Where do you practice management ?

Whenever a team needs to perform, it spends lots of time to practice. Sports team train and practice 90% of the time to be ready for a single performance once a week. Orchestras or music groups spend hours practicing and aligning with one another to make sure the performance they will give in front of paying clients will be perfect. All this is normal and expected. People would be shocked if a sports team or a music band arrived for the performance and looked at one another saying "OK, how will we do this thing ... ?".

And what about a management team ? A management team needs to perform as well. Pretty much all the time. When do we train or practice as a team to get better at solving problems, dealing with customers, introducing new products or growing the business ? Do you do that in training courses ? Not really. Or once a year in the annual retreat ? Obviously that is not enough to develop a real way of working together. Maybe the team-building session ? Great fun but this is not really where we talk about solving problems as a team or dealing with conflicts that may arise.

Practice is the key to moving to a better performance. Yet when it comes to practice to be more effective as a management team, we cannot find the time or, more likely, the way to go about practicing. Management teams need to look for new ways to deal with their challenges, try out new ideas and see what works and what doesn't work, and then practice practice practice to get routines established.

Action Learning sessions are a way for management teams to practice becoming better while dealing with real business challenges. Team members explore new ideas, try some of them out on a small scale and report back to the group how things turned out and what they have learned. Over time, the team gets more aligned and stronger as unit !