Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm specializing and helping organizations crack their activation codes, finding the simple tweaks to enhance both performance and employee engagement.

One of the fastest paths to activating teams, it's activating their leaders with great leadership development,

workshops or programs designed to amplify a key skill, like leading through change or communicating

effectively or managing burnout, and on and on. I'm super bullish on leadership development. Delivered

well, it can totally shift the experience of a team or even

an organization. It can unlock efficiency or collaboration or engagement. And yet, I have talked to

so many leaders over the years who have said things like, eh, didn't really work for me. I took a

class on, whatever, they took a class on. And frankly, I still can't do the thing.

This, friends, is not a sign that leadership development is bad. The truth, it's that the program

or the workshop is only the beginning of a journey towards excellence. Learning does not equal doing.

And I always make this known at the beginning of any program that I run.

So if you've participated in a leadership program or you have one coming up, here are some

strategies that you can use to make sure that it works for you. First, find purpose in the doing.

There's this episode of Friends.

It still makes me laugh.

It's the one where Joey keeps dropping these giant words.

Totally, of course, out of character for him.

The punchline is that Chandler gave him some word of the day toilet paper.

And he can't help showing it off.

It's cute in a 90s sitcom, but it's a little bit painful in the

workplace in the 2020s, because this is sometimes the thing that happens when leaders finish a

program. They've learned a thing, a tool or a framework, and they start applying it everywhere,

...