Leadership Training in VR
Get better at firing your employees
It is season for layoffs in the large Danish companies. The leaders are the last people we should feel sorry for. Nevertheless, together with Finansforbundet, we have developed a learning module that can prepare managers for one of the most difficult and unpleasant conversations.
Several large Danish companies – none mentioned, none forgotten – have announced or are carrying out a large number of layoffs. This creates uncertainty among employees, and for many managers, it creates great discomfort.
Because unless you’re a psychopath, it’s never nice to tell someone they’ve been fired.
At the same time, good leaders know that their emotions should not be in focus that day.
So how do you prepare to give others a dreadful message with just the right level of emotional engagement, and how do you prepare for how the recipient will react?
Clip from VR Leadership Training Experience
Train again and again
The answer is that you practice the conversation over and over again. And the best way to do that is in VR. Because in VR, you are not disturbed, and unlike a role-play on a leadership course, no one laughs or judges your answers along the way.
In collaboration with Finansforbundet, we have developed leadership training in VR, where one of the modules is a dismissal interview.
“Even though the dismissal interview is not everyday life for the managers, it is one of the most difficult conversations. Managers are looking for tools to deal with it, and the learning from that conversation can be transferred to other conflict-filled or unpleasant conversations,” says Briddi Escherich, Team Leader and Senior Consultant at Finansforbundet.
The VR modules in management training will be part of the teaching at Finansforbundet’s management courses.
Effective form of training
In the VR experience, you are a manager and must dismiss three different employees with very different personalities.
“When you put on the VR headset, you’re completely present in the room, and the brain accepts the person opposite you as real. Therefore, it is an intense experience that our students remember and learn something from. Not least because they experience an immediate response and can try the experiences several times, so they can experience what happens if they compromise a little with their own personality and respond outside their own comfort zone,” says Briddi Escherich.
It is especially the immersion that makes VR an effective form of training. Furthermore, studies from PwC show that we are far more confident in using what we have learned in real world scenarios afterwards than if we have received the training as e-learning or teaching in plenary.
Training in VR does not make it comfortable for managers to fire employees. But it does provide some exercise that they can fall back on when their heart beats fast and their palms are sweaty.