It amazes me how often when considering a leadership development initiative, a prospective client will ask us for “something new.” They will say, “Oh, we did the Myers-Briggs before. Haven’t you got something newer?” Or, “Communications skills, that’s much too basic for our managers.” I once had a prospect company that put a huge leadership training program out to tender, selected our company, and then proceeded to tell us they wanted something “more sophisticated.” This was learning material, mind you, that had worked successfully with (quite sophisticated, thank you very much) mid-level and senior managers in numerous other organizations.

If you are charged with selecting development programs, particularly in human interaction areas, be careful that your own level of  knowledge and mastery of the skills to be taught doesn’t blind you to what your trainees really need. I encounter this particularly with Human Resource professionals and well-read line managers. They have attended all the conferences, heard all the latest gurus, taken all the feedback assessments and instruments, learned all the latest concepts and jargon, read all the books by Tom Peters, Pat Lencioni, John Maxwell, Stephen Covey,…

The fact is most of your managers who came up through professional, technical, administrative, sales, and blue collar labor streams often have not been exposed to even the more well-known approaches and skills of leadership. Instead, they have been busy in their career honing their functional, specialized knowledge and craft.

Don’t be afraid to deliver the fundamentals around people management. Your people still need to master the “blocking and tackling” of management: listening, using questions, setting expectations, delivering feedback, handling conflict, articulating a vision, motivating employees, managing priorities, confronting poor performers, etc. It may be old material to you and you may be a seasoned role model in these areas but most of your managers have a good way to go yet before they master these skills.

The classic management and leadership skills are archetypal success skills for the human species. Now, we may present some of these at a deeper level and demand more from a group of your experienced managers, but the topics are the same. Take listening, for example.

• You can learn how to listen to someone and minimize your attention drifting while you do. That’s at the basic level.
• At a deeper level, you can listen for what’s not said or gestured but might still be part of the person’s deeper message and feelings.
• At yet a deeper level, you can listen to what’s going on inside you as you receive the other person’s message.

Any one of these skill levels could be taught under the same title, “Mastering Listening Skills.”

So, don’t be seduced by the latest “in” thing around leadership and management. Look at what your target managers really need to get the results you want in your organization. Even if they have been exposed to a particular skill before, how well are they demonstrating it? Could they benefit from a refresher or rather from a more advanced application of this competency?

Exemplars in any field never stop revisiting and practicing the basics.