Companies Saddle Up For Training Stampede

“Group hugs” are no different on horseback than when dangling on a ropes course or listening to the boss rustle up “rah rahs” at the company picnic. Ultimately, they’re about engaging the herd and spurring ideas toward company goals.

Regardless of what buzz word it falls under — organizational development, leadership training, soft-skills learning, team building, corporate retreats, project management training or executive coaching — work-related training is a growing sector nationally and in Northwest Arkansas. A cottage industry of companies that command as much as $30,000 for intensive team training has galloped onto the local scene.

From the Dinner Bell Dude Ranch in Eureka Springs to the Charles N. McKinney Life Adventure Center in Springdale, experiential learning venues are also riding high. Teams from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. have trotted down trails at Dinner Bell, and firms like Stephens Inc. have braved the ropes course at Life Adventure.

Tim Kizer, president of consulting firm Bentonville Global Associates Inc., said “retreats are a mechanism to change the way people see themselves and their organizations.” He said the content is more critical than the venue, but the most successful training programs include both some sizzle and some steak.

“Especially in a real strategic environment like Northwest Arkansas, the bottom line is there’s got to be some bite to it,” Kizer said. “We all know creativity is what creates market share. But many times, truly creative people aren’t good managers, and we all have to be managers.

“You might be good on a spreadsheet but lost as a leader, and we all have to be leaders. Programs like this try to converge the two abilities. Companies where people do that are the ones that win.”

In its second year of leading organizational and individual development programs, BGA focuses on “creating cultures of creativity and accountability” through a blend of practitioner and academic knowledge.

Kizer said BGA’s retreats generally include 10 to 20 people and cost from $10,000 to $30,000 per group. Invariably, he said, the programs are about some kind of alignment, typically a cultural alignment.

Stephanie Fagnani, editor of the Corporate Training and Development Advisor, said soft skills trainers across America are benefiting from a generational realignment. The CEOs who have been in charge for the last 20 to 30 years, she said, are retiring.

“Everyone is talking about the big skills gap that’s eminent as Baby Boomers retire,” Fagnani said. “A whole new generation of CEOs are going to take over, and training this new breed of leaders is big business.”

Fagnani’s parent company, Simba Information of Stanford, Conn., examined 30 of the nation’s leading soft skills trainers in May. Based on their projected revenue for 2005, Simba estimates the global corporate training market for American-based firms is $10.7 billion.

That’s up nearly 10 percent from the $9.2 billion estimate for 2003, and Simba estimates the market will grow to $12.6 billion by 2008.

The real trend, Fagnani said, is a switch to leadership or soft skills training from information technology.

“Six years ago, there was a clear distinction between IT and soft skills trainers,” Fagnani said. “Now, the IT training vendors are adding a lot of the project management and leadership training. They’ve realized even IT guys need communication skills. If you can’t communicate, it doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Geeks & Geezers

Fagnani estimated that in 1999, about 70 percent of the corporate training going on was related to IT, and the rest was mostly for soft skills. Now it’s something like 48 percent IT, 45 percent soft skills and a smattering of new management-system training.

The American Society for Training & Development’s 2004 State of the Industry Report looked at workplace learning and performance from 1999 through 2004.

ASTD’s national surveys determined that the largest corporations spent an average of $1,189 per employee on development training in 2004, down 9 percent from $1,307 in 1999. Most of the difference apparently came from cuts in IT training.

The average firms spent $812, up 24 percent from $645.

The finance, insurance and real estate industries combined spent the most on training per employee at $935, followed by technology ($930) and the transportation, pipeline and utilities fields ($857).

Mike Thompson, president of Seasons Ventures Inc. in Rogers, has honed in on the highest-end segment — CEOs and upper-level brass. His trademark Radical Sabbaticals can run $10,000 per person for extraordinary leadership training.

Thompson said his programs take a page from the book “Geeks and Geezers,” where authors Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas interviewed “successful geeks” age 35 and younger and “successful geezers” age 65 and up. The question was, how did the subjects become so successful?

“In the end, it wasn’t their work ethic or education,” Thompson said. “It was their own crucible life experience, or period of intense heat that did it. We use periods of intense heat to establish defining moments for executives so they can become more extraordinary leaders.”

Don’t Retreat, Charge!

SVI doesn’t call its programs retreats. SVI Corporate “Advances” go for $500 per person and up.

“The process starts with an assessment and intense planning, plus a follow-up with quantifiable measures,” Thompson said. “Most programs generally don’t include a long-term plan to track progress post retreat. It’s let’s get motivated, but three weeks later they have no lasting impact. That’s not what we do.”

Elise Mitchell and Blake Woolsey, co-owners of Executive Communications Consultants LLC in Fayetteville, also stress the need for training follow-ups. They offer a cadre of organizational development programs with group rates from $3,500 to $10,000, depending on the level of customization.

“Typically, people come to us when they sense something is not clicking,” Mitchell said. “We liken it to when a car is running on all cylinders, it sounds good and feels right. But you can tell when it’s not functioning right. You know you’re not getting the same mileage you used to, even if you can’t put your finger on what’s wrong.”

Mitchell said good trainers often have to ask hard questions to help firms figure out what opportunities they’re missing.

“The situation could be as bad as half the team walked out and there’s no trust anymore, or simply that the group doesn’t think it’s as good as it could be,” she said.

ECC, which is launching a new management skills training program for 2006, has performed its team dimension sessions 25 times in the last couple of years for everyone from nonprofits to Fortune 500 giants.

Teaching Values

Andy Wilson, CEO of the Soderquist Center for Leadership and Ethics at John Brown University, said his program hosted about 800 people last year at the 100-acre Greystone Mansion estate in Rogers. That’s up 23 percent from 650 the year before.

The 16,000-SF mansion sleeps 16 overnight, and the grounds include an experiential learning ropes course with 50-foot elements.

The center’s programs range from $5,000 to $15,000 per team and generally run 12 to 26 hours. It even has two courses specially tailored for retail suppliers.

“We stress the foundations of team building, such as values,” Wilson said. “We look at the mission and values of the team, of its decision making. Are they based on trust and integrity?

“The teams do the real work. We just facilitate and help guide them toward their specific goals.”

BGA, SVI and ECC declined to reveal their clients for confidentiality reasons. The Soderquist Center offered Daniel Andriola of Hartford Life Private Placement as an example of an exec who recently completed its program. Andriola is the executive vice president, chief financial officer and chief administrative officer of his firm.

“They take away all distractions so you can spend your energy focused totally on why you’re there,” Andriola said. “And what really sets them apart is the experiential nature of the way they teach. They place you in real life situations where you can experience the learning associated with the theories they just talked about in class. It is a very customized way of teaching.”

Kit Brooks, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, co-developed the school’s Emerging Leaders Program with Greg Fike for the UA Center for Management and Executive Development. Brooks said the program costs $3,500 per person for nine days of training during a three-month period. Only about 20 participate at a time.

Fike, associate director of CMED, said their program’s major distinction is its focus on the up-and-comer.

“These are people who are going to hold supervisory roles in the next two to five years,” Fike said. “They’re ready to move forward, and we take the abstract concepts and apply them to learnable behaviors that are proven to make better leaders.”

Back to the Battle

Kizer, the Bentonville organizational development trainer, is the former director of CMED. He said both the Soderquist Center and CMED offer “world-class programs” that are among the finest retreats in which companies can invest.

Kizer has also started his own experiential program with retired U.S. Marine Col. Joe Dowdy, a noted history buff and trainer. They take corporate teams to the sites of historic military battles such as Gettysburg, Va., and lead them through a program they call, “It’s Good to be Us.”

Kizer said whether leaders are being challenged on a ropes course, cattle drive or battlefield, the activity is still about showing them how to manage two key drivers of business: allocating resources and leadership.

“Back during World War II, generals liked to do what they called a staff ride, where they took their team around in a jeep surveying the battlefield and looking for milestones,” Kizer said. “They’d try to figure out how to recreate the good, or prevent the bad from happening again. We’re doing staff rides now for our large clients, putting the execs in the same difficult decision making processes.

“They see the key decisions that were made and the outcomes. It has really become an emotional experience for people.”

Corporate Top Guns Take Aim at Leading

Tom Cruise will have nothing on eight select executives who work with Seasons Ventures Inc. this winter. Mike Thompson, SVI’s president, said his firm will take the execs to Phoenix, Ariz., to engage in head-to-head dogfights aboard real combat aircraft at 10,000 feet.

The leadership-training event, which will be held from Dec. 1 to Dec. 4, is a signature component of SVI’s Radical Sabbatical programs called “Fight’s On!” Reservations are still being accepted.

The program costs $8,700, which includes meals, lodging and materials, but participants are responsible for their own airfare to the camp.

No aviation experience is needed. Trained pilots help man the German-made fighters, but the execs are taught how to maneuver the planes at 6″g”s. The fighting is done with lasers.

“There’s a lot of intense training,” Thompson said. “When they first engage in aerial combat, and we yell in the mic, ‘Fight’s on!,’ all heck breaks loose. There’s a lot of parallels in what we try to accomplish with executive training.

“You have to identify your mission, make a plan, identify your wingmen and the competition and evaluate when it’s the proper time to engage or retreat.”

The sessions are designed to help execs escape day-to-day operations to focus on “foundation, vision, inspiration, engagement and personal development.”

There are monthly follow-up conference calls for a year, where the execs help keep each other motivated and on target. Thompson calls the experience “the most comprehensive executive development program in existence.”

More information on Radical Sabbaticals, including SVI’s Pura Vida Seasons Journeys to Costa Rica, is available at www.sviworld.com.

CEO Checklist

Here are 10 “dos and dont’s” company leaders should think about before planning an organizational development event:

• Have a specific focus. Don’t try to do 10 things at once.

• Make it relevant to current challenges the group faces. People hate to go to theoretical, non-applicable training sessions.

• Focus on application skills. Give people tools to use.

• Be accountable for change as a team. Follow-up afterwards to make sure changes are working.

• Allow for group participation and discussion.

• Don’t try to take charge of the event. Use an objective facilitator who’s from outside the organization or the team. Absolutely don’t use the CEO, who will unintentionally cause people to feel they can’t speak freely.

• Don’t expect instant change. Problems don’t come up over night, and they’re not fixed that way. Instead, empower people to try to be different.

• Praise courage among people who try to get better.

• Treat ideas like lumps of clay, and encourage the shaping of ideas until the right thing that works is found.

• View organization development as an ongoing investment because groups are in a constant state of change — there is no one-time fix.

Source: Executive Communications Consultants LLC in Fayetteville