Management Development through Action Learning

Kindly contributed by one of our clients, David Fleetwood-Walker, Training and Development Manager - Cambridge Assessment

The situation

Our industry (academic and vocational testing and Awarding Body) is becoming increasingly competitive and taking on a higher public profile as interest in education and assessment increases. As training and development manager, I was looking for better ways to develop our managers and equip them to take us into this challenging new arena. I believe that our organisation’s capacity to increase innovation, responsiveness and decision-making can only happen if our managers develop their capacity to think, grow and develop together.

I had the view that action learning held one of the keys for management development and organisational change. I was looking for an external resource to help me test my assumptions and introduce action learning into our organisation. I met Sally Kleyn and her associates through a professional network and invited them to work with me on this project.

The intervention

They began by giving presentations to our senior management team to help them buy into the ideas and understand the process. Next, Sally spoke at the launch event for our development programme and excited the participants about what action learning might offer. Finally, we ran action learning sessions alongside our existing management development training. This gave managers a taste of the action learning method and the concept of ‘learning by doing’ that is a central principle of this method of working.

Subsequently, they provided expert advice and guidance, training middle managers in the action learning methodology, facilitating several of the initial learning sets and allowing me and my team to shadow them to develop our ability to facilitate sets in the future. This allowed us to develop our confidence and competence before running our own sets. Now, the sets are self-facilitating and we are spreading the action learning sets to a wider community of managers.

The result

I am now convinced that action learning is a powerful tool for organisational change. We used action learning to develop people's skills to listen, think creatively together and make effective decisions. In practice, we found the most important benefit was learning the discipline of challenging and supporting in equal measure - this helped us to make unblinkered decisions.

Action learning sets are now the places where significant organisational changes are discussed, planned and reviewed.

What I valued about the approach

Sally and her associates acted as role models showing set members how to challenge, guide and support to maximise the value of learning sets. They also acted as sounding boards to me as I planned my strategy for widening the net and for promoting action learning to senior levels of the organisation.

Subsequently, I have had individual coaching with Sally Kleyn to help me clarify my goals, refine my strategy and test my ideas. I have really benefited from these sessions. Just as she taught the learning sets, she modeled the skills of using the right balance of support and challenge to help me work more creatively toward my goal. As a result, I actually changed my thinking and improved my professional practice.