Ban the One and Done

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (5:40)

Part two of a three-part series on Hazel Jack­son and Biz Group, pub­lished along­side our new case study.

Some­where in Hazel Jack­son’s com­pa­ny hand­book, there’s a banned phrase.

“One and done.”

She’s talk­ing about the sin­gle work­shop. The moti­vat­ing speak­er. The cer­tifi­cate hand­ed out at the end of a day that changes absolute­ly noth­ing about how any­one shows up to work on Mon­day. She banned it from Biz Group’s vocab­u­lary years ago, and she could just as eas­i­ly have been describ­ing what hap­pens in a lot of strate­gic plan­ning sessions.

Stop One-Day Work­shops (2:38)

Hazel has spent 33 years build­ing a lead­er­ship and learn­ing firm in Dubai, now a 60-per­son com­pa­ny serv­ing Jumeirah Group, Emi­rates NBD, and Emi­rates Air­lines. I sat down with her recent­ly, and she cut right to the core of why most train­ing pro­grams fail.

“Send­ing peo­ple on a one-day lead­er­ship pro­gram is not going to make them leaders.”

“It’s a bit like say­ing, read all of these books, and then do noth­ing with them. And ta-da, you’re there. You made it. You’ve arrived.”

Most learn­ing does­n’t fail because the con­tent is wrong. It fails because nobody engi­neered what hap­pens after.

Learn­ing as a Jour­ney, Not an Event

Here’s what Biz Group does dif­fer­ent­ly. Instead of a sin­gle ses­sion, they build what they call a lead­er­ship jour­ney. It typ­i­cal­ly runs three to six months, with struc­tured touch­points in between.

At the cen­ter of it are what Hazel calls impact pods: small group con­ver­sa­tions between ses­sions, built around a few sim­ple questions.

“What did you try? What worked? What failed? Where are you get­ting stuck when you’re applying?”

At the end comes a cap­stone project, or what she calls a ​“Drag­ons’ Den” pre­sen­ta­tion, where peo­ple show, not tell, what they actu­al­ly changed.

One recent exam­ple: a leader at a prop­er­ty com­pa­ny went through a Biz Group pro­gram and real­ized she could stop using out­side recruit­ment agen­cies entire­ly. By rede­ploy­ing her inter­nal team and hav­ing bet­ter con­ver­sa­tions with them, she saved mil­lions in agency fees.

“You can turn around to the com­pa­ny and say, you’ve more than paid for the cost of your work­shop just with this one per­son apply­ing. And then you start look­ing at the mul­ti­ples of every­body else.”

One per­son­’s appli­ca­tion paid for the entire pro­gram. That’s not a hap­py face on a feed­back sur­vey. That’s a doc­u­ment­ed outcome.

The Same Prob­lem in Strate­gic Planning

We are in a dif­fer­ent busi­ness — strate­gic plan­ning — but the fail­ure pat­tern is identical.

I’ve watched plen­ty of lead­er­ship teams walk out of a well-facil­i­tat­ed annu­al plan­ning ses­sion fired up, with a beau­ti­ful strate­gic plan, and then do noth­ing with it for the next 90 days. The plan was­n’t the prob­lem. The fol­low-through was.

That’s why we don’t run plan­ning as a sin­gle event either. It cas­cades into quar­ter­ly themes, a Crit­i­cal Num­ber, and a week­ly meet­ing rhythm that forces the team back to the plan every sev­en days, not once a year.

Hazel and I land­ed on almost iden­ti­cal lan­guage for this, from two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent industries.

“We banned the one and done. It’s very easy for sales­peo­ple to want to sell that one-and-done work­shop. Easy to sell. And walk away. But it does­n’t have an impact with the clients or the participants.”

Nei­ther does the one-and-done strat­e­gy off­site. Your plan needs a rhythm built into it: check­points, and a way to know six weeks from now whether any­one actu­al­ly did any­thing. With­out that, you did­n’t build a plan. You built an event.

Tak­ing It to Anoth­er Level

Anoth­er CEO I inter­viewed, Ajit Prab­hu, co-founder and CEO of Quest Glob­al, has his own ver­sion of this same thinking.

Quest has grown from two peo­ple to more than 21,000 world­wide. Ajit does­n’t think about build­ing capa­bil­i­ty in work­shops, or even in quar­ters. He thinks in five-year cycles.

“We learn one big thing every five years — and we embed it into the com­pa­ny’s DNA.”

When Quest set out to mas­ter acqui­si­tions, they did­n’t just do deals and hope for the best. They spent five years learn­ing how to inte­grate new teams, pro­tect the cul­ture, and scale with pur­pose. Sev­en­teen acqui­si­tions lat­er, the cul­ture and momen­tum are still intact.

“You can’t rush this stuff. It takes time to bake into the systems.”

1 Les­son Every 5 Years (3:04)

Hazel mea­sures the jour­ney in months. Ajit mea­sures it in years. The prin­ci­ple is the same: any capa­bil­i­ty worth hav­ing takes longer to build than most lead­ers are will­ing to wait.

It’s also why most of our clients work with us for some­where between five and twen­ty years. Over time, they real­ize the results don’t come from the aha moments in a plan­ning ses­sion. They come from the dis­ci­pline to stay account­able, learn, and iter­ate — quar­ter after quar­ter after quar­ter, and some­times month after month.

It’s not the big think­ing. It’s the ongo­ing rigour to keep learn­ing, improv­ing, and adapting.

Chal­lenge:

Before you approve your next train­ing, strate­gic off­site, or oth­er ini­tia­tive, answer one ques­tion: how will we know in six weeks (or 6 or 16 months) whether any­one is doing any­thing dif­fer­ent­ly? No answer, no launch.

Watch the full inter­view with Hazel below.

Resources relat­ed to Hazel’s Story

• 4000 Dai­ly Hud­dles and Not One Skipped
• Biz Group Case Study: 33 Years of Human Capa­bil­i­ty Engineered
• Inter­view with Biz Group CEO, Hazel Jackson

Addi­tion­al Resources

Arti­cles

• Pro­fes­sion­als Train, Ama­teurs Wing It
• Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment: Inte­gra­tion vs Inter­ven­tion?
• Embrac­ing Painful Mis­takes: The Unfore­seen Path to Success

Growth CEO Interview

• Inter­view with Dec­o­rat­ed Air Force Pilot, Kim ​“KC” Campbell
• Inter­view with ViR­TUS CEO, Mike Desjardins

Growth Case Studies

• Cloré Beau­ty Sup­ply: Fam­i­ly-Owned Busi­ness Flour­ish­es Across Generations
• Bund­aberg: The Local Brew­er That Became a Glob­al Sensation

Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

• 45 Minute Webinar
• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

• Assess your­self
• Resilience Webi­nar

About Hazel Jackson

Hazel Jack­son is the founder of Biz Group, a lead­er­ship and learn­ing firm she built from a con­vert­ed watch­man’s room in Bur Dubai into a 60-per­son com­pa­ny serv­ing clients includ­ing Jumeirah Group, Emi­rates Air­line, and Almarai. Over 33 years, she grew the busi­ness organ­i­cal­ly and debt-free, a rare feat in the region. This year, Biz Group was acquired by Nema Hold­ing. Hazel recent­ly hand­ed the CEO role to her suc­ces­sor and remains close­ly involved in the com­pa­ny she built. Based in Dubai, she is known across the region as one of its most dis­ci­plined operators.