Kardelen Training

We set up Kardelen Training for 3 simple reasons:

• we’re convinced that training can be a superbly valuable, enduring investment, as long as the right skills are trained in the right way;
• our method of training – practice and mastery of essential skills – results in consistently strong improvements in performance, but is rare in the corporate world in the subjects we train;
• selfishly, we love working with smart people who are taking time to master new skills and develop their abilities.

Good Training is an Outstanding Investment

We want to spend our time doing something that gets results; and the facts are relentless about how training the right skills in leadership, management and self development increases both performance and satisfaction. Training in intelligent goal setting creates reliable single and double digit performance improvements. People trained in sound leadership skills strongly outperform their control group peers. Leadership teams trained to develop inspiring but well-rounded missions financially outperform those without.

We see results like these ourselves from the first day we train, as our participants begin to apply and master the skills we teach. Participants’ companies start to see the benefits of those skills the day they get back to work.

We Only Train Skills That Work in a Way That Works

From the outset of Kardelen, we plan only to train skills that we know improve performance. We believe the burden of proof is on us as a training provider to find out what genuinely gets real world results, so we do the background work to know that with confidence. We review studies on what does and does not improve performance, we run our own surveys, and we see the results of our own training.

This is why we train effective goal setting, which is one of the most compelling areas of performance improvement, but we don’t train SMART goals or stretch goals, which miss critical steps. It is why we train how to set inspiring visions and coherent missions, which have excellent records of success when done well, but we don’t train strategic tools, which have a typically negative effect on the performances of companies that apply them. We will continue to grow the subjects we train, but we will only train what works.

We also only want to train with a method that works. We believe that teaching insightful concepts is important, but we believe that most of the challenge and benefit from training comes from applying those concepts skilfully in real life. This is why we describe our work as skills training. We introduce a small number of new skills, and spend the bulk of our time practising those skills in progressively difficult circumstances relevant to our participants.

We know our training is better if it’s enjoyable. Our participants are more engaged, open to learning, and keen to test out new skills if they’re having fun, so we make it fun.

We don’t plan to train every important management and leadership skill. We only want train subjects where we think we have something distinctively good to add. There are plenty of experienced people doing excellent training in technical subjects, like finance, systems and operational improvements.   We have nothing new or distinctive to offer in these subjects, so we leave them to the people who are already doing an excellent job.

We Like Working with Smart People Who Want to Get Better

The main reason we set up Kardelen, though, is that we love to work with smart people who want to improve and who want their teams to flourish. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with these people, as they get stuck in, practising and mastering essential skills, and integrating those skills their daily way of operating.