Are your organization’s learning programs in sync with your business goals? Creating this alignment is the highest priority of L&D professionals, according to LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2024. But ensuring that training drives business results should also be top of mind for executives, department heads and even individual contributors looking to advance their careers.
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As a longtime leader, leadership coach, facilitator and now a learning platform creator, I’ve found that one tool gets overlooked when it comes to using L&D to advance business priorities: cohort learning.
And what a versatile tool it is. No matter what you want your organization to achieve, empowering your employees to learn with and from each other will help you get there faster. Here are three areas where I’ve seen cohort learning deliver big payoffs.
1. Breaking Down Silos
It’s all too easy to get so focused on the success of your own department or function area that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Silos can pop quickly, bringing a passel of problems with them. They hamper innovation, reduce efficiency and damage morale and engagement.
Once silos have appeared, they can be quite challenging to remove. Perhaps you’ve seen this for yourself at cross-functional meetings, where it can feel like different teams are speaking different languages. If one of your organization’s goals is breaking down silos, you’ll need to take things a step further than just having different departments meet together.
That step could be creating a cohort of leaders or rising leaders from across the organization to go through a development program together. This is a very different setting than a meeting where key decisions are being made.
When they’re learning together, participants from different departments feel safer dropping their guard. They stop focusing on who’s "winning" and start actually hearing each other and understanding others’ viewpoints. They learn from each other—not just from the content of the development program. And when that happens, all sorts of positive change can flower. They may identify inefficiencies, share best practices and build on one another’s ideas.
2. Advancing Underrepresented Groups
Despite some high-profile backlash to DEI programs, most companies are maintaining their commitment. No matter what the climate is at your own organization, creating opportunities for cohort learning can be a powerful way to support and increase diversity.
To understand why this is the case, we need to back up for a moment and talk about discrepancies in promotion rates. Women make up less than one-third of C-Suite positions, according to the Women in the Workplace 2024 report from McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org. But the problems start far below the executive level. The report also found that men outnumber women at every stage of the leadership pipeline. Racial or ethnic minorities have even less representation in the C-Suites, holding just over 12% of those positions.
But analysis by speaker, educator and consultant Rob Cross found that a focus on building relationships early in an employee’s tenure at a company can close the gap in promotion rates. With this in mind, you can shape your organization’s cohort learning programs to encourage relationship building. This is another reason it’s valuable to combine employees from different departments into the same learning cohort.
You can also look for ways to bring employees together with their more senior colleagues for learning. For example, members of an ERG could use a learning platform together, with veteran employees adding context and insight for newer employees.
3. Addressing Manager Burnout
If protecting your managers’ well-being isn’t a corporate priority right now, it should be. After the past few turbulent years, managers are burning out at alarming rates. More than two-thirds said they’re overwhelmed by their workloads. This may be because most new managers are not prepared for the challenges of their new roles.
A cohort learning program for managers can be a much-needed place for them to give and receive support, as well as a chance to share experiences and advice without the pressure of deadlines. It can even foster a sense of shared purpose, which is one of the best remedies for burnout.
Final Thoughts
Cohort learning is one of the most effective ways to ensure that learning and development programs align with business priorities and deliver the ROI your organization is looking for. By bringing employees together to learn, grow and reflect, you create opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas, relationship building and better understanding across departments. This approach doesn't just impart knowledge; it fosters the kind of collaborative problem-solving and innovation that can transform your organization.
This article was originally published by Neena Newberry in Forbes.