In one possible scenario, a company sends its 15 managers on a five-star leadership course at a hotel in Dubai. Everything looks wonderful, they’ve had a professional facilitator, everything has been planned down to the smallest detail, and then two months later everything that was wrong is still wrong.

The instinctive follow-up is: “Would online have been better?”

That is the wrong question. It’s rarely the format that is the issue. The problem is that most organisations treat this as a checkbox exercise rather than as an active process. That said, format does seem to matter and it is worth getting it right.

The Case for In-Person Leadership Training

What in-person does better than any virtual format is force people out of their daily context. Remove the laptops, the Slack notifications, the constant interruptions. Something shifts. A management team taken offsite for 48 hours will engage at a level that a Zoom call simply cannot replicate.

In the case of in-person programs, the tipping point is that one moment of honesty when one of the executives running it admits to a career setback. In the virtual world, however, it’s difficult to achieve that level of authenticity when people are joining via Zoom from their home offices while their kids are running around and alerts are popping up.

In-person gives a skilled facilitator real-time access to people’s nonverbal cues, their energy levels, the moment something lands. There is an accountability that comes from having been in the same room. They’re going to bring up everything you’ve talked about in this room at the meeting next week. That’s harder to back out of.

Read More: https://deants.org/which-is-better-online-or-offline-leadership-training-in-dubai/