The times are challenging our paradigms. Uncertainty and disruption don’t look like they are going away any time soon.Previously well-established learning and development best practices are quickly becoming obsolete, and L&D professionals are being called to respond speedily to new and fluid situations. How do we effectively develop leaders in this context?
Paradigms that do not work anymore
Preparing leaders for future opportunities: The future is coming at a more rapid pace. Needs are being felt now.
Classroom-based leadership development: Sitting through class is a distraction from where meaningful learning is really happening — at work!
Mandated participation: Participation alone does not equal learning, and being required to attend learning programs can affect participant motivation negatively. Participation without motivation = time wasted.
What will work, then, you ask?
Below are some alternative ways of thinking that I have tried and tested that could inspire you to see leadership development in a new way.
From waiting in line to being in the front line
One of the fastest ways a learner can learn new skills is to work with someone who is an expert on those skills. It doesn’t need to be a full-time job experience. It can be a task or a temporary assignment.
An organization’s top leaders are a fantastic resource for leadership skill development. Turn them into multipliers of learning by creating immediate opportunities for others to work with them (beyond their immediate team), observe them and experience their wisdom in action.
Less training, more learning
This is a slogan I adopted from a very wise former colleague. By training, I mean classroom-based experiences. Classrooms — virtual or in-person — are poor reflections of reality. When we remove people from their real work environment to go through classroom-based training or skill-building, we profoundly impoverish their learning experience and limit what they can learn and how. Even high-quality, classroom-based experiences, facilitated by exceptionally skilled instructors, cannot capture 10 percent of the complexity participants will find in real work life.
Cut down on the classroom time and give people an abundance of opportunities to do something new and challenging — preferably under the supervision of someone who is a really good leader (see first paradigm shift above).
From required to desired
Let’s admit what we all already know: Required participation doesn’t work for leadership development programs. People can fake their attendance in multiple ways if they don’t believe they need that program, or don’t understand — and accept — why they are being asked to attend.
Or they can be really annoyed when they are forced to participate in a structured learning activity at a time when they are under tight deadlines or have top priority work at hand. I would be!
Will learning take place if someone feels their time is being wasted, or is flustered because of work urgencies? Motivation to learn is an essential condition for learning. Allow your people to opt in and choose what they want to learn, and when.
The learning marketplace: A practical example
In a previous work engagement, the HR team and I heard from functional leaders that they sometimes had tasks they needed to get completed quickly, but they did not want to assign those tasks to their team members because they were already at full capacity with other priorities. Those tasks were not sufficiently large to justify the hiring of another employee or even a consultant. Sound familiar?
At about the same time, we heard from employees in the emerging leaders program that they would like to learn more about the various different departments of the organization.
These two seemingly separate needs came together into a successful initiative that I would describe as a learning marketplace. Partnering with our L&D leader, we used the organization’s intranet to create a space for functional leaders to advertise tasks for which they needed help, including a brief description of the scope and number of hours estimated to complete it.
Employees interested in a cross-functional experience could express interest for tasks they believed they could accomplish, assuming they would receive some guidance along the way.
With the support from their direct supervisor, employees would then take on this temporary, developmental assignment.
Leadership is often more effective when a leader has broader knowledge of how an organization works. The learning marketplace allowed emerging leaders (and others) to broaden their familiarity with the various departments of the organization, to try out something new and to use strengths that they may not have been aware they had — an all-around learning win.
When L&D budgets are at risk
Uncertainty in the economy often comes with reductions in budgets and workforce. The shift in thinking described above and the learning marketplace example can be accomplished under limited or even reduced budgets.
The essential part of all of the above is you, the capable L&D professional and leader, willing to see what doesn’t work anymore, let go of the past and collaborate across the organization to create new and nimble ways to attend to the urgent needs of your organization.
Moving forward
If you are interested in exploring more of how to use experience in leadership development, I would recommend looking at “Experience-Driven Leader Development,” by Cynthia D. McCauley, at the Center for Creative Leadership. I am also a big fan of CCL’s 70-20-10 model of leadership development, which emphasizes the importance of combining experience in the acquisition of leadership skills (70 percent ), with learning from others (20 percent) and classroom-based instruction (10 percent). Best of luck.
