Evaluating the impact of a leadership development program often takes a fair amount of time. Behavior change doesn’t happen overnight, and it may take several months to see improvement in metrics such as employee engagement and retention, sales numbers, or customer satisfaction.
That doesn’t mean you have to wait months to start measuring impact, though. In fact, the sooner you start evaluating your learning programs, the sooner you can make adjustments and improvements in near real-time.
There are many standard participant satisfaction survey questions available, and while those can be helpful, it’s sometimes the more unusual questions that reveal trends in your learning programs. Here are five outside-the-box questions that can help you gauge the immediate impact of your learning programs.
5 Questions to Add to Your Learning Survey
1. “What are three to five words that sum up your overall opinion of this session?”
What it reveals: Your program participants aren’t sitting static during their sessions—at least, they shouldn’t be! Even if they aren’t fully engaged, they are likely to form opinions about the quality and content of the program. Allow them to share their thoughts on this question. Participants will often come up with very interesting words in response, such as “waste of time,” “interesting,” “boring,” or “innovative.” By grouping these words into categories or forming a word cloud, you can get a feel for what words went through participants’ minds as they attended sessions.
2. “What are one or two things you will do differently as a result of this training?”
What it reveals: Ideally, your program participants will have Individual Action Plans to help guide their goals and objectives. This question will help them tie behavior to goals from the Individual Action Plans. For example, if an action plan goal is to improve communication with direct reports, a participant in a leadership training program might answer this question with something like, “I will follow through with regular one-on-ones with my team.”
3. “Did you receive developmental support from your boss and/or colleagues to attend this training? What did support look like?”
What it reveals: Your leadership development programs are only as good as the support they receive from the top. If executives and leaders are pushing their teams to attend training programs but not giving them the practical support they need for such attendance, they are not setting their teams up for success. Participants may feel overwhelmed or unsupported, and the program may seem like a waste of time that the company is just using the “check a box.” By asking this question and even allowing for an expanded answer, participants can share how their bosses and colleagues are supporting learning and development—or aren’t supporting it. Leadership can then use answers to this question to change how it supports attendance.
4. “Did program leaders clearly communicate course objectives at the beginning of the course and reinforce them throughout the course?”
What it reveals: The best programs define clear objectives and desired outcomes from the beginning. Participants who know the goals and desired outcomes from the beginning are more likely to apply their future behaviors to the objectives. By reinforcing goals throughout the program, participants will be able to continually assess learnings and apply them to their own Individual Action Plans. Conversely, if a number of participants do not believe objectives were clearly defined and reinforced, that information can help you revise your program.
5. “What courses or programs would you like to see in the future?”
What it reveals: Whether your program met objectives or not, participants will likely have their own ideas about what courses or programs might be helpful. Managers may want more practical, hands-on training, for example, or senior leaders may see a need for sales training. This question gives participants an opportunity to express what they see as the needs within the organization, and senior leaders can use that information to improve future offerings.
With billions of dollars spent every year on leadership development programs, organizations need to make every dollar count. Adding these questions to a learning evaluation is a first step toward improving long-term outcomes.
If you’re struggling with knowing where to begin or how to improve your leadership development efforts, contact us. The experts at Stewart Leadership can help you implement programs that will build leaders who can deliver business results and people results.
SELF CHECK:
- Which one of the questions above would be most helpful to add to your learning evaluation? Why?
- Do you request evaluation after a learning program? Why or why not?
- What is one additional outside-the-box question you can think of to improve learning evaluations at your company?
