states “an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practiced it”.

Both of the dictionaries describe the “behavior” as the fact of managing the actions of oneself in a particular way.

We could continue, but the point is that the meaning of a term in a competency model is given by the interpretation of the authors and its position in the hierarchy.
That’s a good starting point, but let’s delve deeper.

The different building blocks of soft skills training

Let’s try to add clarity with the purpose of better organizing such hierarchy and coming to a clearer picture, thus simplifying the design process of an effective (and actionable) training program.

To do so, it is important to define what the key elements are and how they can be aggregated to create the other ones.

Observable behaviors are the most suitable since they are the components that can be more efficiently and precisely observed and measured. They represent the expression of a skill at particular levels of efficacy, which can be defined using different criteria, as we will see later.

That’s why we can consider them the basic “bricks” that can be re-arranged in competencies and domains to fit the desired competency model.

Observable behaviors, moreover, are the only elements that can be changed, while the elements generated by their aggregation are a representation of one’s style and cannot be directly changed.

Now let’s clarify the most common terms and their meaning, starting from the broader ones, putting them in hierarchical order by defining the meaning of the various terms and the relationship between them.

• A Domain can be considered as a conceptual area that describes a framework of ability applicable to a profession or a role, which expresses one’s capability of doing something in an efficient way in a particular field. This is often fairly broadly identified. In our example, a domain could be “communication”. A domain is made by an aggregation of competencies.

• A Competency can be described as the capability to apply a set of related knowledge, skills and behaviors to successfully perform a critical task in a defined context. In our example, in the domain “communication”, we can identify the competence “Active listening”. A competency is made by an aggregation of skills.

• A Skill is the activity of performing a task, usually pretty precisely described. In our example, under the domain “Communication”, we have the competency “Active listening” comprised by a cluster of skills, one of which is “Ask questions”. A skill shows up in an observable behavior that can be identified in a range of possible manifestations from optimal to worst.

• An Observable behavior is the representation of a skill in a clearly recognizable action in the user. We can identify different levels of efficiency from optimal to worst. In our example, the skill “Ask questions” can have the following grading: “Ask open questions” as the optimal option, “Ask closed questions” as the sub-optimal and “Not asking questions” as the worst one.

Figure 1: The hierarchy of the elements that make up a competency model

Turning a model into action: from skills to dialogues

As anticipated above, the purpose of a model of competencies that details all the hierarchy from the broadness of the domains to the specificity of the behaviors is twofold:

• On the one hand, it serves to align the resources to an approach that is consistent with the organization’s objectives and vision (and therefore to classify for the purpose of including or excluding some elements)
• On the other hand, is used to have an organized system to evolve people’s behaviors (in order to align them to the expected ones, and to improve the individual and general performance)

To do this, the classical training uses a cognitive approach, which is strongly anchored to knowledge transfer that merely explains the model and the expected behaviors related to it. But since behaviors are acted by people mostly through habits, it is necessary to integrate the cognitive part of the training with a more practical one, which can be done by immersing the trainee in an authentic situation to test, simulate and train individual behaviors.

The ideal learning strategy for doing this is the role play, and even better the Digital Role Play (or DRP, take a look at this article “Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership” to learn more) that is more scalable, interactive and less expensive to implement than the traditional face-to-face version.

However, even using an actionable training strategy is not enough to ensure effective skills’ development. In order to be truly effective, any training strategy, especially when devoted to actionable practice such as Role Plays and Digital Role Plays, should embrace in a correct and balanced way all the topics discussed up to this point to efficiently work on the competencies, skills and behaviors deployed by the user during the simulation and to provide a realistic response from the virtual character.

Let’s take, for example. the case of how a competency model can be useful in the design of a truly actionable training tool on soft skills such as a Digital Role Play.

We have said that observable behaviors are the basic bricks and also the most important components of a hierarchy of a competency model, since they are the only ones that can actually be measured in a direct way through observation and can be modified through a repetition and feedback-based training process.

The first step is to decide how many levels of grading we will be using: usually the final result is 3 to 5 levels. Based on my experience, 5 is the best compromise since it lets you have the right amount of specificity for each grade whilst keeping a reasonable amount of granularity.

In addition to this grading, which generally describes the worsening of a behavior, a skill can be also turned into a different cluster of observable behaviors that bind to each other with different grades of effectiveness with respect to a goal.

In our example, the skill “ask questions” can have as its optimal “ask open questions” if you want to explore a topic, but if the situation is different and you need to analyze and classify something, the optimal behavior would be “ask closed questions”.

To be able to order the behaviors correctly, it is necessary to apply a series of criteria (I normally use the 6 listed below) which allow for the contextualization of the reasons for which a certain behavior is optimal or not, according to a set of rules of grading:

1. The character we are meeting
2. The type of conversation we are managing
3. The topic of the meeting we are in
4. The scope of the measurement
5. The seniority of the user
6. The time when we use it (at the beginning of the conversation, in the middle, at the end, etc.)

Having a situational approach here is one of the key factors to success, as we have said for the leadership in another article (“Using Situational Leadership to Manage Different Types of Conversations”).

The most important elements to work on in the Conversational Leadership training are observable behaviors, as they are the measurable expression of a skill at a particular level of efficacy.

The application in a Digital Role Play

In a digital role play, these gradings and shadings are usually represented by a very well-designed set of sentences available to the user as options to choose from along the dialogue, where the user is requested to select the one he feels closer to his real-life approach.

The experience is designed in a way that the skills involved are checked multiple times and in the different shades along the story, to provide a precise and weighted measurement of the actual and situational behaviors acted by the user.

Every step of the conversation is bound to one or more skills, guiding the writing of the available options in a way that the storytelling becomes a trigger to action and trains the existing user’s skills in such a subtle way that is invisible to the user, thus also making this methodology suitable for assessment purposes.

In the following image, we can see an example where the user can act the skill “Use objective data” in an optimal, sub-optimal or wrong way according to a mix of the above 6 criteria defining the reasons of such a rating and ranking.

Figure 2: An example of the interaction with a virtual character

Learning from the situation

Using Digital Role Play to show how the concept of observable behavior can be graded and shaded in a training tool to turn it into an actionable learning-by-doing strategy is even more interesting when we consider those Digital Role Plays that allow the option of reviewing a previously played interview and providing the trainees with information about where, when and how certain behaviors were acted (you can check this article “Digital Role Play Stripped Bare” which explains the different phases of the DRP-based training method).

In such case, the meta-narrative strategy to build the sentences of the dialogue (see this article “The True Learning Scope Behind a Digital Role Play” for more details on this approach) can be fully exploited in pedagogical terms by helping the trainees to track a line between their choices and the underlying behaviors (and then up to competencies and domains).

We refer to this as “reverse engineering”.

In the image below, you can see how the explanation of the observable behavior measured according to its qualitative grade for this specific context is given during the review (“replay”) of a conversation.

Figure 3: The sentence as an expression of a skill at a particular grade of efficacy, as shown in the replay

This kind of user experience can be leveraged to design emotional storytelling that helps people to practice behaviors, which are the contextualized in everyday life, as well as to measure their efficacy by providing valuable feedback, both qualitative (in the post-meeting feedback by the character) and quantitative (in analytics and Augmented Replay).

The outcome of this training made by a looping sequence of experience, feedback, reasoning and re-experience leads to an evolution of the trainees’ behaviors and therefore the overall quality of the skills of the Leaders and, as an effect of it, of the entire organization.

The importance of behavior mapping

Still within the context of this practical training application of a competency model, a good question to move forward on would be: what criteria should be used to connect the competency model to the design of a Digital Role Play?

There are several elements to be considered here, but the primary component is increasing effectiveness training. This is accomplished when it is designed as situational while taking into account the mix of variables that define the “situation” in order to understand which skills can reasonably be linked to the exercise.

You have to identify the most important skills to train by selecting the ones that, if well managed, lead to a better performance in the role’s KPI.

Here are some criteria to identify the skills set:

• The type of conversation
• The topic of the conversation
• They type of character with which the conversation is taken
• The role of the trainees

Those elements define the situation and each situation shall be dealt with in a preferred leadership style, which will attract certain skills and relevant behaviors. Then, once the skills are identified, the plot will be developed (what turns a situation into an actionable story) by turning well-graded and well-shaded behaviors into storytelling dialogues.

Grading and shading of the behaviors can be done using the six criteria shared above.
When designing the dialogue, it is very important to assign one or more skills to each passage, ensuring that every skill is checked multiple times (around 10) along the entire story to ensure a more precise measurement.

An important consideration to keep in mind is that the weighted aggregation of behaviors in the skills must be done at the time the DRP is designed, since it is strictly related to the meta-narrative of the storytelling.

After that, it is always possible to re-aggregate the skills in personalized competencies models through an analysis of the meaning of the individual behaviors of a skill and of the skills themselves. To explain this point, let’s see what happens when you choose ready-made Digital Role Plays and you need to connect the trained behaviors (and skills) to your personalized competency model.
In this case, we start from the skills and their shades of behaviors, and we connect them to the competencies possible in a well-weighted manner.

Every skill is made by two or more observable behaviors (OB) that contribute to the score of their related skill with different weights. They can have more or less the same importance as you see in Figure 4 on the left or there can be an OB way more important than the other(s) like you can see on the right (expressed in weighted percentage).

Figure 4: Observable behaviors with different degrees of importance are aggregated to create a skill

The upward aggregation of skills into competencies can be done by analyzing the meaning associated with the skills (and to the subsequent observable behaviors) and searching which skill(s) can contribute to the description of a certain competency.

Since skills (and, more so, observable behaviors) are the most elementary piece of the model, it is normally quite easy to find a way to bring several skills together to match the content of a competency. As we have seen, this operation can be done by excluding, aggregating and balancing the available skills in the desired competencies.

Conclusions

Let’s draw a conclusion.
On one side, in order to provide an actionable meaning to a competency model, whatever it is, it is paramount to clarify the meaning of each of its components and, most of all the relationship between the different building blocks.
On the other side, it is important to relate the entire competency model to some actionable form of measurement and development, to make sure that people in the organization can recognize it as a meaningful way to orientate behaviors along the way.

The most actionable learning strategies normally come with some sort of role-playing, such as Digital Role Play. When the design of such tools is well crafted, it is quite straightforward to leverage the smallest bricks of a competency model to develop powerful soft skills training solutions that fit any model upwards.

Finally, it is therefore fundamental to carefully choose those Digital Role Play solutions that work on observable behaviors that are well aggregated in a comprehensive skill map, since they can be more easily integrated into proprietary competency models.

If you are interested in learning more about designing a balanced curriculum for training soft skills in an actionable way, I would recommend reading this article (“A Curriculum for Conversational Leadership”).

Of course, we would be delighted to show you SkillGym’s solution in a 1-hour discovery call.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• On classifier domains of competence, E.B. Mansilla; Tin Kam Ho. Check here
• What Is Competence? FRANCOISE DELAMARE LE DEIST & JONATHAN WINTERTON, Human Resource Development International, Vol. 8, No. 1, 27 – 46, March 2005. Check here
• University of Texas School of Health. Check here
• Toward a Common Taxonomy of Competency, Domains for the Health Professions and Competencies for Physicians. Robert Englander, MD, MPH, Terri Cameron, MA, Adrian J. Ballard, Jessica Dodge, Janet Bull, MA, and Carol A. Aschenbrener, MD. Check here

Written By

Livio Mariani

Contact Livio

As mentioned in this previous article (“Make SkillGym the Barebones of an Effective L&D Strategy”), a lot of L&D professionals report difficulties in making new HR technologies (the so called “HR-tech Universe”) quickly actionable and integratable in their L&D strategy.
Often this is described as the consequence of a general scarcity of resources (economic, logistic, etc.) of people development departments, but this is not always the case.

Many times, in fact, the slow adoption of innovative solutions is the result of a deep-rooted mindset of “pit-stop” learning where, even if new and innovative approaches are applied, they most often result in very short experiences for the trainees, typically a couple of days, in line with the consolidated class training framework.

In this situation, methodologies and tools based on practical learning are pushed in the area of the so-called knowledge-transfer nullifying their effectiveness and huge potential.

The result is that they provide only a weak awareness on practices or techniques without consolidating them into the continued practical experience that drives to a consistent performance.

However, the good news is that there is an increasing number of companies starting to approach HR-Tech vendors to benefit the support of technological innovations, such as AI-based Individual Adaptive Learning, Augmented Reality, etc., to develop and maintain their people’s skills with consistent practical learning approaches.

The back side of this is that the majority of them are still looking at HR Innovations with what we call a “predator approach” trying to satisfy the last and more urgent need with a “surgical injection” of innovation into an already designed program, where they should, instead flip their perspective and think how they can evolve their programs into the opportunities offered by HR innovations.

In our experience, the general approach of L&D professionals to the Digital Role Play (DRP) methodology is not exempt from these dynamics.
We (my team and I) can report many cases of L&D professionals deeply impressed by the positive impact of DRP on people development even when they embrace it with the “Pit-stop” approach mentioned above.

In some ways, it offers some short-term results on learners, but unfortunately, it doesn’t allow for the full potential of Digital Role Play tools to be exploited.

Eras of application in L&D programs have, in fact, confirmed the effectiveness of role play techniques to consolidate theoretical and inspirational learning, but have even shown their limitations.

To enable a consistent and sustainable behavioral change, a different approach is required.

The good news is that Digital Role Play tools, if well applied, are able to sustain a true development of behaviors through time, going beyond these limitations.

L&D professionals tend to approach Digital Role Play tools in the same way they do with the traditional role play.
It happens for two main reasons:

1. Digital Role Play is as powerful as traditional role play in providing an effective way to practice Conversational Skills.
2. At a first sight, Digital Role Plays look to be simply the digital version of role plays. That, however, isn’t actually the full picture.
   Digital Role Play offers more than its “non-digital version” because it goes beyond some of its limitations by providing a lot of new opportunities for personal development.

This article explores these opportunities based on the premise that it makes sense to evaluate a complete flip in the L&D strategy assuming Digital Role Play as a main activity to exploit the behavioral metrics that are usually provided by this kind of applications to drive the application.

In a well-balanced strategy, “pit-stop” learning activities have to be considered as an effective response to specific needs that emerge by evidences collected in the Digital Role Play practice.
In this way, they become timelier, more impactful and appreciated by learners in addition to being extremely measurable (as you can monitor their impact on the Digital Role Play practice).

Let me clarify further.
Consider typical People Management or Customer Care training programs.
Those are normally basic courses (historically based on class-training, now “refreshed” adding some e-learning pills). They are usually provided to new-in-role managers or sales reps to support them in dealing with new duties and responsibilities.

Those programs, still largely diffused, offer a strong knowledge transfer imprinting as they include a lot of theoretical elements, Dos and Don’ts lists or instructions and, usually, a smaller number of learning by doing elements.

Practical exercises are commonly covered by individual or group activities. Sometimes those activities are innovative and mind-opening such as pills of Design Thinking (research, define, prototyping, etc.) or Collaborative Solution Definition while other times they are built using more consolidated items, such as card games, puzzles, role plays, surveys, etc.

All of them aim, with different angles, to give a concrete and physical application to the theoretical elements transferred during the training program.

As mentioned above, Role Play Techniques are probably among the most effective ones to achieve this objective in the short-term, but unfortunately, often they are not enough to enable a deep and sustainable behavioral development in the mid- and long-terms.

Let’s move back to the L&D professionals to analyze the main limitations of Role Play Techniques they report:

1. They cannot be constantly performed due to economic and logistic sustainability, as the trainers are not always at the disposal of all of the learners to conduct role plays
2. Those activities put people in situations where they are observed by others, sometimes feeling judged, which could be an issue for reserved or self-conscious employees
3. They are not enabling an individual consistent self-development path, since those are often one-shot activities, normally limited to the training program time frame

In this context, “injecting” a Digital Role Play tool into a one-shot training program is not the optimal way to express its full potential even if it is the most natural temptation for the reason explained above.
A deeper reflection on the L&D strategy is needed, as DRP tools, in particular the AI-driven ones, offer a sustainable opportunity to enable remarkable and persistent behavioral developments.

The benefits brought by Digital Role Play tools

As explored in detail in this previous article (“Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership”), DPR introduces five benefits in the application of role play techniques:

1. Consistency of practical training
Behavioral changes require time and consistent practice. DRP platforms make it sustainable from an economic and logistic point of view.

2. Scalability
Everyone deserves the opportunity to improve.
DRP allows the application of the effective “Learning by Doing” approach to all of the employees in a very immediate and manageable way.

3. Metric driven
DRP solutions provide a set of homogenous and unbiased behavioral metrics for the entire learners’ community. It allows L&D professionals to obtain a complete picture in order to set objectives and design specific actions where required.

4. Self-awareness through conversation review
Having the opportunity of self-reflection is a key element in personal development. The best Digital Role Play allows the learner to re-watch the performed sessions adding additional behavioral insights to build internal and external self-awareness.

5. Safe environment
DRP solutions make trainees feeling “safer” than when they play a traditional role play. In fact, they remove that feeling of “being judged during confrontation” that can embarrass and even block some people, in favor of a more natural way to express themselves in the role play session.

As a direct consequence of the elements above, instead of focusing on the elements of similarity between Digital Role Play and role plays, it is worth leveraging the elements of differentiation between them, as they provide an immediate clarification on how a flip in the entire L&D Strategy in the direction of DRP brings a lot of benefits.

I’m referring, as a first element, to the direct measurability of the impact of an L&D strategy when it embraces the DRP approach.

Secondly, its scalability makes the difference in many contexts in providing a consistent (and sustainable) support of practical learning for the trainees.

On top of that, some DRP solutions come with Adaptive Learning features that allow each single trainer to get and follow a meaningful and effective individual learning path.

Take a look at this article (“SkillGym Digital Fitness: Pure, Adaptive Leadership Training”) about Digital Fitness to read in-depth on this topic.

Self-development path to improve confidence and awareness

As mentioned above, Digital Role Play tools offer the opportunity to exploit a wider set of benefits to sustain a process of behavioral change. It takes time and requires a constant effort to be kick-started and sustained through time.
DRP tools have to be conceived as life-long companions for growing organizations that put people’s development in the center of their strategy.

This conclusion is strictly related to the development of individual confidence and self-Awareness (see this article “Self-Awareness: the Single Factor Influencing the Most the Speed of Leadership Development” -and the recording of this webinar– for an in-depth analysis of the fundamental role of Self-Awareness in developing Leadership).

Leadership is a complex matter, sometimes an empty and too broad of word, but certainly it implies a status that has to be recognized by others and not assigned “as a badge”. It means that leaders have to embark on never-ending self-development paths to improve their soft skills.

On the one hand, they have to become masters in leading their teams, inspiring, communicating and acting in the direction of empowering people toward a set of shared objectives.
On the other hand, leaders must have a top-notch mindfulness and sensibility in understanding the true (beyond first impressions and “formal reactions”) impact of their behaviors both from an Internal and External Self-Awareness perspectives.

Being able to deal with these two elements represents a necessary condition to be a successful leader and, of course, it is not for everyone. It implies constancy in practice (that normally means fatigue) and an open mind, ready to accept criticism and negative feedback along the way.

It doesn’t mean that Digital Role Play tools aim to fully replace the current actors of the Leadership Development Industry such as business schools, corporate universities, consultancy firms, etc. (see the HBR’s article “The Future of Leadership Development” by M. Moldoveanu and D. Narayandas, for a very interesting and complete picture of this).

DRP tools offer a booster to support and accelerate current programs, whatever they are, injecting elements of practical learning (which some of them above demonstrate a lack of) with the aim of consolidating and sustaining behavioral development.

Digital Role Plays and the culture fit

It’s time to analyze an interesting point about the adoption of Digital Role Play in an organization.
Revolving around conversational leadership and being deeply connected with the ability of delivering empowering conversations, Digital Role Plays are always measured based on their alignment with the so-called Organization’s Culture.

Defined as “the set of core values, beliefs, and formal and informal ways of interacting that creates the unique environment of each organization”, Culture is one of the key elements leaders have to keep in mind on their journeys as it influences how people evolve and grow.

Surely each organization is different from a cultural point of view, however, there is something to consider when we think about the culture fit of a Digital Role Play solution. Some of the DRP tools, in fact, consider observable behaviors as building blocks of their methodology and scenarios.

You can consider those basic behaviors, such as Asking Questions, Showing Understanding, Involving the Counterpart, etc. as part of the Culture of almost all the organizations.

The way those behaviors are acted (directly or in response to certain stimuli) and how they are organized (with a thoughtful weight) into competencies determine, not only the Competencies Model of an organization, but also its values, beliefs, dynamics, etc., in a word: Culture.

Focusing on basic behaviors, how they are acted and rewarded together with their impact in each specific organization is one of the best ways to ensure an optimal culture fit of a Digital Role Play solution.

Other elements can be considered to maximize the fit, but this is not the scope of this analysis, so let me leave them for another article.

Why flipping the L&D strategy is not only possible, but logical

Let’s come back to the tendency reported in the initial part of this article that “DRP is amazing, let me find a Training Program to inject it in” commonly heard by L&D professionals when they see DRP solutions in action.
In our experience, we saw that the best results (getting sustainable and maintainable behavioral developments) are achieved where there is a flip in the L&D strategy.

It happens when the Digital Role Play practicing paths are made available for the trainees regardless of the training programs already in place. In those cases, instead of “injecting” DRP into current learning modules, we see a flip in the approach, where all the other training programs (e.g., class-based lessons, coaching paths, etc.) benefit from the DRP metrics resulting from the consistent practice of the trainees.

Coming from a unique and homogeneous source, DRP data, in fact, can be used to fine tune, maximize and recalibrate, where necessary, objectives, approaches and scopes of other training interventions.

Employing a Digital Role Play tool as the structural skeleton of an L&D strategy brings measurable and sustainable results because:

• Practicing is extremely useful. See this article (“How Practicing on Digital Role Play Improves Performance: a Case Study”) for an interesting case study on that
• Practicing constantly and consistently is the only way to improve
• Conversations are the essence of everything for human-beings and the core of any leadership development approach
• Training cannot remain a “pit-stop”, bur rather must be seen more as an “ongoing maintenance” part of a never-ending process

In a nutshell

To wrap up some of the conclusions, we can certainly say that the application of the so-called “HR-Tech Universe” that groups all the latest innovations applied to HR management, is one of the most important current trends for L&D professionals.

It’s almost impossible to slight its great potential in terms of both process efficiency and effectiveness.

On the flip side, the application of these innovative technologies and tools into L&D strategies often results in one-shot tests under a what we have defined as a “predator approach”.

Digital Role Play tools, which empower the undoubted effectiveness of Role Play techniques overcoming their logistic limitations, are not out of this dynamic.
Since they provide an effective support to raise confidence and self-Awareness, tackling a matter as pervasive as the ability to manage critical conversations, they should be seen as a long-term companions for learners instead of occasional tools to address specific and time-based needs.

This vision definitely implies a flip in the L&D strategy where a Digital Role Play solution is seen as a structural skeleton from which all the other Learning Programs (that should be maintained “on air”) can benefit by exploiting data and metrics coming from the DRP sessions to maximize their effectiveness.

Feel free to comment below or book a 1-hour discovery call of our tools.

Written By

Matteo Malatesta

Matteo is the head of business design at SkillGym. He supports the product design teams, bringing the voice of stakeholders to the discussion thanks to his international experience in the learning and development industry and his human-centered approach.

Contact Matteo

Is leadership a prerogative of managers only?

We believe that leadership skills are not just a domain of management, since they can be expressed in various activities like listening, motivating and driving whatever the person we have conversation with.

They have the power to shape the context and achieve objectives. So, if well practiced, conversational skills can help any role to achieve leadership.

In this case study, we will see what happens when practice is for sales people. Our objective was to identify if there is a correlation between the use of a Digital Role Play and the increase of job performance in the trainees.

For this purpose, the number of sales actually made by each agent after the training is a suitable and tangible element to rely on, especially because it is compared with their performance before the training, and with the performance of a control group who did not train with a simulator.

Measuring impact of soft skills training is difficult

Measuring soft skills is often a difficult task, and even more difficult is to measure the effect of a soft skills training with real-life indicators, such as the impact on sales.
Identifying the ROI of a training course is a struggle for all trainers and coaches around the world due to the missing immediate correlation with real, tangible results.

That’s why we have implemented a methodology based on a simulation of a real-life situation, with a specific learning design and accurate analytics, where users have to use the same skills from their everyday practice, measured by the software.

Identifying the ROI of a training course is a struggle for all trainers and coaches around the world.

Why digital?

Role play is an important resource for the development of soft skills, since it allows the learners to practice the critical conversations of their role and discuss the outcomes of this experience. Universal issues associated with this methodology are the necessary time commitment and difficulty in scalability, which relegate it as a niche tool or as a resource targeted only toward high-level and expensive training throughout most of the world.

A Digital Role Play is easily scalable, thus letting a greater number of learners profit from it, also relieving them from the time and location constrictions.

How Digital Role Play works

The SkillGym simulator is an interactive movie operated by artificial intelligence in which the user engages in a conversation with a virtual but authentic character in a context specifically designed to challenge his skills.

The dialogue between the user and the customer takes place by selecting from a set of questions and answers, which are designed to fit the most common communications styles and possible mistakes related to good communication rules as well as the selling model created by the company.

Each sentence that the user can choose represents one or more observable behaviors and allows the flow of the conversation to follow one’s own style and topics. If the user would not use any of the three sentences presented, he is encouraged to select the one he feels is the closest to his style.

The interface is clear and self-explanatory, so the user does not have to learn how to use the tool and can concentrate on the experience and the contents. It is also possible to activate subtitles and voice-over if needed.

Before and after every user interaction, the customer is “alive” and waiting so that the user can analyze his body language to understand if he is comfortable, under stress, etc.
Even if we aim to reproduce a real-life situation where time matters, the user has the possibility to pause the simulation if he needs to manage an important task that emerges during the training.

Simulation Based Learning (SBL) [1] is a rapidly growing paradigm in education. From the days of simple hyperlinked versions of textbooks, digital learning systems have evolved to complete simulation environments in which students are placed in complex, life-like situations.

It has been shown that these systems provide definite advantages in terms of learning efficiency [2][3].

Role play is an important resource, but the issues of time commitment and difficulty in scalability relegate it as a niche tool for high-level training. Until today.

Our experience

The Digital Role Play we proposed consisted of two different scenarios about a sales meeting: one about distance selling (by phone) and one about face-to-face selling. The products considered were a car insurance policy and a comprehensive household insurance policy.

We have trained a group with the simulator and a control group with a different, classical training methodology.
After six months, we compared the results before and after the training of the two groups, also comparing their real-life sales results in terms of quotes and sales.

An example of a SkillGym simulation

Our objective was to identify if there is a correlation between the use of a Digital Role Play vs traditional learning, and the increase of conversion rate in the trainees.

The numbers

The whole analysis involved 13,755 salespeople from a banking and insurance company, from eight different facilities all around the country.
During the training period, 23,909 simulations were made, with an average of 5 simulations completed per user.

The maximum possible score was 100; the average score was 52.6 and the average best score for the users was 68.
With regard to diligence and performance, 15% of the SkillGym users completed at least 10 simulations (2 times the average). Of that group, 21% reached a best score equal to or greater than 85.

Virtual sales results improved

As a first step, we compared the average score attained by the simulator users at the beginning and at the end of the training period.
For the simulator that mimics a phone sale, we observed an increase in the average score reached by users from 19 to 47 points.

The face-to-face simulator showed a similar trend, but with higher results. Users scored an average of 30 at the beginning of the training and an average of 71 at the end.
This score represents the confidence of the user, i.e., his ability to face the virtual interview like a routine task without too much stress and with a clear process in mind.

This data demonstrates that the trainees actually improved their virtual sales confidence by using Digital Role Play.

Figures 1 and 2 show a detail of the average score for each phase of the interviews at the beginning and at the end of the training activity.

(Fig.1) Average results for each phase of the interview – phone meeting simulator

(Fig.2) Average results for each phase of the interview – face-to-face meeting simulator

Real-life performance improved too!

As a second step, we compared the evolution of salespeople’s real-life sales results between the group who trained with the simulator and the control group who did not use it.
The group who trained on the simulator managed to conclude a customer meeting with a quote 76.8% of the time, while the control group concluded a customer meeting with a quote only 50.5% of the time, indicating a difference of 26.3 percentage points.

With regard to actual sales, the group who trained on the simulator managed to conclude a customer meeting with a sale 26.7% of the time, while control group did it only 18.3% of the time, resulting in a difference of 8.4 percentage points.

Moreover, we analyzed the performance of a smaller sample on the gross sales made by 1,150 salespeople. In the period studied, the increase of the gross sales made by the group who trained on the simulator was 42%.

This is a pretty good result considering that in the same period, the overall average increase of gross sales was only 17%.

Impact on quotes and sales

People who trained with SkillGym Digital Role Play achieved better real-life results as compared to the control group.

Diligent users sell more

We considered a user as “diligent” when he/she completed more than 10 simulations. To compare “diligent” and “non-diligent” users, we excluded the facilities that had less than 100 “non-diligent” users, because it wasn’t significant enough.

So, for this particular analysis, we have considered only three out of the eight company facilities.

In the three cases studied, diligent users always sold more than non-diligent users (32.4% vs. 30% in the first case, 29.9% vs. 25.9% in the second, and 29.4% vs. 25.3% in the third).

Efficient users sell more

We considered a user as “efficient” when he/she reached a best score of at least 85%. To compare “efficient” and “non-efficient” users, we excluded the facilities that had less than 100 “non- efficient” users, because it wasn’t significant enough.
In only one out of eight facilities did the efficient users sell 2% less than non-efficient users.

In all other cases, “efficient” users sold slightly more than “non-efficient” users, as shown in the figure below.

Efficient users sell more

The importance of authenticity

The simulators used in this training activity are designed with authenticity and realism in mind. They follow the company’s selling model while using cases experienced in real life by subject matter experts when creating the stories and the scripts.

The skills trained in the simulators (the ones needed to achieve good performance in the virtual interviews) are the same that salespeople will use in real life.

This is why we believe that the SkillGym methodology allows people to “train by doing” in a virtual environment that is absolutely authentic and realistic, so that the improvement they gain in the simulators can be transferred to real life.

It’s always great to witness how SkillGym impacts real life behaviors. This case study is simply amazing: performance had a huge impact on people, turning those who took the practice seriously into real Leaders of their role and profession.

You may want to read another article (“10 Reasons Why You Should Consider SkillGym for Your Next Leadership Development and Maintenance Program”) in which we outline, in more general terms, how the introduction of SkillGym can be beneficial for your organization.

And if you want to test SkillGym, please book a 1-hour discovery call here.

Bibliography

[1]  S. Barry Issenberg, William C. McGaghie, Emil R. Petrusa, David Lee Gordon, and Ross J. Scalese. “Features and Uses of High-Fidelity Medical Simulations That Lead to Effective Learning: a BEME Systematic Review”. Medical Teacher, 27(1):10{28}, 2005.

[2]  Margaret Bearman, Debra Nestel, and Pamela Andreatta. “Oxford Textbook of Medical Education”. Oxford University Press, 2013.

[3]  De Ascaniis S., Cantoni L., and Sutinen E. and Talling R. “A Lifelike Experience to Train User Requirements Elicitation Skills. In Design, User Experience, and Usability: Understanding Users and Contexts.” DUXU 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10290. Springer, Cham, 2017.

Written By

Livio Mariani

Contact Livio

During training, it is harder to improve your performance if you are not aware of your real level of expertise from the very beginning. That’s why this first step is crucial at the beginning of a training.
There are different ways to raise self-awareness: the emotional feedback and the concrete figures. Here we will show you that mixing the two is even more efficient.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. – Carl Jung

Self-awareness: an important asset

First, let’s define what self-awareness is. It means that you have a clear and honest vision of your personality that includes not only strengths and weaknesses, but also your emotions and motivations.

In other words, it is the ability to know what you are doing as you do it and understand why you are doing it. Self-awareness is a skill, and like all skills, it needs to be trained.

Being self-aware of your own performance is key. Here are a few reasons:

• When you’re aware of your weaknesses, it’s easier for you to define which way to direct your effort. You know what you have to improve and can directly focus on it.
• It’s also easier to rely on others who don’t share your weaknesses in order to overcome difficulties. Working with complementary people is always easier when you already know what your strengths and weaknesses are.
• By being self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses, you gain objectivity and it helps you make all your choices and decisions.
• Self-awareness helps you be proactive instead of just reactive and makes you raise your standards to always aim at doing better. In other words, it makes you respond rather than just react.
• Self-awareness helps you to improve your emotional intelligence, according to Daniel Goleman’s studies. And mastering this skill makes you understand better the problems you face and so the best ways to solve them.

For all these reasons, it is essential to stimulate self-awareness during training: if you know what your weaknesses are, it’s easier to work on the problem.
Besides, the more self-aware you are, the more rapid and efficient the training will be.

Self-awareness helps you be proactive instead of just reactive and makes you raise your standards to always aim at doing better.

How to efficiently stimulate self-awareness in the long term

In order to stimulate self-awareness, there are two consecutive steps: ask yourself good questions and get a feedback on your actions.

Once you’ve defined your motivations and goals, it’s easier to make decisions.
You can ask yourself for example:

• What am I trying to achieve?
• What am I doing that is working?
• What am I doing that is slowing me down?
• What can I do to change?

After your actions, you can ask for feedback from friends, colleagues or managers. We always need an objective, constructive and direct view on what we did, and they will play the role of the honest mirror for your actions and behaviors.

Feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, is the most powerful way to realize the impact of your actions and attitudes towards others.
But usually people are reluctant to give feedback freely, hence why you often have to ask for it specifically. In part because it’s not always easy or pleasant to hear (who likes to hear that he is performing poorly?); in part because managers, friends and colleagues don’t always have or take time to do it.

That’s why training via role plays using familiar conversations that learners face in their everyday life is a good alternative. It makes users self-aware of how they interact with people and what their impact on them is.

Getting feedback on the conversation they had during training maximizes the self-awareness effect while also helping them find a way to improve their performance.

The self-assessment role in self-awareness

Before getting a feedback from someone to know how you really performed during the role play, it’s very interesting and instructive to self-assess your actions and behaviors.

The questions you can ask yourself can be classified in two types: internal and external self-awareness.
Internal self-awareness is the way you evaluate the impact of your actions.
External self-awareness is having a clear view of what people think of you.

To go deeper into this subject, do not hesitate to read our article (“Self-Awareness: the Single Factor Influencing the Most the Speed of Leadership Development”).

After or during a simulated conversation, we assess internal self-awareness, for example, by asking you to evaluate:

• how the meeting went/is going
• how you think you interacted with your friend or colleague
• if you think he/she understood your point and arguments
• if and how you put into practice some skills, etc.

These questions seem ridiculously simple and you may think the answers are obvious, but this “inner examination” is the best way to raise your self-awareness of your performance because:

• You HAVE TO think objectively about your performance and the way you managed the conversation, but also about how the character perceived your approach. This is something we usually don’t do as part of our day-to-day activities.
• It will make you put into practice during subsequent conversations all the elements that you became aware of during this role play.
• In a more general way, assessing your own performance during the role play you’ve just done involves and engages you even more in the training, empowering you in the development of your performance.

SkillGym self-assessment questionnaire

Assessing your own performance during the role play you’ve just done involves and engages you even more in the training, empowering you in the development of your performance.

From self-assessment to feedback

Once you have self-assessed your performance, it’s time for you to receive feedback on what you did. There are two forms of feedback: subjective and objective.

Subjective feedback is usually an oral report from your counterpart, trainer or manager. It is defined as subjective because you receive his personal opinion on what you did.
He gives you his feelings, his perception and so this feedback depends on his characteristics, motivations, needs met, etc.

By receiving this feedback, you activate the right side of your brain, which is connected to feelings, imagination and holistic thinking, according to Roger W. Sperry’s right brain-left brain theory.

On another hand, the objective feedback consists within a set of metrics and measurable data and figures that provide information about your performance.
This can be, for example, a customer feedback survey, software results obtained after a training, etc.

By receiving this kind of feedback, you activate the left side of your brain, connected to logic, facts and analytical thinking.

What your brain hemispheres prefer

That’s why receiving both kinds of feedback is twice as efficient. You activate both sides of the brain and, by doing so, have a full vision of your performance as it raises your awareness of your true skill level.

Combine emotional feedback and analytical metrics: the Digital Role Play solution

As we said earlier, self-awareness is a skill and, like all skills, it needs to be regularly trained to improve.
Additionally, skills can improve or worsen over time as your strengths, weaknesses, motivations and goals evolve with your experience. That’s why regular practice helps you maintain it.

In order to put this skill into practice, it is shown that Digital Role Plays like SkillGym are very efficient. As it places the learners in real conditions of a familiar situation, it helps them see if they have the appropriate qualities, skills and behaviors for the task.

And in order to change them, repeated practice is the best way, as demonstrated in our article (“Why Use Interactive Storytelling in Training: Benefits of Role Plays”) on mirror neurons. Mirror neurons record what you see, hear and learn and thus help you unconsciously assimilate, repeat and improve your actions and behaviors.

The self-awareness skill can improve or worsen over time, as your strengths, weaknesses, motivations and goals evolve with your experience. That’s why regular practice helps you maintain it.

And thanks to digital technology, combining metrics and emotions has never been easier.

In SkillGym simulators:

• You can simulate in a safe environment one of the typical conversations you have with your teammates and managers by meeting a real character with his own needs, personality and moods.
• Then, after the meeting, you will be asked to assess your performance based on different questions on your behaviors, skills, approach, etc.
• You will receive an emotional feedback from the teammate or the manager you’ve just talked with. He will give his personal opinion on your approach and attitude during the meeting.
• Finally, you will be provided objective results and metrics in order to know exactly what your performance was: global performance, objectives reached, skills and behaviors, etc. Even your self-awareness is calculated according to your self-assessment.

The character’s feedback is always combined with objective metrics to give you a full overview of your approach

Using this unique approach, SkillGym is able to provide enough data for both your left and right hemispheres to process thus helping you raise your self-awareness on your strengths and weaknesses.
By knowing yourself better, you can focus on improving!

Conclusion

In adult learning, self-awareness is key.
Knowing what your skills and motivations are helps you focus on what the problems are, what you have to improve on and how you can do it.

To raise your self-awareness on your skills and improve them, SkillGym and its Digital Role Plays are the solution.

In a safe training environment, you can face as many simulated scenarios as you want, self-assess your performance, receive emotional feedback and evaluate your results thanks to objective metrics.

Do you want to go more in depth into the SkillGym approach? Don’t hesitate to read our article (“How AI Helps Delivering a Better SkillGym Training Experience”).
If you’re interested in the theories behind our approach, then why not read this article “Learning Theories Supporting SkillGym Methodology”?

If you are interested in our work and approach, book a 1-hour discovery call here.

Written By

Anne-Laure Blanco

I love to turn life into pedagogical stories. My challenge is to make storytelling as powerful as real-life experience. For a real immersive User Experience.

Contact Anne Laure

What is SkillGym?

SkillGym is a Software as a Service (SaaS) Digital Role Play environment that offers the opportunity to practice behavioral soft skills in Critical Conversations.
Thanks to the Artificial Intelligence, the tool provides a realistic environment where conversations, as in real life, dynamically adapt to the behavior of the user as the counterpart expresses natural behaviors dictated by their needs and emotions, whether displayed or hidden.

SkillGym is a consistent and versatile system that includes several features, such as:

• A digital fitness program: a personalized and adaptive schedule of the training activity
• A “preparation room” where the user can find all the necessary information before starting the Digital Role Play
• The Digital Role Play itself: a realistic simulation of a critical conversation with one or more characters
• A self-assessment questionnaire: right after the simulation, the user is asked to evaluate the quality of his behaviors during the conversation he just had with the character
• An analogic feedback: the character talks about the conversation providing an immediate feedback to the user
• Digital metrics: a dashboard containing all the detailed results of all simulations played by the user
• Augmented Replay: it allows the user to re-watch each session exploiting Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to identify key passages in the conversation and analyze each behavior

To delve deeper into the benefits that SkillGym can bring to your organization, we suggest you read this article (“10 Reasons Why You Should Consider SkillGym for Your Next Leadership Development and Maintenance Program”).

Here, we’ll be focusing on the following practical questions:

• What is the difference between SkillGym and a traditional learning course?
• How can SkillGym enhance my company’s L&D programs?
• How can it be subscribed to and used?
• Can it be integrated with my company’s technical environment?

A gym to improve behaviors

SkillGym allows managers and professionals to get involved in a scheduled training program of Digital Role Plays in order to improve the behaviors and the competences needed to successfully deal with the most common human interactions throughout their work life.

The concept forming the basis of SkillGym’s methodology can be described using an obvious analogy:

Behaviors are like muscles: the more intensive the training, the better the results. And above all, the greater will be the spontaneity with which the user will put into practice those same behaviors in real life.

SkillGym is the virtual place where the key-people of your company have the opportunity to train their relational skills in a simulated and yet highly realistic environment. We can see the impact of our behaviors on a virtual counterpart with a true personality.

The Artificial Intelligence provides all the SkillGym characters with a specific personality profile, which allows them to have consistent and authentic reactions to our behaviors. This is the key of SkillGym’s “learning by doing” approach: we see the results of our relational approach reflected in the reactions of another individual, and then we learn how to improve in real life.

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. – B. Franklin

 

Read this article (“How AI Helps Delivering a Better SkillGym Training Experience”) to discover how we leverage AI to provide authentic interactions.

One shot training vs constant practice

In a traditional classroom training session, the participants typically retain about 20% of the information that is conveyed to them. Much of the improvement in their performance depends on the daily application of this training “in the field”.

This leads us to two points:

• Adults learn by doing. The learning process should leverage the learner’s existing experience, it has to be problem-centered and related to topics that are relevant to his/her work or personal life.
• Practice is the key. Critical conversations drag us out of our comfort zone because we are not used to them. When they happen, we are basically unprepared: as a result, our level of stress grows, reaching sometimes high levels and emotions overwhelm us. Emotions are a huge interference when we have to deal with a business conversation.

How many full-day behavioral courses have we attended throughout our work life? We might find them interesting, sometimes even astonishing.
But once back to our usual work, we don’t really apply them. And after a while, we end up to forgetting everything.

Why? Because habits are stronger than knowledge: to change habits, the practice of the behavioral skills has to be constant.

SkillGym’s Digital Fitness^TM feature allows trainers to define a scheduled engagement strategy for their trainees. Thanks to this feature, users are involved in an automatic and adaptive follow up system. They receive email invitations to play with a frequency that is based on their previous results and usage attitude.

The scheduled engagement makes all the difference in terms of retention of the new behavioral skills learned during the role play.

The following case study shows the different impact of three training strategies on comparable groups of trainees: each of them was composed of 45 Leaders with a homogeneous level of the new behavior mastery.

• The first group trained for two months with a one-shot course of 16 hours, using a puppet-based serious game (the characters of the role play weren’t portrayed by real actors).
• The second group adopted the same training approach as the first group, but they used SkillGym instead.
• The third group trained for 1 hour per month, following the SkillGym’s Digital Fitness ^TM program.

At month nine, the first group retained 4% of the trained behaviors; the second group 16%.
Astonishingly, the third group retained 46% of the behaviors, with progressive improvement.

Use it everywhere!

SkillGym is a cloud-based SaaS, which means nothing has to be installed on users’ devices. It can be used from any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone.

It runs with all the HTML5-compatible versions of the main browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Firefox).

All of the contents in the tool are optimized in order to grant an optimal user experience even using a limited internet bandwidth: a connection speed of 400Kb/s for each user ensures seamless streaming of the contents and a realistic role play experience.

New product updates and technical optimizations are periodically released with no need to locally download or install any updates, and they are included in the existing subscription.

How to subscribe SkillGym

SkillGym can be subscribed to with license-based annual plans. The needs of each company can be covered thanks to a set of different plan sizes.

The more the licenses included in the plan, the lower the price per license. Licenses can be assigned to the final users all together or separately throughout the year.

The subscription also includes one or more (depending on the plan) trainer profiles, entitled to:

• Enrolling new users (according to the available licenses)
• Assigning the users to a specific training group (aka “bootcamp”)
• Defining a training program for each group, supported by the Digital Fitness^TM feature
• Accessing a dedicated dashboard to track the engagement and the results of all trainees
• Reviewing the Augmented Replay of every simulation played by each user

There are advantageous terms applied for multi-year subscription.

Contact us for a free quote and find how cost-effective adopting SkillGym is.

Same subscription, new stories!

The annual subscription grants access to all the available SkillGym libraries. Each library consists of two to four Digital Role Plays for different business-related areas, such as:

• Leadership (English, Italian, French)
• Sales (English, Italian, French)
• After Sales (Italian)
• Job interview (Italian, French)
• Job safety (Italian)
• Pharma meetings (English, Italian)

Quarterly, new contents are made available and included in all the active subscriptions.

Once released, the new contents will automatically be available for all users, with no need to locally download or install any updates.

Keep calm and tell me your story

None of the available Digital Role Plays fits your specific needs? Let’s develop your Digital Role Play from scratch!
The beauty of working with the SkillGym team is the possibility to ask for the development of new Critical Conversations and influence elements such as:

• The type of character (targeting)
• The plot of the conversation (situation)
• The setting of the conversation
• The process of communication, provided that the overall length of each story is shorter than 25 steps
• The behaviors/competences measured and trained
• The pedagogical outcome of the exercise

A significant savings can be applied to the development price if the client agrees to:

• Not including specific and branded-related contents
• Not asking for exclusive usage of the specific tailored critical conversation(s)
• Focusing on topics that have a significant relevance for other potential companies

A very structured process defines all the tasks and terms of collaboration throughout the development of a customized Digital Role Play.

The related milestones are detailed in the project calendar, shared with the client at the beginning of the project, including the relevant dates. The average timing of delivery can be estimated in 12-16 weeks for the development of up to four simulations in parallel.

Main phases of the development process of a new Digital Role Play

Integrating SkillGym into your company’s technical environment

As in many companies, you already have an L&D workflow? Let SkillGym be part of it.

The SkillGym environment can be linked to your LMS with an SSO connection: this would allow users to access SkillGym with no manual log in.

And all of the users’ results can be sent to the LMS platform or to a Data Warehouse using dedicated web services or secure file transfer protocols. Its data-driven approach allows SkillGym to feed your workflow with the key metrics needed to track the usage and improvements of the users.

Did you find this article interesting? Take a look at our other articles to learn more about our methodology, case studies and scientific papers.

And if you want to test SkillGym, please book a 1-hour discovery call here.

Written By

Alessandro Guerrini

I am passionate about sports, arts, communication and listening to people and my challenge is to drive personalized projects to a safe harbor working on clients’ expectations.

Contact Alessandro