MLC Life Insurance: Communicating with Impact workshop series
It’s easy to talk about promoting from within but harder to back it up by providing plenty of on-the-job learning combined with targeted support to set leaders up for success.
MLC Life Insurance (now Acenda) is an organisation I’ve found to walk the talk in this regard.
We recently partnered to empower a cohort of Claims Managers to step up in their stakeholder engagement through focused development to enhance their communication impact, particularly when participating in key forums and consulting with industry partners.
Given the Claims Managers' diverse locations and busy schedules, we decided on a virtual workshop series to deliver cut-through learning in a concise format.
Workshop series
Here’s a snapshot of the workshops:
Workshop 1: “Influence without Authority”. A roadmap for influencing outcomes using my 5Gs framework.
Workshop 2: “Build Trust with Your Stakeholders”. Techniques for building and maintaining trust.
Workshop 3: “Build Confidence in How You Prepare”. Methods to boost preparation and presentation skills.
Workshop 4: “Build Impact by Making Thinking Visible”. Tools for making your thought process clear and persuasive.
Between each workshop, a deliberate ‘test and learn’ approach was emphasised to bridge the gap between knowledge and action, encouraging Claims Managers to apply their new skills immediately and iteratively (acknowledging that the longer they take to apply new knowledge, the less likely they are to use it).
Application anchors
At the start of the Communicating with Impact workshop series, Claims Managers worked together to help one another identify targets for their learning. They coached one another by asking questions like:
Why is communicating with more impact important to you?
What currently gets in the way of communicating with impact?
Which key stakeholders do you need to communicate with more effectively?
Which forums do you most want to boost your impact in?
Identifying specific stakeholders and forums provided the Claims Managers with tangible anchors for their learning, priming them to notice and act on opportunities to apply this knowledge on the job, which they were supported in doing with action planners and quick reference guides.
Peer-to-peer learning
To further highlight the importance of closing the knowing-doing gap, in workshops two to four, Claims Managers shared what tools and techniques they had applied since the last workshop and the impact this had on their work. These peer-to-peer exchanges enabled team leaders to benefit from one another's experiences, bringing the models and frameworks to life and fostering a collaborative learning environment.
Reinforcement
We also started each workshop by reviewing the main ideas and strategies from the previous one, as repetition and reinforcement are essential ingredients when enabling behaviour change.
Sponsorship is also important, so to bookend the workshops, we invited back the GM sponsor who opened the Communicating with Impact series to hear what the Claims Managers are doing differently based on what they had learned.
This created momentum and commitment within the cohort to continue sharing their learnings and practical examples of skill application with one another, thereby boosting their influence and impact further.
*****
Thanks again to the Acenda team for the opportunity to design and facilitate the Communicating with Impact workshop series.
“The group keep mentioning how engaging you are Justine, and I can’t believe they’re already using what they’ve learned.”
Senior HR Business Partner