Executive education: how to get bang for your buck

There is no gold standard for measuring the effectiveness of executive education spend — at best it requires a cogent blend of art and science.

That said, there are several return-on-learning (ROL) or learning-impact tools that can serve as a useful guide to business schools and their clients. Among the best known are the Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Training Evaluation model and the Phillips Return on Investment (ROI) methodology.

These models provide a structured framework to assess various aspects of corporate training, from participants’ learning outcomes to subsequent behavioural change. The Phillips model also considers perhaps the most important metric — whether the impact on the business exceeds the total training costs.

Several of South Africa’s leading business schools make use of these approaches, along with evaluation software and other reporting methods. But all those canvassed by the FM agree: what really matters is the extent of constructive engagement, trust and partnership that develops over time between the employer and the education provider.

Rhodes Business School director Owen Skae’s view is that while the intention behind the Phillips and Kirkpatrick models is laudable, and their methodology does provide a “guiding aspiration”, measuring the ROL is a lot more difficult in practice.

The entire process requires “a spirit of collaboration and partnership”, he says, in which the client needs to be clear about the desired outcomes and fair about what the business school can and cannot control.

“The opportunity and challenge that we always face is that some participants are excited and committed to being there (the potential apostles), some are willing to be convinced (the healthy sceptics), others not sure why they are there (the reluctants) and, finally, there are those who don’t want to be there at all (the prisoners),” he tells the FM.

As an executive educator, Skae believes he has to be a storyteller to get participants’ attention, an entertainer to keep them engaged, a humble guru (who knows his discipline so that learning takes place) and a pragmatist grounded in the real world (or you lose your audience) — and to have an acute ability to read the room.

“Under all of this, you must love what you do and be willing to learn as much as you educate,” he adds.

Given all these considerations, how does an employer know, when its staff rate an executive education programme as excellent, whether they are rewarding the entertainment factor rather than telling it what it really wants to know — the probable business impact several months down the line?

Henley Africa dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley believes it’s extremely hard to determine the value of executive education by any scientific means.

“On a subjective level, the answer is easy,” he says, “people either feel the change or they don’t, but of course this doesn’t really wash at board level.”

He solves this challenge by working closely with Henley’s corporate partners to explore what change will look and feel like, so that it can help employers set rational measures to track the ROL or their ROI.

Two things matter, he says. One, that the employer defines upfront what “value” means for the company or organisation so that they can track it more accurately after the programme. And two, that senior company executives are part of this conversation.

“One thing that is very clear to us is that the better the quality of the relationship and the engagement between us and the client upfront, the more likely it is that we can track and measure ROI. And these conversations must happen at the highest levels.”

Rayner Canning, business development director at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), agrees. He says the best way to guarantee a good ROL is through deep partnerships with company clients. This level of engagement requires trust, time, commitment and meaningful exchange.

It’s vital for the business school to understand exactly what the employer is looking to achieve, says Canning. While this may sound obvious, the briefs provided are often extremely vague and frequently appear to have been drafted by consultants.

“It is therefore imperative that the parties engage deeply around the requirements,” he says. “That top-down ownership and investment of time and effort [from senior executives] is critical to the success and impact of any programme.”

Gaye Evans, a strategy implementation consultant for the Spar group, says: “You can’t plug and play. Executive education should be aligned to an acknowledged need for continuous leadership learning, business goals, and [the company’s] impact and role in society.”

Standard Bank South Africa’s long partnership with Henley is a case in point. Its executive head of people and culture in personal and private banking, Genine Jacobs, says the bank connected with Henley in 2018 because the institution didn’t just provide qualifications, it shared the bank’s deep sense of purpose — “to really make an impact on this continent and to move Africa forward”.

For example, in one programme that Henley designed for the bank, which set out to create a talent pipeline of future-fit African leaders, 13 of the 40 delegates were subsequently promoted to senior leadership roles, with 40% of them black women.

Customised vs general programmes

But is it really necessary to work with senior executives to customise executive education programmes, or can general, untargeted programmes be just as effective?

It seems it all depends on the client’s specific needs.

“If the organisation would like to close a gap between the skills of specialists — for example, engineers or brokers and managers — then general management programmes can help to do so,” explains Chris van der Hoven, CEO of executive development at Stellenbosch Business School (SBS).

General programmes can also accelerate the performance of high-potential talent or refresh and update the skills of existing managers.

Rhodes Business School says it is increasingly being asked to deliver whole qualification-aligned courses, which means that the participants must meet the eligibility requirements, follow the content of the curriculum and complete the assessment requirements. These programmes enable sector education & training authority funding, which can also be measured for impact.

Customised programmes take more time to craft and may cost more because they are mapped to address specific challenges in an organisation.

“They may be tailored to address specific events, such as post-acquisition integrations, a request to address a change in culture when a new CEO or exco is appointed, or the challenge of a looming disruption,” says Van der Hoven.

“Customised programmes can also tackle business-specific strategic projects, engage executive sponsorship, and deliver on work that may otherwise struggle to get traction in the day-to-day activity of the business.”

Lerato Mahlasela, managing executive (corporate education) at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs), says that while general programmes provide great value, “at specific levels and for specific needs we believe that customisation is crucial for maximising strategic organisational impact”.

This means consulting closely with the senior executives of the client company or organisation to ensure Gibs is able to tailor programmes that are relevant and applicable, and drive forward the client’s strategic goals.

However, Leoni Grobler, director of executive education at Wits Business School, notes that in some cases organisations actually prefer delegates to attend open programmes so that they are able to interact with delegates from a wide range of industries and benefit from peer-to-peer learning.

“The ability to network and gain insights from peers has always been a drawcard for open programmes,” says Grobler.

The benefits of action learning projects

When it comes to evaluating programmes, it is easier to gauge success when the programme involves a business integration (or so-called action learning) project.

In these cases, senior leadership teams from the corporate client, industry experts and the business school’s faculty evaluate delegates’ final project presentations to assess their ability to apply what they’ve been taught to a real-world business issue.

“The ability to clearly and effectively articulate and present a solution is a truly transformative experience for the delegates,” says Grobler.

“People change in different ways, and it is rare to find a delegate who successfully completes a programme without undergoing some form of personal transformation.”

People change in different ways, and it is rare to find a delegate who successfully completes a programme without undergoing some form of personal transformation

—  Leoni Grobler 

But personal growth and an increase in employee motivation, while desirable, are nevertheless hard to quantify. For the employer, the ROI or ROL is easier to measure when the projects and solutions identified by the delegates as a result of their training are actually implemented.

Skae, for instance, has a video of a delegate saying at a certificate ceremony that as a consequence of their attending one of Rhodes Business School’s executive education programmes, their company was persuaded to rework a contract which saved it hundreds of millions of rand.

Other formal feedback from Rhodes executive education graduates includes comments such as: “After hearing for a long time about ebitda [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation], I now understand what it means and what I must do with it.”

Another said: “I never thought there was so much to governance. You have opened my eyes and mind.”

Gibs also often embeds action learning projects in the design of its leadership programmes to provide the client organisation with a tangible, direct ROL.

“A number of organisations invest in and adopt these projects within their organisations, either saving or making millions in the process,” says Pravashen Pillay, Gibs managing executive for value creation.

In addition, Gibs’s largest clients typically gauge the success of its programmes through a combination of evaluation models (such as the Phillips and Kirkpatrick models) and their own internal metrics.

A number of organisations invest in and adopt these [action learning] projects, either saving or making millions in the process

—  Pravashen Pillay

“They look for improvements in leadership effectiveness, strategic thinking and operational efficiency, as well as direct contributions to the bottom line,” Pillay adds. In other words, “they want to see shifts in being, thinking and doing that enables better decision-making and problem-solving”.

Pillay says that since conducting a specific ROL study can be costly, they are mostly done for companies where there is a specific request and budget to do so, and often only for their flagship programmes.

For Henley’s director of executive education, Linda Buckley, the litmus test of an effective programme also comes down to the ability of graduates to think differently afterwards.

“The key question to ask is: Do they have the ability to critique the world around them and to solve problems in a more robust manner based on data they themselves have analysed and synthesised?”

One way Henley is trying to embed learning in its long-term clients, where it has graduated between 600 and 800 students (Nedbank, Standard Bank and MultiChoice), is to create alumni groups within these companies.

In this way, former delegates are able to share their personal and professional successes, and to keep the learning discussion going and encourage each other to keep using the tools they’ve been taught in the classroom at work.

“With such a critical mass, lessons are passed down to teams, and the learning lingo becomes part of the language of the organisation,” Buckley explains.

She finds the ROI increases exponentially if, in addition, exco members mentor younger programme graduates.

Van der Hoven says SBS’s biggest and best clients build executive education programmes into personal development plans and use them in conjunction with succession plans and talent-acceleration programmes.

What it means: While it is possible to try to quantify the impact of corporate training scientifically, the real value accrues over time from forging enduring partnerships

—  What it means:

“Real returns are maximised where the organisational learning culture and the individual learner’s mindset are engaged, aligned and enthusiastic,” he says.

The learning must also be a visible part of the executive’s career trajectory and success, he adds. “If they think the learning will not be valued in their working context, then what we bring may fall short.”

The bottom line is that corporates looking for an executive education programme that is going to deliver value should be alert to the following: Has the business school asked to see a company report? Have they interviewed your people? Have they asked what outcomes you want? And have they challenged you about how this links back to the company’s goals?

When it comes to evaluating programmes afterwards, employers should be asking themselves the following basic questions: How do the beneficiaries rate the learning experience? Are the skills the training set out to achieve visible in the beneficiaries? Are they more willing to engage and step up at work and are they thinking more strategically or generating fresh solutions and insight? Have any been promoted since finishing the programme? And have there been any material improvements in the business following their return to work?

If all, or nearly all, of these questions can be answered in the affirmative, you are well on your way to developing a beautiful partnership with your education provider. If not, it may be time for a strategic rethink — and you don’t need a costly ROI evaluation to tell you that.