In a recent article (“8 Key Metrics to Ensure a Successful Practical Training on Critical Conversations”), I wrote about the eight key metrics that L&D strategies should focus on when designing a leadership training program aimed at developing conversational leadership.

Being all equal, however, years of in-field experience about leadership development suggest to me that if I had to choose one and only one, I would definitely go for developing Self-Awareness.

Let’s take a look at how Self-Awareness influences the pace of development of leadership skills.

Measuring Self-Awareness with Digital Role Plays

There are several ways to assess Self-Awareness, most of them being based on questionnaires and 360-degree reviews of leadership effectiveness.

Since I consider Self-Awareness as one of the most important metrics of our practical conversational leadership training, so I have developed a very interesting method for measuring it throughout the conversation within a Digital Role Play.

First of all, you should distinguish between two types of Self-Awareness (as also pointed out by Tasha Eurich, in her book and in this interesting article):

• Internal Self-Awareness – how clearly we evaluate the impact of our actions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses)
• External Self-Awareness – understanding how other people view us in terms of those same factors listed above

Measuring and developing both is a great way to develop a complete Self-Awareness, but Leaders can’t simply focus on any of the two, disregarding the other.

We measure the two factors in two different ways:

• For Internal Self-Awareness, we ask the trainees to self-evaluate their ongoing performance during the development of the conversation.
  Typically, the character in the simulation makes an excuse to pause the conversation and a self-evaluation slider like the one below pops-up, asking the trainee to rate the quality of his performance until then.

The slider is designed specifically without the indication of measures, offering just a very intuitive color scale to set the preferred level. We absolutely prefer to let the instinctive emotion prevail.

Measuring on the go in such an intuitive way is the best approach to frame the moment.

• For External Self-Awareness, we prefer a very simple questionnaire. The simulation scans the played interview and picks specific moments upon which to ask questions.
  Each question is intended to assess the trainee’s perception about the other party’s evaluation of the trainee’s performance.

We compare the self-evaluation of each of the two factors with the equivalent objective evaluation of the user performance in the simulation as calculated by our Digital Role Play algorithm. The distance between the two -expressed in percentage- represents the Self-Awareness.

The smaller the distance, the higher the Self-Awareness, with 100% representing a perfect alignment between the evaluation of the simulation and the self-perception of the user.

The overall Self-Awareness results in a weighted average of the Internal and External Self-Awareness.

The Critical Threshold of Self-Awareness

In order to tell you more about the importance of monitoring Self-Awareness during a training program on leadership, let me introduce two different case studies in which we monitored the development of the performance in critical conversations -which we call “Confidence”- in connection with the development of Self-Awareness.

• The first case study is a project we delivered for a health system operating eight hospitals. We were asked to help design a meaningful training program for developing their managers’ conversational behaviors. The practice schedule was set in a way that, on average, each trainee was taking one simulated conversation per week, over a 20-week program. A total of around 1,500 hours of training was provided to around 200 Leaders involved in the initiative.

• The second case study is a project we developed for a bank in which the middle management was involved in a massive program of leadership development and we were in charge of the practical training on critical conversations. The project was delivered over the course of 12 months with 1200 managers involved in an average of 1 role play / week each.

In both cases, we recorded a very interesting correlation between the two variables. As you can see from the graphics below, the improvement in performance started to boost after the Self-Awareness crossed a specific level, a “threshold”.

In Case Study ONE, it took around seven weeks of practicing -at a low pace- to start obtaining a significant increase in self-awareness. Until then, the overall performance in conversation management was growing at a very slow pace.

But once the trainees reached the critical threshold of 65% in self-awareness, the performance in conversations started to grow faster as well.

In Case Study TWO, after eight weeks of practicing Self-Awareness the threshold of 72% was crossed, at which point the performance started to grow at a higher speed as well.

We see this phenomenon happen quite frequently when analyzing our Big Data from the practical training sessions.

In fact, performance is related to Learning Agility and Learning Agility widely depends upon Self-Awareness.

Until the trainees are sufficiently aware of the impact of their own performance, it is more difficult for them to focus on changing their behaviors.

As self-awareness finally clicks thus revealing this blind spot, learners start realizing that new behaviors are necessary to achieve the results they aim for. Then they start to change for real and at a faster pace.

It is a very important point: evidence suggests that there is a threshold above which it becomes easier to turn experience into new behaviors; and new behaviors into better performance. There is no fixed measure for such threshold, of course.

It may vary according to each individual and it does not make much sense to think in terms of averages, but rather try to shape a general conceptual framework.

Defining a specific and unique percentage doesn’t matter; what we see is that most of our trainees, once achieving a certain level of Self-Awareness, improve on the other skills at a much faster pace.

The point, however, is that it is highly unlikely for trainees to start the training program at their threshold. Whatever the threshold is, the percentage of “ignition” is typically quite high.
Evidence show us a totally different scenario with regard to the level of Self-Awareness at which the average trainee enters our conversational leadership training programs. Take a look at the data below.

A look at Leaders’ average Self-Awareness

Looking at the enormous amount of data available in SkillGym -we track over six million simulated critical conversations by 250k+ Leaders around the world- it is interesting to notice the following distribution with regard to the “entrance” Self-Awareness (i.e., the level of Self-Awareness recorded at the trainees’ first assessment with a Digital Role Play).

Where the five thresholds are:

Basically, our evidence shows how a large majority of Leaders appear to have an intermediate level of Self-Awareness, with a slight predominance of Internal over External Self-Awareness.

This is a very important point, since the intermediate level of Self-Awareness is far below the level of threshold discussed above. This means that a considerable part of the training effort is normally devoted to increasing Self-Awareness before being able to enjoy the benefits of faster improvement in performance.

A considerable part of the training effort is normally devoted to increasing Self-Awareness before being able to enjoy the benefits of faster improvement in performance.

Another interesting piece of evidence we collected is about the distribution of Self-Awareness according to the seniority in role (number of years):

Interesting, isn’t it?

Apparently the more the seniority, the lower the Self-Awareness. It looks like that experience leads to a false sense of confidence, making Leaders overconfident about their level of expertise.

Apparently the more the seniority, the lower the Self-Awareness. It looks like that experience leads to a false sense of confidence, making Leaders overconfident about their level of expertise.

Practicing on conversations for developing Self-Awareness

Building on Self-Awareness development is a great approach to pave the way to any leadership growth. Of course, there are several ways to develop this factor, but few are as efficient and effective as practicing critical conversations.

We are totally aware, however, that practicing critical conversations through a Digital Role Play system does not provide the means for addressing allof the aspects of one’s own self-awareness.

All our triggers, in fact, are directed only to the skills underlying the conversational behaviors we address, in a context characterized by:

• Certain types of critical conversations
• One or more objectives to achieve
• One or more types of psychological profiles
• A set of behaviors, connected to one or more leadership styles that are deemed as appropriated for the specific situation, according to the several theories and models underlying our methodology

That said, we see from field evidence that training in critical conversations using our learning triggers generates a very high impact -level of improvement and efficiency- on the development of Self-Awareness.

There is a reason why training in conversational leadership with Digital Role Play can accelerate the development of crystal-clear self-awareness. Human beings fear confrontation, but when confrontation happens, it becomes a great time for inner self-discussion.

Digital Role Plays are the safest way to make this confrontation happen. And the feedback session at the end of each simulation, especially when delivered in the form of a subjective and emotional feedback of the character with whom the trainee was practicing, is a fantastic accelerator of inner self-discussion.

That’s when Self-Awareness gets sharper and sharper.

And if we consider Self-Awareness as the result of an exercise of focusing on our own limits, potential, strengths and weaknesses, certainly practicing in the above context is a great exercise to stimulate a more general approach of self-assessment and self-reflection.

Factors stimulating Self-Awareness

Our methodology of leadership development through practice on critical conversations relies on the following powerful learning triggers, capable of stimulating trainees’ Self-Awareness (more details of how a SkillGym Digital Role Play works, in this article “Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership”):

• Self-evaluation questions during and at the end of the conversation, as seen above
• Emotional feedback provided by the character at the end of the simulation
• Objective metrics showing the actual synthetic outcome of the conversation
• Objective analysis of every single behavior applied and relevant impact, as outlined by our powerful Augmented Replay

For obvious reasons, we can’t measure the impact on Self-Awareness of other factors external to the simulation’s environment, such as the effects of a tutor-led session to discuss one specific conversation.

Over the years, we have carried out several experiments to assess which of the above triggers works best for the development of Self-Awareness and, not surprisingly, we found that the following two:

• Self-evaluation questions during and at the end of the conversation, as seen above
• Emotional feedback provided by the character at the end of the simulation

when compared to the other two (more rational) factors are absolutely the key triggers to stimulate the trainees’ attention to the present situation and generate a need for more focused self-evaluation.

However, when the four factors come together, it’s where the maximum elicitation of self-awareness happens. We discuss this in greater detail with regard to triggering both sides of the brain with emotional and rational feedback in this interesting article (“Why Stimulate Self-Awareness by Using Both Sides of Your Brain?”).

Finally, in this article (“10 Reasons Why You Should Consider SkillGym for Your Next Leadership Development and Maintenance Program”), I discuss ten good reasons to consider Digital Role Play as a great learning strategy for leadership development including some useful reflection on how to choose wisely the type of solution among those available on the market.

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

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

Unless the Leaders inside your organization live in a vacuum, they need to communicate with their employees. At all levels, on many subjects and for several reasons. Every day.

Making decisions implies communicating and sharing those decisions. Leading by example means being an example of clear, transparent and effective communication. Managing a team requires settling disputes, encouraging, motivating and listening to all members.

It’s a busy job, and delicate too.

Of course, conversations are the conduit for communication. Communication as a Leader is a specific genre that is often one-to-one in emotionally-charged situations. The route to the finish line is often through uncharted territory without clear guidelines.

That’s why we commonly refer to those situations as “critical” or “crucial” conversations, referring to the fact that they are definitely not easy to manage.

We believe that is one of the reasons why so many Leaders fail in conducting successful conversations. Leaders often start off the wrong way because they consider these conversations to be difficult, which too often leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What follows is quite easy to imagine: we tend to avoid as much as possible those conversations, which results in an ever-shrinking comfort zone to the point where we consider those moments as really uncomfortable.
This spirals into impacting our self-awareness about how we can actually perform in those situations.

Unless the Leaders inside your organization live in a vacuum, they need to communicate with their employees. At all levels, on many subjects and for several reasons. Every day.

Keep the focus on what really matters

When you consider that conversations are the moment when potential turns into collective energy, the 20% factor of a Leader that makes the 80% of the difference in team results, the question becomes: how can we work out a better way to deal with conversations?

Here at SkillGym, we call it the C-Factor. The specific skill and attitude that high-performing Leaders show when involved with Critical Conversations by turning these conversations into genuine empowering moments.

How do they do it? Is there a secret to be unveiled?

Is there a way to scale up their level, their attitude, and their skills so that everyone in the organization can contribute to generating energy through empowering conversations?

Over the years, we met many organizations and, within them, innumerable Leaders and their employees. Our research conducted while developing the SkillGym methodology led us to the following encouraging conclusions:

• It’s more or less the same everywhere: humans tend to stay in their comfort zone and confrontation is typically perceived as outside that zone
• In contrast, employees almost always claim that they would prefer to have more frequent, transparent conversations with their bosses rather than less
• More importantly, many employees recognize “leadership” in the conversation moments, when they get motivated and driven
• The best performing Leaders are almost always also those who strive to excel in transparency and commitment to communication with their employees
• We met very few Leaders who were just “naturally” gifted with the ability to manage Critical Conversations; the vast majority struggle with their own instinct to avoid confrontation but try to do better and better every day in this field

This last point is particularly interesting because there really is no secret formula to excel in conversations. Those who succeed achieve their results pushing forward every day.

We met very few Leaders who were just “naturally” gifted with the ability to manage Critical Conversations; the vast majority struggle with their own instinct to avoid confrontation but try to do better and better every day in this field.

Practice, practice, practice

Of course there are some best practices to follow (several interesting books are available on the subject, look here if you are interested) and certainly taking a course on communication skills makes sense, especially at the beginning of one’s career, to help focus one’s own efforts.

But in the end, it’s mostly about practice. The more you practice, the more you gain confidence and raise your self-awareness.
Your comfort zone starts to expand as soon as you move the first step toward trying and trying again.

That’s the point. Talent is overrated and fear of confrontation has to be fought by practicing.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, but it’s worth it given the impact a great conversation can have on the employees’ and team’s energy.

We have studied hundreds of Leaders who made their way through this challenge to see what they would consider the enabling factors that they consistently worked on to improve their conversation skills.

Over time, we have identified four recurring ingredients that can help increase a Leader’s C-Factor (by the way, “C” can represent so much: Communication, Conversation, Courage, Confidence, Continuity of practice, etc.)

One of the reasons so many Leaders fail in conducting successful conversations: they start the wrong way since the beginning, considering those conversation as difficult. This too often leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

1. Try. It seems obvious, but most of the times what holds us back from succeeding is just the fact that we are scared about the (potentially negative?) outcome.
This ingredient does not apply only to Critical Conversations in business, of course.

But it’s worth a reminder here that the first step we should always take to start is…a first step. In practice. Nothing to add here.

2. Have a work-out plan. Trying alone won’t take you far. To improve, you need to get organized. This point can be developed in several ways, but in short:

a. Identify the conversations that matter most. You can’t be great in all disciplines. At least at the beginning, so focus is paramount. Also, don’t forget the golden 80/20 rule: 20% of the conversations (types of conversations, by the way) make 80% of the impact. Focus on a few, key types of conversation and work your way toward mastery.

b. Identify at least two key metrics upon which you want to improve. All the best performing Leaders we spoke with agreed that it’s much harder to improve something that you do not measure. Again, there are a lot of possible metrics, maybe too many. The two most efficient items to measure, in our experience, are: confidence and self-awareness. They are easy to measure but very powerful in a development path. See below some more details about the two skills.

c. Seek for unbiased feedback. Nothing accelerates improvements as much as receiving feedback. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. Again, humans are poor at providing feedback (since we don’t like too much exposure) and even poorer at seeking feedback. But it’s the one single factor of a practice program that provides the highest impact.

d. Schedule conversations in advance and do it consistently. We are hard-wired with our calendar. Whatever goes in the calendar normally gets done. Push yourself to schedule even the most uncomfortable conversations. It won’t be easy in the beginning, but you’ll get used to it soon.

3. Look for help. Executive coaching is an excellent way to support conversational skills. Role Plays are a great learning strategy. Peers can help too (reciprocally).

The emerging world of Digital Role Plays is one of the best allies you can rely on (SkillGym is a great example, but look at this article “Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership” if you want to learn more about Digital Role Plays as a category of digital learning tools).

4. Don’t settle. Apart from riding a bicycle, all other skills require maintenance. The one thing you should not do is to assume you are done at a certain point.

You are never really done. There is always room for improvement and acquired skills require maintenance to keep them active. So, keep on practicing, whatever happens.

Apart from riding a bicycle, all other skills require maintenance. The one thing you should not do: think that at one certain point it’s done. It’s never really done.

Proof is in numbers

For years, we’ve been proving the reasoning for this list. Every day, we continue to witness that this list does not change. Leaders come and go, but these principles never go out of style. It’s always about struggling against the instinct to fear confrontation, whilst practicing to improve and measure change.

We have built our SkillGym methodologies following these principles and we have helped hundreds of thousands of Leaders around the world to ease their practice schedule on Critical Conversations.

We have extensive data supporting these principles and we review these data regularly to extract new evidence. Let’s go over this data together.

(All of the following data comes from our routinely updated database listing over 250k users, with 10k+ simulated interviews played every day).

The first interesting fact: the two groups are made up of Leaders with similar age and seniority cohorts.

Group 1 went through an intensive “traditional” course on leadership communication skills just before entering SkillGym. Group 2 just entered SkillGym with no specific courses completed in the prior 12 months.

The graphic below shows the Confidence (*) as recorded during their first simulated interview, which was comparable for both groups.

Of course, this does not mean that traditional courses are not useful, however, look at the next graph:

Here we have compared again two different groups (same age, same seniority).

Both completed an assessment on a Critical Conversation in SkillGym. Then Group 1 did not participate in any practice, whereas Group 2 attended a Digital Fitness program on SkillGym for around 6 months. Then we asked Group 1 to take the test again.

See the point? Clearly, practicing goes a long way and almost always overcomes raw knowledge.

(*)We define “Confidence” as the skill of feeling comfortable with a situation, in this case, a Critical Conversation. In more technical terms, Confidence measures Leader’s capability in managing the conversation to make the best of it in terms of matching its core objectives.

Let’s dig deeper.
We have compared the Self-Awareness (*) dynamics of two groups of Leaders simulating several types of Critical Conversations.

Interestingly, the youngest (or “less experienced”?!?) Group 1 scored consistently higher than their “experienced” and certainly more senior peers in Group 2.
Does it ring a bell? We hear all the time things like “Training is not for me, I have my way, I know what to do” from part of the senior management.

(*) We measure Self-Awareness as the gap between the evaluation of the performance in the conversation provided by SkillGym and the self-evaluation collected from the Leader at the end of the conversation. The larger the gap, the lower the Self-Awareness.

As we continue, you can see in this graph what happens when Leaders practice consistently on Critical Conversations, but then stop.

You can change the world

What does all this mean? To me, it clearly shows that:

• Practicing is much more important than just storing knowledge
• Seniority does not necessarily mean better performance in communication
• Communication skills need to be maintained over time with consistent training
• A great training tool can make a big difference
• When conversations work well, the team works well, performance increases and everyone is happier
• Leaders can really change the world by developing their C-Factor

Now, let’s draw some conclusions from all of this. The recipe for developing the C-Factor looks clear. But how can you, as an HR and L&D professional help your Leaders to go this route?

In my experience, those who really implemented a sustainable and effective long-term strategy for supporting the C-Factor went through three steps:

1. Rebalance their programs, by placing more importance on practicing than on knowledge storage. Knowledge is everywhere nowadays and Leaders hate being flooded with information. Let them practice, let them make mistakes in a safe environment.

2. Think long-term. Reduce the “pit-stop” approach (2-day courses, twice per year and then go and perform) and replace it with a consistent program of continuous practical exercises. It can be delivered in any form, but please start considering skill development as a sport. Would you imagine Roger Federer going to a class a couple of days every now and then and nothing else? How could he possibly compete with the champions?

3. Consider technology. Conversation is a role play. No doubt about that. That’s why role playing is the most suitable learning strategy to practice conversations. Digital Role Play can let you scale (which is what you need if you want to plan long-term) both on numbers (of Leaders you can involve) and consistency over time.

At this point, you may want to delve deeper into the subject of Digital Role Plays and the benefits that you can derive from a solution like this.

Here you can find an article (“Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership”) describing in detail what Digital Role Plays are, how they work and what you can achieve with this type of solution.

Here you can watch some interesting webinars just released showing interesting case histories of what happens when you blend Digital Role Plays into your learning strategy.

Thanks for reading!

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

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

As an L&D and Leadership Development professional, you know that one of the biggest challenges when it comes to digital learning is about ensuring that users consistently access the learning contents, keeping pace with your proposed schedule.

This becomes an even greater reality and more important when the subject revolves around soft skills and participation goes beyond click-and-pass the test.

Still most companies struggle to get users online for training purposes, and many initiatives that look brilliant in the beginning never take off for lack of long-term active users traffic.

Why trainees systematically lose their grip on soft skills’ online training courses? How can you improve traffic and engagement?

Why trainees systematically lose their grip on soft skills online training courses? How can you improve traffic and engagement?

Today I will try to answer these questions by reflecting on the case studies of three different large companies from three different industries: Insurance, Retail and Automotive.

We have provided them with our SkillGym Digital Role Play system and what follows is the description of how they implemented this tool overtime.

Specifically, we helped them to improve their delivery strategy using a 3-step approach.

Each step lasted six months and was dedicated to the deployment of a specific set of Digital Role Play with a specific population (which we will call Group 1, 2, 3).

The set of Digital Role Play was different for each company as was the type of population.

This point is very important since, as you will read below, it highlights the fact that the evidence we collected is independent from the industry, the topic and the type of trainees.

Step 1: Is “learning by doing” the key to engaging users?

The strategy behind the first wave of deployment was supported by the idea that delivering a smart and interactive program such as SkillGym was enough to keep users on track.

A significant launch event was organized at each of the three companies and, at the beginning, the novelty of digital role playing was perceived by users as something to look at.

Our Customer Success team was monitoring the ongoing activity of the online training program and the overall result was summarized as follows:

Look at the distribution of usage in the first group. The blue bar represents a benchmark, the average engagement per month of what I would call a “knowledge transfer” as part of a voluntary digital learning program. This average emerged by one of our previous in-field research studies.

The new strategy generated a great deal of engagement in the first month by almost doubling user engagement as compared to the traditional digital learning course that we used as a benchmark.

However, starting in the second month, things started to fade, and the participation slowly dissipated (even though the drop was by a lower percentage as compared to the “old way” shown by the blue benchmark).

At SkillGym, we were quite impressed by this. Everyone (including us, by the way) was talking about “learning by doing” is the real magnet of any engagement. Evidence has shown that it was not enough.

Changing the learning approach toward a more interactive practice is at the foundation of real behavioral change on soft skills, however, it was not the secret trick to keeping users engaged long term. And, of course, no engaged users, no usage, no improvement – regardless of learning approach.

Step 2: Leveraging F.O.M.O.

So, preparing for the second semester and group of trainees, we decided to tweak this basic engagement strategy and add some flavor in the form of “FEAR OF MISSING OUT”.

Basically, we introduced some additional metrics (available to the trainees) to the training dashboard.

Sourcing from our extensive BIG DATA (consider that we delivered Digital Role Plays to over 300,000 trainees worldwide over the past 6 years), the new dashboard showed and compared one’s own result with those of colleagues (in anonymous way, of course) and with comparable profiles from all around the world.

Guess what happened? We scored a month’s longer engagement.

That’s cool:

We started to learn that, in order to develop a good delivery strategy aimed at consistent training engagement over time, you can’t just rely on one single factor. Especially when enrollment and participation is voluntary, and the time span extends for 6 months.

In order to develop a good delivery strategy aimed at consistent training engagement over time, you can’t just rely on one single factor.

Step 3: Leveraging habits

Our third step was set up in the third semester of this training initiative. In order to get a handle on why participation levels declined over time, we surveyed trainees about why engagement in the training program declined for them.

A common response was along the lines of, “I have other priorities scheduled…”

So, we started to observe that each of us, as human beings, is hard-wired to a calendar-based way to schedule the day’s activities. I am sure that any of you also tend to stick to your calendar schedule, no matter what.
In the event that you can’t make it to a scheduled appointment, you advise those involved and reschedule (feeling a bit sorry for the cancellation).

It’s a HABIT. So, we decided to LEVERAGE HABITS to “change habits”.

This is where our scheduling system called SkillGym Butler was born. We designed one automatic scheduling tool inside SkillGym to increase the emotional engagement and commitment of users towards their scheduled individual training program.

• Once the individual training path was defined, the SkillGym Butler started to send to the trainees periodic Doodle Invitations to schedule one Role Play on their busy calendar
• Each trainee was free to choose the preferred date and time of the meeting and an appointment was scheduled on the calendar, just like it would happen with real life meetings
• Close to the appointment date, SkillGym Butler sent reminders to the trainee and, in case of late show or cancellation, a re-schedule procedure was set up

Look at the curves…engagement exploded! People are so used to sticking to their calendar that the simple fact of scheduling one life-like meeting turned the trend upside down. There is a scientific basis to this.
As you certainly know, numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that our brain does not differentiate between real life and simulation.

Moreover, the fact that the tool used for the training is focusing on a conversation with somebody else (and SkillGym makes it very life-like) enhanced the sense of obligation.

Keeping the momentum

Like any other initiative, success is a mix of several factors, the quality of the contents being just one of them. Here at SkillGym, we tend to consider the quality of the contents as well as the strength and depth of the learning methodology as the founding pillars of behavioral change.

However, we know that such change happens only if people practice consistently over time. And we are fully aware that the noise out there is so loud that each of us tend to ignore whatever is not fitting our strict calendarized priority list.

That’s where we learned how to leverage this habit of sticking to the daily checklist that we all call “calendar”.

Does it mean that simply by scheduling the learning activities on trainees’ calendars turns a lousy training course into one of the year’s greatest hits? Certainly not. Many other ingredients concur to maintain the momentum.

Let’s look at five key ingredients that must be in place to start paving the way toward real training engagement:

1. First, creating the momentum. Any training activity has to be promoted and advertised among the trainees right from the start. Based on our experience, L&D departments are very good at this and, of course, the availability of social digital channels is a great ally for viral diffusion of a learning initiative.
2. Endorsing and framing the initiative. At the same time, it is very important to provide trainees with a sense of why they should put effort in your learning initiative. Again, we see that L&D professionals are very aware of the importance of framing the scope of a training program. However, the message becomes much more powerful when it is endorsed by the senior management. We see some misalignments here, which often leads to a weaker message spreading among trainees.
3. Providing activities that are perceived as useful. Whatever the advertising, it’s ultimately about the contents. If the training course is perceived as meaningful and useful, you will have opportunity to win. Otherwise, no matter what effort you put into promotion, people will quickly realize that it’s not worth their effort.
4. Showing clear signs of improvement. No one wants to keep training if improvements are not apparent. Don’t forget that it’s not about whether or not improvements are achieved; it’s about letting them know that improvements are achieved. So, provide metrics. Sound metrics, showing very clearly that it is worth putting forth the effort.
5. Challenging the FOMO. Even better, show them how all the others are improving too. Benchmarking, when done in a properly and with utmost care when handling individual personal data privacy, is one of the most powerful fuels to push commitment ahead.

Even if all those ingredients are in place, the corporate training strategy is all to often:

• Either positioning the course as mandatory, which certainly increases the formal participation, but typically decreases the real and genuine involvement;
• Or letting the trainees free to organize their attendance (“it’s digital, doesn’t mean you can play when you want and reap great advantages?”), with the result that “when you want” quickly turns into “later on” and then into “never”.

That’s where SkillGym Butler makes the difference. Users are still free to organize their training schedule as they want, but once a meeting is set on their calendar, the Butler will make sure that it is perceived as so real that sticking to the underlying commitment becomes… just a habit.

Scale the training engagement, lower the organizational effort

Not only SkillGym Butler:

• Keeps track of each trainee’s schedule
• Turns training into appointments
• Monitors the trainee’s reliability to scheduled conversation
• Delivers smart reminders when needed…

It does all this automatically!

This is the key to the success of SkillGym Butler: a huge advance in engagement strategy at almost no organizational cost from the point of view of trainers.

With SkillGym Butler, trainers do not need to remember to send reminders and can, finally, dedicate their time to the most precious activity of analyzing the results from practice and adjusting the overall training strategy accordingly.

I hope this case study was as inspiring to you, as it was to us here at SkillGym.

We learned a lot from observing how habits can be leveraged through smart engagement strategies. Today we are proud of considering the Butler as one of the key ingredients in our recipe for developing conversational leadership.

Tell us about your story in the Comment section and let’s continue this conversation.

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

(Just in case…here “From Critical to Empowering Conversations: Let’s Change the World Using the C-FACTOR” I talk about why Critical Conversations are Leaders’ most important area of improvement; here “Building a Community of Leadership Abundance” I provide you some interesting evidence about the role of practicing to improve conversational performance; and here “Digital Role Plays, the Best Way to Develop Conversational Leadership” I give you a checklist for selecting your next Digital Role Play platform).

Today I want to take a deeper look at the different ways Leaders can actually learn from such a practical digital experience. In fact, several researches underline the importance of combining at least four different strategies to improve a behavior:

• The self-awareness of the cause-effect relationship of one’s own behaviors
• The positive reinforcement of optimal behaviors, through recognition and feedback
• Rehearsal of the new behavior, through practice
• The continuous measurement of performance KPIs, highlighting the improvement trend

Here at SkillGym, we have done extensive research over the last 10 years and we have embraced some of the most important learning theories (“Learning Theories Support SkillGym Methodology”) ever developed to shape our methodology.

We have done a lot of experimenting to tweak our recipe, based on the learning experience of hundreds of thousands of Leaders around the world who have practiced on our Digital Role Plays.

This way, we have built upon the above four recommended strategies by developing eight different and exclusive learning triggers that work together and help Leaders make the best of their immersive and interactive sessions in SkillGym:

1. The counterpart body language
2. The counterpart emotional reactions
3. Objective measurement
4. Emotional feedback
5. The acquisition of a communication process
6. The challenge to achieve smart goals
7. The possibility to critically review the performance
8. The Deja-vu trigger

Self-paced learning benefits from the combination of these triggers: trainees activate both the rational and the emotional learning mechanisms, experiencing the best value in terms of improvement in confidence and self-awareness about their skills in Critical Conversations.

At the same time, many executive coaches around the world deliver more powerful questions in analyzing the evidence delivered by the extensive metrics available in SkillGym. This way, assigning Critical Conversation practice in between coaching sessions is not only a way to boost the practice, it literally becomes a way to have crystal clear evidence of conversational behaviors to discuss at the next session (if you are an Executive Coach, you may be interested in attending this free master class on this subject).

Let’s analyze each of these precious sources of improvement.

Some of them are designed to trigger the trainee before the conversation starts, some work during the conversation and some are available at the end of the conversation. However, as you will read below, some of the triggers work well along the entire experience.

I don’t list here any additional tutor-led trigger (there are many) that our clients continuously add to their recipe of delivering SkillGym, such as the possibility of discussing face to face a specific conversation’s outcome or the many learning materials that can be associated to the practical exercise.

The counterpart body language and emotional reactions

We know that one of the most challenging skills to develop is that of reading the other persons’ body language and hidden emotions during the development of a Critical Conversation.
One of the reasons is that multiple senses come into play here.
You have to listen with your ears and watch with your eyes. The tactile sense is also involved sometimes.

And of course, you need to be able to recognize the subtle signals of non-verbal communication that change according to the type of person you are facing.

And finally, you need to be able to instantly associate those signals to the specific and dynamic context you are in and react accordingly. Easy? Of course not.

SkillGym helps in three ways and in three consequential moments of the exercise.
Before the conversation starts, the trainee has the possibility to study the personality of the character, including the way that this type of personality deals with nonverbal communication.

During the conversation, with smart usage of video shooting technique: close-ups are widely used to underline those emotional peaks coming with non-verbal communication.

After the conversation, the Augmented Replay lets the trainee analyze every single step of the conversation (highlighting the most significant ones) and review the body language of the other person with clear indications about the meaning in the specific context and what lead there.

The benefit of these two learning triggers is very valuable: learning to understand other people’s body language and hidden emotions through consistent practice as well as guided aid is the fastest (and more enjoyable) way to improve. Improving on these two elements is paramount to mastering successful conversations and growing in leadership.

Objective measurement and emotional feedback

Measuring soft skills is not easy. Measuring the impact of soft skills on the other person’s reactions is even more challenging. However, what you don’t measure, you don’t improve and most of the time the result of our Critical Conversation is very different from what we planned and from what we expected at the end of the conversation, as imagined from our own individual blind spot.

Improving without feedback and objective measures is very hard since these triggers work in our favor as eye-opener and accelerators of growth.

At the same time, up to 50 specific key performance indicators (including confidence, self-awareness, strategy and down to the single behaviors applied during the conversation) get measured.

On top of that, trainees can access their personal dashboard where improvements are tracked, and interesting benchmark indications are provided.

The benefit of measuring and triggering both sides of our brain is huge. Learning speeds up and the entire effort acquires a much deeper meaning.

Also, trainers can better target their support-oriented efforts and supervisors have access to significant ROI metrics showing the value of the training experience.

The acquisition of a communication process

Learning to master Critical Conversations goes through the acquisition of a series of techniques related to the process of communication. Each type of conversation has a peculiar structure, a sequence of intermediate objective to achieve and a preferred strategy to achieve the result.

SkillGym helps Leaders to prepare each conversation in a structured way, presenting the goal, the character, the sequence of intermediate objectives and the recommendations on the most suitable strategy.

At the end of each conversation, all these elements get measured and during the Augmented Replay they can be analyzed in deep detail.

All the conversations inside SkillGym are designed based on the most reputed leadership theories and models and can even be personalized to your organization’s culture and best practices.

The benefit of developing a strong and structured backbone to approaching conversations is of course that of growing more aware Leaders that can achieve better results with greater flexibility in a broader range of conversational contexts.

Moreover, the possibility to adapt the structure of a specific type of conversation to your own corporate culture makes SkillGym a great companion to your leadership training programs.

The challenge to achieve smart goals

The energy we put in our learning efforts is influenced by the perception we have about the type of challenges and the goals we are after. The more compelling and rewarding, the higher the energy and the commitment.

SkillGym offers the possibility to set a specific goal for each of the over 50 different KPIs available in the system, so that you can choose what type of achievement you want your trainees to go after.

The possibility to set up in few clicks one internal challenge, with a real-time leaderboard showing the result of the challenge is often a good way to increase participation through well tested gamification techniques.

They are a benefit for the trainees in setting goals, since they can measure themselves against compelling challenges and there is a benefit for trainers too, since higher and clearly stated goals bring higher achievements faster and with much more solid commitment.

The possibility to critically review the performance

One of the biggest problems in reflecting on a past conversation, whether it is a self-reflection or a discussion with a tutor or an executive coach, is that we completely lose the evidence of what really happened.

So, it becomes quite frequent to picture in front of us a biased version of facts and build upon that a distorted analysis that, inevitably, leads to incorrect conclusions.

Instead, having the possibility to review what happened would generate a great deal of stimuli to comprehension and self-awareness development. Not to mention the increase in quality of any tutor-led discussion.

SkillGym provides Augmented Replay, a tool totally integrated in the system that is designed to review any past conversation from a third-party point of view.

Additional hints are provided through augmented reality and the possibility to browse back and forth, stop and play and zoom into several behavioral details make it the best way to develop self-awareness and to discuss based on clear evidence.

The benefit of being able to step back and review one’s own conversation from the outside is that we can actually see how things happened without being trapped inside our small direct vision.

The availability of such powerful tool allows for the development of advanced training and coaching strategies where the tutors and the coach can help the trainees on demand in live sessions or from remote, focusing on what really made the difference and is worth discussing.

The Deja-vu trigger

The learning trigger I prefer in SkillGym is what we call the “Deja-vu effect”. Certainly, you have experienced deja-vu in your life. It’s the perception of a situation that you feel you experienced before and are strangely connected to what is happening now in front of your eyes.

One recent Scottish study by Akira O’Connor shows how our brain uses deja-vu to control the memories stored along the way.

According to another study by Anne Cleary, “Deja-vu can be driven by an unrecalled memory of a past experience that relates to the current situation, with the evidence of memory-based predictive ability during deja-vu states. Deja-vu did not lead to the ability to predict the next turn in a navigational path resembling a previously experienced but un-recalled path (although such resemblance increased reports of deja-vu). However, deja-vu states were accompanied by increased feelings of knowing the direction of the next turn”.

SkillGym offers the possibility to repeat the same conversation several times and every time to experience different nuances generated by the AI algorithm influencing the real time flow of the conversation. At the same time, the same type of behavior can be practiced in different scenarios, with different types of persons and goals.

All this leads to extensive experience being stored in a very short time and with little effort.

The result and the benefit for the trainee is fantastic with much more experiences in such a little time allow the activation of many more deja-vu effects that come to mind in real life when similar situations happen.

The feeling of a higher confidence -connected to the “I was here before, I know what expect”- is one of the elements contributing to faster and higher development of confidence in the conversational skills.

Practice is development

Imagine how much faster and smarter your Leaders can grow their skills, gain confident self-awareness and experience in Critical Conversations by practicing in a Digital Role Play system like SkillGym, providing up to eight different learning triggers of this kind.

You may now be interested in trying the power of SkillGym. Click here to book your 1-hour discovery call.

Please, also peruse our website. There are plenty of inspiring pre-recorded webinars and articles.

Of course, we would be delighted to continue this conversation with you; simply book a discovery call with us here.

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

Here at SkillGym, we have a long track record of case histories of Leaders who successfully turned Critical Conversations into empowering moments of reciprocal development with their reports, clients and peers (read one case study here “How Practicing on Digital Role Play Improves Performance: a Case Study”).

All of them developed their mindset, attitude and behaviors through a disciplined and consistent practice of their skills.

In a previous article (“Building a Community of Leadership Abundance”), I discussed in detail the importance of practicing to reach mastery, a concept that not only applies to conversational leadership, but also extends to any activity in which humans intend to excel.

Today I want to focus my attention on the importance of measuring along the way, the effort and the results of practice in conversational leadership, since I am absolutely convinced that selecting the right metrics is one fundamental ingredient of the recipe that leads to mastery.

Unfortunately, while some metrics are almost always taken into consideration for any training program, it is quite common to rely on some that are not suitable to ensure the right balance of activity toward a meaningful goal.

At the same time, certain measures are relatively easy to take while others are less so because they are difficult to keep up-to-date, particularly in large organizational contexts. The qualitative measurement of self-awareness, for example, is quite complex to measure in addition to being tricky to analyze.

Based on our hands-on experience here at SkillGym in training hundreds of thousands of Leaders around the world in the most compelling and critical conversations, let’s consider the most important metrics you should rely on when designing a training experience of this kind.

Results come from discipline

First of all, you should find a balance between measuring the goals of your training program and the discipline with which trainees attended, otherwise it will be not possible to understand why certain results happen (or do not happen).

There are two complications here:

• Either the balance is not appropriate, resulting in a much too broad of information in one of the two sides, or
• The information is not properly organized, resulting in additional noise over the signal

Finally, keeping track of the long-term development of these metrics, as well as the impact of their aggregation across a diverse population taking the training, is equally important -both for judging the results and for adjusting the recipe on the way.

After several years of refinements, I currently consider the following eight metrics as the most significant in terms of defining a properly balanced, efficient and effective conversational training program:

Of course, there are many more elements to consider, particularly when the training program focuses on the development of very specific behaviors or competency areas (SkillGym measures over 50 detailed skills that can be aggregated according to several competency models).

Measuring the ongoing sentiment of trainees is also very important (we also do this in a very detailed way).

Ultimately, we always see that the above eight metrics (or “observation angles” as we like to call them) are the well-known 20% carrying the 80% of the overall impact of whatever training program you may design.

So, let’s see them one by one.

1. Confidence

Confidence 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 -especially a so-called “critical” one- with another person.

If I were to choose one key metric to predict the outcome of a conversation, it would be Confidence.

However, it is not easy to measure. We first need to agree upon what exactly we are measuring and, then find a way to measure it meaningfully for assessing the quality of a training program, and eventually adjust its content.

At SkillGym, we have decided to measure confidence as the result of the overall quality with which each specific skill is used along the conversation. We consider not only the absolute quality of each behavior, but also the context: the specific situation and the flow (dynamic development) of the conversation.

Measuring Confidence as the result of the level of mastery of all the skills required along the conversation is also a great way to define the scope of the training.

At the end of the day, that’s what we aim for: increasing our Leader’s confidence in taking and managing (more) leadership conversations.

2. Self-Awareness

The second paramount metric is the well-known self-awareness, which is one of the most important elements to rely on for a well-balanced development of any skills.

It requires no definition, but how to measure self-awareness in a meaningful way is of issue.

At SkillGym, we simply ask the trainee to rate the quality of his performance and we compare such self-evaluation with the score 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.

This assessment is accomplished in two steps and in two ways in order to build the most effective and representative self-awareness index possible.

• First, we check trainees own perception of their behavior (internal self-awareness)
• Then we ask them to reflect on how they think the other person perceived those behaviors along the conversation (external self-awareness)

The combination of these two angles provides a much more comprehensive measurement of the overall self-awareness of each trainee.

Taking this measure during and at the end of each conversation provides an amazing amount of information that builds up an evolving profile of the actual development.

3. Self-Control

Another very important metric is self-control. In a conversational context, we can define it as the ability to keep a consistent approach and quality of relation through the entire conversation, no matter what happens inside.

This is a very important KPI and according to our experience, it not only has the power to affect the long-term quality of the relationship inside a team, but it also has a great degree of impact on the other two above mentioned metrics. In fact, a lack in self-control lowers the overall confidence and confuses self-awareness.

I think that one of the best ways to measure self-control is that of monitoring the spikes of those emotional reactions -on both sides- that lead to a hasty change in the quality of the relationship during the conversation.

The flatter the spike curve, the higher the self-control. Self-control should always be analyzed in conjunction with Confidence, since one can have a high level of self-control but still be maintaining a bad conversation.

4. Learning Agility

The last qualitative metric we recommend focusing on as a top priority is Learning Agility, which means “finding yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do, but then figuring it out”.

There are various definitions of what’s inside learning agility and certainly ways to measure it.

Overtime, we have found it very useful to focus on three dimensions that can be helpful to monitor:

• Skill Flexibility, showing how trainees adapt the application of certain skills to the changing environment (being “skill resistance” is the opposite).
  For example: applying one conversational behavior in a very efficient way when talking to about a report does not necessarily mean that the same approach will optimize a conversation with a peer. How flexible are Leaders in adapting their skills to the circumstances?
• Learning Speed, how fast are Leaders in understanding, applying and evolving their current behaviors?
• Retention Degree, for how long the newly acquired approach can last if not properly maintained with consistent ongoing practice?

We have seen that measuring these indicators with SkillGym and aggregating them into a pondered unique measure of Learning Agility provides very useful insight about the efficiency of any learning strategy.

5. Reliability

One of the trickiest aspects of learning engagement is making sure that people attend their training as expected. We can call it “Reliability”.

You can’t expect results to happen if you don’t even show up.

Reliability can be measured as the ratio between your expected schedule of training and the number of times you actually have shown up.

Do you measure reliability? I think it’s worth doing. Especially when it comes to digital learning (overall, classes are much more difficult to skip, but when it comes to digital…).

I have recently discussed the issue of ensuring consistent “traffic” in digital learning in this webinar where I presented our approach at SkillGym and the results we obtain by focusing on this metric. I dedicated an entire article (“Three Case Studies and One Strategy to Keep Users Engaged with Digital Learning”) on strategies to increase participation to digital learning.

6. Focus

Showing up is just the beginning, of course. Then you must be mentally present.
Measuring focus is relatively easy, but still very important.

Here at SkillGym we consider several elements such as the level of concentration during the conversation, the time spent in reviewing a conversation played before and so on.

Analyzing our big data, we find a great degree of correlation between Focus and achievement of the learning goals. It seems trivial, but it is quite important.

7. Effort

Effort can be measured by the amount of exercise that is spent on practicing. It’s probably the easiest measure you can take and certainly one of the most used.

Again and again, I see how much the quantity of practice is related to the level of mastery of skills.
Every time Leaders increase their effort in practicing, they improve consistently. However, this happens mostly when the other metrics I am talking about in this article are balanced.

The point is, don’t expect change to happen for free. A great deal of effort has to be put in.

However (there is an interesting article here about the importance of rhythm in a practice schedule), consistency and rhythm are much more important than intensity (read: quantity).
Does it ring any bells? In fact, when you go to the gym to prepare for the summer, it is pretty much the same, isn’t it?

8. Balance

The last metric I want to talk about is balance. We noticed that a well-balanced program scores higher in results and engagement than one where the quantity and type of practice is not well defined.

Balancing a training program is not easy since you need to consider several elements such as: which type of conversations to practice, which frequency, which quantity of rehearsal, when to practice and what to do in between.

Lately, the concept of “adapting learning” is becoming more and more popular, referring to the idea that balancing a training program is paramount and it should happen -if not in real time- quite often and in a personalized way for every single trainee.

At SkillGym, we are very familiar with this concept, since one of the key features of our Digital Role Play system is called “Digital Fitness” and consists of an AI-based set of algorithms that continuously tweak the schedule of practical training on critical conversations for each trainee.

Several months after the implementation, I need to say that the more personalized the training path is, the easier it becomes to ensure consistent engagement and thus, reaching the training goals.

Focus on what generates the maximum impact

Sorry if I went on too long here. However, I trust so much in the power of focusing on what really makes a difference, that I feel it very important to share with you our experience on what metrics really matter.

Time and again, I have witnessed a direct correlation between managing these KPIs and obtaining faster and easier results to the extent that I really want to underscore the importance of choosing wisely the (few) metrics to monitor as a priority.

Then of course you can still check the good old competencies of the classical leadership curriculum -we do it too. But please, never forget that we are in the era of results and your internal clients, the Leaders you want to help develop, have an ever decreasing attention span and are becoming continuously less fascinated by learning to develop a competence map.

Focusing on metrics that they also perceive as “actionable” is not just a best practice for L&D professionals, it is also a smart way to make leadership training more appealing to Leaders.

Going digital makes the journey much easier

Clearly, going digital to practice critical conversation elicits a lot of advantages including in the field of measuring the above metrics. Some of them can be tracked in the traditional way, others require too much effort and others are really challenging to measure if you don’t have a digital system doing it for you.

And it’s not just about measuring once, it’s about consistency of measurements. It’s not just about helping one single Leader once.

It’s about having better control and understanding of which factor impacts the learning program as a whole. A consistent and continuous monitoring of these eight KPIs goes a long way toward a more organized and higher performing training activity.

You can also try it out. We are always available for a 1-hour discovery call of SkillGym.

Have a great 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