The First-Time Managers
Webinars Series
A series of six webinars to enhance the expertise of learning development professionals on modern leadership training strategies.
Once they enter their new role, First-Time Managers need to communicate with their employees in a different way from what they were used to. They need to master leadership conversations to gain real influence beyond authority.
A conversation is a moment when the potential becomes collective energy.
It’s the 20% factor by which a leader makes possible the 80% difference in team results. This is the number-one reason that one shouldn’t plan for leadership training without considering the importance of developing conversational skills on key critical types of conversations.
Backed by a team of researchers in the areas of management, leadership, adult training and neuroscience, we’ve developed a series of six webinars grouped in three blocks:
- Innovative Learning Strategies,
- Best Practices from the field
- Case-study applications.
They gives corporate learning managers, officers, VPs, SMEs, independent leadership trainers and executive coaches a comprehensive overview of how to approach evolutionary design and implementation for effective leadership training.
Innovative Learning Strategies
After 10 years in continuous research in leadership development and with more than 30 articles published in prestigious international journals, we’ve explored this topic at its cutting edge. The first two webinars discuss how AI-based technology can improve the current approach of leadership training design:
1. First-Time Managers need to practice Leadership Conversations
January 29, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
The journey from individual contributor to newly appointed manager is tough.
It brings excitement and anxiety as emerging leaders move from focusing on accomplishing their own tasks to helping others accomplish their own tasks.
It requires new skills that they normally did not practice enough.
Why should high potentials, emerging leaders and newly appointed managers practice on leadership conversations?
The shift in their role implies new responsibilities and new or, at least, improved communication skills, such as:
• Listening actively;
• Delegating;
• Focusing on People instead on tasks;
• Learning from others;
• Managing a team;
Supporting young managers and developing their leadership skills is one of the main challenges of L&D, since they need to acquire the ability of managing a new set of critical conversations where high stakes, emotions and divergent opinions are very common and part of the daily experience.
In this webcast, we will discuss how a well-designed Digital experiential (learning-by-doing, if you prefer) approach, powered by Artificial Intelligence and deeply rooted into a human-centric methodology, can support this behavioral shift through an actionable critical conversational upskilling.
We will share more about our researches, case studies and direct experiences “on the field” dealing with this topic.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
• Why it is so important for new leaders to master leadership conversations
• What types of conversations really make the difference in the early days
• How you can integrate efficient practice-based training into your next leadership program
2. AI-driven Role Play for making First-Time Managers Practice Leadership Conversations
February 19, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
As an L&D professional, you’re familiar with many models of learning, but there’s one area, upskillng First-Time Managers, where role-play practice remains one of the most effective strategies. But how do you scale roleplay? AI (Artificial Intelligence) may be the answer.
There are several ways you can use AI-driven digital role-play to empower First-Time Managers at scale for better performance.
Remote practicing, smart objective setting, big-data benchmarking and adaptive learning scheduling are some of the strategies that can help you go beyond the limitation of soft-skills knowledge-led e-learning solutions, to start providing continuous empowering value to your learners.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
• What digital role-play is and how it can help corporate L&D professionals deliver effective and practical soft skills learning strategies
• Why Digital Role Play can be your best ally when it comes to upskill First-Time Managers
• The main characteristics to look at when designing a learning strategy based on digital role-play
• What early-adopting L&D professionals report are the leading advantages behind this new learning strategy
Best practices from the field
With more than 300,000 leaders trained over the years on practice-based leadership training, we’ve collected so many lessons on what works and what
doesn’t. Webinar 3 and 4 are a gold mine to skip the line and learn from others’ mistakes.
3. Four Best Practices to Improve Digital Learning Traffic and First-Time Manager Engagement
March 18, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
As an L&D professional, you know that one of the biggest challenges in upskilling First-Time Managers using digital learning is about having users consistently access the contents and keep pace.
Still most companies struggle to get First-Time Managers online for training purposes and many initiatives that look brilliant at the beginning never take off for lack of active users’ traffic.
Why First-Time Managers systematically lose their grip on soft skills’ online training courses? How can you improve on traffic and engagement?
The answers to these and other relevant questions come from extensive research done among more than 100 large corporations and from years of practical fine-tuning of winning strategies on online trainees’ engagement.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
• What First-Time Managers and trainers think about current online training engagement strategies and why they tend to fail
• How a new disruptive methodology as digital role-play and an Authentic Scheduling can attract and maintain the user’s attention
• Which strategies can help you to leverage First-Time Manager’ habits to help you change their (soft skills) habits
4. Six Best Practices for Faster First-Time Manager upskilling
May 4, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
When designing successful leadership training programs, contents weight less than 30% in determining whether it will be a success. The rest is about the strategy of implementation.
We have seen too many leadership training programs fail despite the fact that they had stunning content. The reality: the content matters only when the overall implementation strategy is successful. And implementation strategies aren’t about the content.
People are increasingly in demand for ways to learn faster and to correlate their learning with their daily activities. The days of “knowledge-transfer is the answer” are gone and if you want to make sure that your contents get digested and turned into a real and measurable performance, you need to work harder on the way you deliver it and the way you involve your trainees.
Unfortunately, still too many programs are designed the old way and very often too little effort is devoted to working around the content by designing actionable strategies and comprehensive ways to keep trainees engaged.
In this webinar, we cover six key best practices that you really can’t ignore if you want your training program to score among those unforgettable experiences you would like your trainees to tell home about.
• How to implement actionable training experience
• How to leverage smart metrics
• How to turn top management into a great endorser
• How to generate pieces of evidence that speak loud about the value of your program
• And more…
Case-study applications
We work with hundreds of medium and large organizations, and we’ve witnessed dozens of inspiring case studies where a great leadership training design can make the difference. Webinars 5 and 6 of this series explore some of the most interesting lessons we’ve learned.
5. Developing First-Time Managers’ Self-Awareness Through AI-Based Role-Play
May 27, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
Someone said that “self-awareness is all that matters.” That isn’t far from the truth: So many times First-Time Managers fall short in recognizing their actual performance, potential, strengths and skills.
It’s particularly true when they need to face uncomfortable tasks such as dealing with critical conversations in the early days of their new career’s step.
We, as human beings, are remarkably poor judges of ourselves and how we come across. It’s rare to get candid, objective feedback from colleagues, employees, and even friends and family.
How can you, as a professional in L&D, help leaders perceive the gaps in their self-awareness? After all, isn’t that one of the most important skills they should have?
How can you design programs that truly speed up the process of self-recognition and the path to self-awareness?
The answers to these and other relevant questions come from extensive research involving more than 100 large corporations and from years of practical fine-tuning of winning strategies for developing longlasting self-awareness.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
• How a lack of self-awareness influences the daily performance of First-Time Managers in providing motivation and driving their reports
• How a new disruptive methodology as digital role-play can shock First-Time Managers’ self-awareness and develop it for the long run
• Which strategies can help you design your next training program focusing on self-awareness first
6. Retaining Talents Through Development of Leadership Conversation Skills
June 24, 2020 – 12:00 pm ET
Not all of them will become Managers. Losing your next best people does more than hinder your productivity, disrupts current and potential leadership and reduces company morale. It also helps your competitors.
So, developing the soft skills of your talents will keep them with you, and in turn they’ll become even more valuable assets.
An employer who doesn’t focus on learning is going to lose with respect to performance, engagement and retention. At the same time, leadership is more and more needed (and sometimes expected) from every corner of the organization.
Now individual contributors are just as necessary in shaping the direction of company strategy and informing company decisions as those with formal managerial roles are.
Make sure your individual contributors are prepared to play the game and get the influence that they deserve and that the company needs. And they’ll stay with you.
In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
• How common it is for organizations to lack strategies about talent retention
• How impactful a training program on leadership development for talents can be in terms of retention
• How digital and AI-driven learning technology can talent engagement and development easier than ever
THE WEBINARS SERIES
hosted by
1. First-Time Managers need to practice Leadership Conversations
2. AI-driven Role Play for making First-Time Managers Practice Leadership Conversations
3. Four Best Practices to Improve Digital Learning Traffic and First-Time Manager Engagement
4. Six Best Practices for Faster First-Time Manager upskilling
5. Developing First-Time Managers’ Self-Awareness Through AI-Based Role-Play
6. Retaining Talents Through Development of Leadership Conversation Skills
presented by
Andrea Laus and Matteo Malatesta, SkillGym
PRESENTERS
Andrea Laus
CEO, SkillGym
Andrea has 20 years 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.
Matteo Malatesta
Head of Business Design, SkillGym
Matteo is head of business design at Lifelike. 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.
