Training designed to improve the customer experience for diverse customers often teaches key concepts like racism, oppression, privilege, bias, and microaggression. Addressing these knowledge gaps is essential. But just as important, maybe more so, is teaching new skills and behaviors.

The COVID-19 crisis offered an opportunity to innovate and to test new approaches to virtual skills development, some of which were extraordinarily successful. Here’s what we learned from those studies.

Unconscious bias can derail a sales conversation in several ways. Being aware of your own biases and understanding how they influence your customer’s journey can improve your relationships and increase your close rate.

Unconscious bias can derail a sales conversation in several ways. Being aware of your own biases and understanding how they influence your customer’s journey can improve your relationships and increase your close rate.

Many organizations have begun to prioritize improving diversity and inclusion. Over the last five years there has been a 113% increase in the number of executives that hold diversity and inclusion titles.

Since corporate training began, Learning and Development professionals have struggled to determine the return on investment (ROI) on training programs. While the reaction level or “smile sheets” administered during or post program are often very positive, the next three levels - learning, behaviour change, and business results - are traditionally more difficult to measure.

With a unique and challenging year behind us, now is the time to reflect on how the pandemic is bringing digital conversations to the forefront in 2021. Sales success will be determined by how well these conversations flow and convert.

One of the important lessons of 2020 is that organizations that deliver effective changes quickly will continue to have a competitive advantage. I had the pleasure of hosting several virtual roundtable discussions throughout 2020 that focused on how organizations were adapting their Leadership Development strategy to address the immediate needs forced on them by the Covid-19 pandemic as well as social change driven by Black Lives Matter and the Me-Too movement. Several themes emerged from the discussions.

Until recently, it was enough for successful leaders to bring a combination of interpersonal skills, academics, and business savvy to their roles.

A podcast interview with Kyle West, the CEO of K.West Partners, a bespoke recruitment service tailored to enable employers to secure the top performing sales talent.

Over the last several months, most companies have been re-examining their diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, and with good reason.

The lockdown has been hard on just about everyone. But for people working in training and development, it’s been particularly rough. Sure, they made the same shift to working from home that we all did, but, unlike the rest of us, the intensity of their work increased massively at the same time.

The events of the past months have us all questioning our business models, from where and how we work, to how we help our leaders, managers and employees adapt to change while they continue to run the business. One of the lessons that has become apparent is that many of our old learning and development paradigms have been broken and it’s time to question whether we bring them back.

The most important things that happen at any organization are conversations. They are the reason we innovate, collaborate, sell, lead, coach, change, succeed, or fail. Given its significance to success, why is it that most organizations and individuals take their ability to execute a great conversation for granted?

Today, our attention is demanded by the screens that we work and play on, advertising designed to prey on our deepest fears and dreams, and of course, the important things like family, friends, walking the dog – you know, reality. Combine this well-crafted assault on our attention and our obligations to reality it’s no wonder that when you see the data on the meager effectiveness of traditional L&D programs, they are typically the first to have their budgets questioned.

Return on Investment (ROI) for customer-facing or coaching training programs has always been elusive. Ninety-four per cent of CEOs are looking to their L&D teams to drive results, but only 8% are satisfied that they are getting what they need. The big disconnect is measurement.

For over 17 years, we’ve tracked the performance of every salesperson in every one of hundreds of thousands of conversations. With all this qualitative and quantitative data we can say that the two most important skills (and the two that are often performed worst) are curiosity and empathy.

Applying deliberate practice as the skill development component in support of the change process is critical to the success of the initiative. Now, there is next to no investment made by organizations to develop deliberate practice solutions although the payoff seems self-evident. Applying deliberate practice to change initiatives comes with a simple truth.