Last week I ran a module with a group of retail graduates where we looked at how they can manage themselves and others in difficult situations.  We applied Transactional Analysis and other theory that we had introduced during their previous modules on their graduate development programme to help them explore and learn from the challenging situations we put them in.

The one that got us all a little worried was preparing and running a session for students at the Merchants’ Academy School in Bristol.  The graduates were given a short period of time to prepare an interactive, high quality session that would inspire and engage the students in a particular business related subject.

Engaging 14 year olds is not something they had too much experience of, so each group had to do some careful planning and thoughtful preparation.  Children of any age can be brutally honest, so the graduates where really worried about the pupil’s views of their sessions.

During the sessions the graduates worked really hard to relate to the pupils and had to think on the spot on more than one occasion! The reward was some really useful feedback, and after some personal reflection each graduate worked on how the learning from the programme could be applied to make them more effective at work. A lovely example of engaging experiential learning.

I recently ran an influencing skills programme for junior managers.  Considerable time was spent on helping the delegates understand their preferred style of influencing - its strengths and weaknesses and the need to flex one's style according to the person and situation. 

Effective communication lies at the heart of effective influencing. One of the delegates really struggled to be clear and concise under pressure and so the value of their message was often lost. Their confidence had suffered as a result. In working this through I found a helpful way of helping them work on this was to encourage them to think about their spoken communication as if it were written in a book.

A strong story (overall message) and clear structure is needed at the outset followed by chapters (themes), paragraphs (key points), and regular punctuation (to accentuate and break up the points). We worked on how this thinking could help both as part of planning and preparation and also during the actual situation (using professional actors).  It was great to see how looking at this issue from a slightly different perspective (and giving the delegate the opportunity to try this out for themselves) genuinely helped improve their communication skills and importantly, gave them new found confidence that they could be effective at influencing as a result.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) plays a key part of one of our modular graduate development programmes. Not only do the graduates get the opportunity to add value back into the community but the experience also provides important learning opportunities.

In fact CSR provides the ultimate experiential learning and forms a key part of our overall approach to graduate development. For this particular client the approach is used to emphasise key behaviours relating to strategic thinking, problem solving, project management and decision making.

Each year we work with our client to partner with a different community organisation. Yesterday I observed the graduates completing a variety of projects for a local community centre and was struck by the strong teamwork and commitment to achieving results that the experience instilled. For some organisations CSR is used to help with team building and you could say that this in itself is enough. For me though, I think the real value comes from extracting the learning from the experience and translating it into genuine behavioural change.

In this module, the CSR project is the meat in the sandwich between a day of planning and a day of facilitated review. This ensures that the rich learning is extracted and applied at an individual and team level.

I recently ran a large graduate induction and am pleased to say that it was a big success. Involving 30 graduates and over 60 people from the client business, the logistics alone were no mean feat. The graduates were thrown into a week long business simulation. They ran their own mini businesses - completing money earning tasks to pay for resources to pull together a high stakes business presentation. Senior guests and line managers were invited to attend the presentations at the end of the week.

The great thing about the programme is that it genuinely provides experiential learning and this is why we’ve run this client induction for over 8 years.

I really enjoyed working the week as you genuinely see the graduates progress throughout the week and get under the skin of the organisation. Also, the induction helps them make the difficult transition from university learning to work place learning e.g. they are responsible for finding things out for themselves. For me this is one of our flagship programmes which demonstrates the value of and power of our graduate development work.