Digital Learning Is Essential
Remote work is here to stay, which means that organizations must integrate digital learning into their leadership development programs. Although in-person learning options still offer tremendous value, it has become much harder to convene participants in a single location for training as the workplace has evolved. Now, more than ever, training must be accessible when and where employees need it.
Collaborative Learning Works
When you think of leadership training, do you imagine an expert imparting knowledge to participants? Well, that’s only one part of the picture. The other is to include collaborative learning to tap into diverse perspectives, foster creative problem-solving, and build stronger relationships among peers. Each of these benefits go beyond developing skills and knowledge to significantly increase employee engagement.
Solutions Must Be Scalable AND Customizable
According to Gorana Sandrić, an HR consultant and career coach:
A traditional approach to talent management, in which leaders would select the targeted few “worthwhile of higher developmental investment,” is more and more part of the past. As L&D leaders, (we) must change the perspective that talent is rare and tap into hidden talent pools, which means expanding the possibilities for development and career networking to wider groups of candidates.
Leadership training must be customized in addition to being scalable. Employees and employers are tired of training programs that fail to address their everyday challenges or deliver real-world results. Before they commit, organizations want to see the relevance of the learning option to the needs of their company and individual learners. That’s the approach that Procter & Gamble is taking. Chief Learning Officer Ann Schulte explains:
To help our people learn faster, we are disrupting how we manage learning and development to focus more on the immediate business context and personalized needs by providing easy access to information, performance support aids, and carefully curated training that is relevant and can be directly applied to work.
Learning Should Be Part of Every Day
Leadership training should be easy to incorporate into everyday work. In other words, training shouldn’t only happen outside the workplace on rare occasions or in large blocks of time; it should enable learning every single day.
This approach to training has been shown to deliver better results.
Researchers have found that when we learn a new skill outside the setting where we need to use it, we have less chance of putting it into action. For example, strategies learned at a conference, offsite, or other event can be impractical once the learner is back on the job. As development experts Josh Bersin and Marc Zao-Sansers put it, “for learning to really happen, it must fit around and align itself to working days and working lives.”
Is New Lens Right for Your Team?
As we have worked with companies to develop high performers for the past 20 years, we continue to develop solutions to address the critical needs we see. Our newest solution, the award-winning New Lens app, integrates the essential elements of a successful leadership development program for today’s workplace.
New Lens draws on decades of in-the-field learning working with business leaders, a track record of success helping over 75% of our clients get promoted, and an approach that is affordable, scalable and customizable. We would love to see if it can help you. Schedule a demo now.
