Essential learning tools to help you help your clients
Professional services companies like accountancy, consultancy and legal firms all need to adapt to complex client needs while maintaining cohesion and consistency. How do you ensure your professionals have the capability to manage complex client needs while sharing best practice across your entire organisation? It’s hard to find a one-size-fits-all approach to learning and development when your professionals are supporting such a wide array of clients.
Give your professionals the edge
MTa’s approach to experiential learning is well-placed to develop the competencies that give your professionals the edge, by engaging them in activities that mimic real-world situations common to all sorts of business sectors. Using versatile kits to carry out short activities, participants gain skills to deal with complexity and change. While simple, these activities test even the brightest minds and give them an opportunity to develop the skills and attitudes required to perform in a high-pressure fast-moving environment.
According to the UK’s national careers service, communication, analytical skills and flexibility are some of the key skills required for management consultants. Bright Network highlights innovation, understanding and communication as top skills for accountants, with similar skills plus client relations seen as essential for lawyers.
How do you develop high-performing people when expectations are so high?
You could use activities like MTa KanDo Lean to help your professionals strive to drive efficiencies among your clients. Indeed, IT services consultancy Cognizant used this lean simulation to work across teams embedded with various different clients. Teams were brought together to compete against each other and share best practice. This helped to build a sense of belonging to the bigger Cognizant team and is now embedded in the organisation thanks to train-the-trainer sessions.
Bespoke activities designed around your needs
Given your needs to adapt to complex client expectations, MTa can adapt to yours. As well as dozens of off-the-peg solutions, MTa can build bespoke activities. For example, data technology giant Oracle used MTa activities as part of a team-day focusing on the skills and attitudes needed to interact with clients in client-consultancy interface project.
And MTa helped KPMG in Riyadh with a series of bespoke 3-day workshops for high-potential employees to develop leadership, change management and problem-solving skills. KPMG ran an assessment centres for all its staff with direct reports and selected 20 high performers to take part in a series of five 3-day workshops.
MTa designed and delivered three of the three-day workshops, using real life problems identified in previous workshops to look at challenging the status quo.
“We take a concrete experience and enable participants to look at the difference between the current state and desired state, to think about the different problems and the different solutions available, and finally select a solution for experimentation and reflection,” says MTa Senior Facilitator Alex Greenwood.
Coaching and reflection to become agents for change
Some of the tools and activities used included Mind-Mapping, Paired Comparison Analysis and exploration of group behavioural concepts like confirmation bias and Social Loafing. These bespoke exercises are combined with a range of MTa activities from the New dimensions, MTa Insights and MTa Team Kit
At the end of each session of three-day workshops, participants each have one-to-one coaching sessions with the facilitator, where they reflect on how MTa’s involvement had helped them change their approach to leadership and problem-solving and how they can replicate what they have learned to become agents for change within KPMG.
Using real-life problems they know and understand, these high-performers are able to look at different approaches and experiment with solutions – real experiential learning they can take back to their workplace and their clients.