Leadership development is always (at least to me) in the top three reasons folks use a learning system.
Number one is developing skills – current or future (albeit that is a bit misleading) – this part of the skills angle is taught through assigned learning.
Number two is content tied to your job role, and of late, “career management” is another wonderful, ambiguous term focused on white-collar professionals – whether on-site or remote.
I wish it weren’t true, but way too many C-level folks see it this way, and too many L&D folks as well – even if they have a solid blue-collar workforce.
I say this because the learning systems that push the ‘career management’ angle, perhaps unknowingly, towards white-collar.
I digress, though.
Leadership Development
Overwhemingly it is an L&D (Learning and Development) focus – and in the past, it worked this way.
- Someone in some department identifies X as a potential leader
- That person is placed into a ‘leadership development’ program, even though a percentage of folks in said ‘leadership’ group do not have a leadership mentality, but someone in said department believes so.
- Those lucky folks – depending on their perspective – get into this special group to acquire specific skills to ideally move up the food chain – whether it is for a specific area in the department/group, the department itself, across the board, division, another location, or in the long term, the company itself. It reminds me of ‘Six Sigma’ with only a select few individuals getting an opportunity to be in the program. Everyone else? Not happening – even if you have the aptitude and desire to be in the Six Sigma program.
- The same applies to leadership development. You may have the leadership capabilities – the future leader, who, if they left your company, would get such a role, but within your company, the selector doesn’t see it that way. Trust me, I see this a lot.
There is nothing worse than having the selector and even the person higher up in the food chain be the leader, and they themselves are horrible leaders.
Yet, in this room, there were books around leadership development, and I thought to myself, “This person (VP) should read some of these books.”
There is no doubt in my mind, you are at a company where a ‘leader’ is incompetent, and you wonder how in the heck they got this role, and why do you have to listen to their utterly nonsensical method of doing things?
Did they not take the appropriate skills for leadership? Did they ignore it when given the opportunity to take such courses? Are they the owner’s nephew?
What Skills are relevant to leadership development in a learning system
I’m not going to go in-depth on the content, because that is always the client’s decision.
That said, I will say you need personal and professional development content – go third-party off-the-shelf.
Look for content that offers scenario-based learning situations – and even if you create your own content, you want real-world scenarios and not some theory you read about in some book or watched on YouTube.
The most important leadership content, according to CEOs, is empathy. And yet, I rarely hear or see anyone offer this content in their learning system – i.e., the client buying the system, to include leadership development.
Heck, it should be for everyone, but this post references leadership development.
Case in point, there was a CEO who was seen as a “G-D-like person” in the company.
They rarely came out of their office to see the minions, uh, the employees.
One day, they did.
The employees greeted the CEO.
The CEO then pointed at various people and told them they were going to be laid off.
Skills functionality that you want in a system, specifically around leadership development
In this situation, it is always about the quality of the skill capabilities and not the quantity.
Often, a mistake plenty of folks make when looking at skill capabilities.
The term I use is Skills Management – this covers all skill options
Here is an approach I would go with before assigning content to your future ‘leadership development’ program.
Pick content that can ascertain (not by an assessment only) where the individual’s strengths and weaknesses are.
The content should be ‘assigned’ and be no more than four courses/content, all of which should have scenarios in them – you can find this.
This assigned approach isn’t a longetivity angle – it’s about finding out – okay, weeding out those that are potential leaders and those who are leaders in theory.
- Communication Skills – Everyone in the leadership group goes through the course – yep with an assigned due date of a couple of weeks. Create a course that is no more than 20 minutes in length. Ideally 10 minutes -and place again, a couple of scenarios and see how they respond.
- Empathy – Find a course on this, or create one. Make it no more than 10 minutes. Add some scenarios – and not, “Johnny is grumpy at the company, and can’t handle change. How should you respond to him?” Trust me if Jhonny ripped you in a company e-mail, Johnny wouldn’t have a job the next day. Go realistic here, not defcon-5.
- Listening – Pretty important. 10 minutes max. There is plenty of content out there, that offers legit short courses on listening. Avoid LinkedIn Learning content for any of these, unless you want to snooze, which uh, some leaders do when they ask you dumb questions, in your weekly meetings. I mention LL because it’s a lot of talking heads. Boring.
- A Deep Thinking Question for each of the three – Really put together a scenario, that each potential leader will face – or high probability – in handling people, dealing with them – a bit different than handling IMO, the communication, empathy and listening piece all in one.
When I was in grad school, my final exam (besides defending my thesis), consisted of one scenario, based on the courses of required in the two years I was there.
The scenario involved a small business store that had to compete against a big-box (my term) business, and I believe the small biz store was a grocery store.
Anyway, you had to create a marketing plan including strategy and tap into stasticial analytics, to define which is the best approach.
No calculators allowed. Four hours to complete.
I remember using a multi-ANOVA with four or five variables and multi-regression to output the correct strategy or most accurate tying into the marketing program, and pricing.
You had to include writing – journalism style – as part of it.
The point here, isn’t that I smoked it (I did – ha), but that it required deep thinking – to really get insight into what you learned beyond memorizing, and the potential of what you can be, based on the variables presented to you.
That’s the key here – variables which is why you start off with specific courses for each leadership dev group.
The high potentials end in up in another group and are tasked with higher-level content, scenarios, and concepts – they go back into areas that are identified as “areas to improve”, to began retention.
Through your program, this group is provided content tied to specific skills, for reinforcement.
Reinforcement will lead (no pun here) to potential future leaders.
An AI Assistant comes in, along with real human mentors (trust me, AI mentors are appearing).
Mentoring is crucial to leadership development, and yet, most folks think Coaching.
Coaching gets you to point A, then you need another coach to get you to point B.
A mentor can achieve those objectives and much more.
I’d rather have the VP of sales at my company, or a VP of sales at say another division – assume it is an international company with different LOBs for sales – as my mentor than Missy – who is a leadership coach – covering either one specific skill (common) or multiple skills (common too), but will not be elite in all those skills. Plus, Missy may be a horrible listener, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Skill items I’d look for include:
- Skill ratings that include descriptions, so the prospect knows what each rating means and represents. Ideally if you can get a seven point Likert Scale, that would be ideal. The majority of vendors offer only five. And you want a skills rating whereas you can change the wordage, so it isn’t average or a 3, rather it can be King Kong of Empathy or Psycho Empathy.
- Provide the learner specific reasons on why the ratings are so important – the manager isn’t reviewing this, because this is for folks in leadership dev programs, which can include managers – right?
- Skills tied to the content – Obvious, but way too often focused only or solely on job role – again, this is leadership dev – not the job role of leader. You want that? Have everyone play RISK – the winner is your leader. The last place person? Hangs out with Johnny.
- Adaptive learning – legit kind – trust when I say this, there are plenty of vendors who push Adaptive, when in reality, it is misleading. You want AL tied to skills mapping (via AI is fine). Skill is empathy or dealing with poor level sales employees (in this example) – Leader prospect takes empathy course/content and based on results – goes to a higher and more challenging course. Lower, goes to a lower level course, and then learns from that. Clearly, you want folks going up and not down.
- Skills data – Metrics will drive this in the end – don’t look at how many views, or the fact the completed the course. If it has sections or chapters or mods – how often are they going into it, where are they going – I bring this part up, because yes it is assigned, but ideally you want someone to go back into an area within that course or back to the course itself. Focus on how often, and how many times. Length of time can be overrated – I’m more intersted in return and where, not that they spent 32 seconds there.
- Look for systems that have canned skills reports – this means the system comes with skills reports out of the box. Sure you can do ad-hoc – with filters, but if you do not know what filters to select from, out of the box can help. If you want specific data that you cannot generate with a filter report – ask the vendor to see if they can generate it for you. The majority of vendors can, because their system captures that data (please note there may be an additional fee)
- Tier up courses – This bounces into the adaptive piece, but we are focused here on leadership development – and only that.
- Skill Challenges – My ideal would be scenario-based challenging content – have your potential leaders do something outside of the workplace or in the workplace that meets the challenge requested. Let’s say you want to find out their communication skills – okay, they record themselves in a setting with friends, and talk about situations of X. You will be looking for ABC, to indicate their skill growth. Skill Challenges can rock, and you can tie them into a gamified learning experience.
Too many leadership dev programs are boring, dull and lack engagement.
The real world shouldn’t and isn’t like that.
If someone is cutting off their employee explaining something, that would be relevant don’t you agree?
Okay, so you have a record me and you challenge, and you act like a new employee, and maybe add a couple of others on the call “acting” and the leader prospect isn’t aware of the scenario – afte all, if I know you are assessing me on whether I have strong comm skills, wouldn”t I prep to handle that situation?
A good ol’fashioned webinar will provide the outcome, and the leader prospect can review, and take notes, or usually AI generates a summary and from there the leader prospect can learn from that.
Preferably you want them to go back and check out the now recorded content in the following two months. If I am needing improvement in an area, I should want to go back in.
Bottom Line
Leadership development programs with a learning system should be a six month program or up to a year depending on your objectives and goals.
Content and skills specific for a leader is and should be only applied.
Mapping is relevant.
Skill ratings – relevant.
Skill Challenges – Relevant.
Mentoring – relevant.
Building upon one skill to another skill to another skill, each time getting more difficult – relevant.
AI scenarios – depending on how you leverage your built-in AI Assistant (KM) can be useful – but deep thinking isn’t something you can do – and thus, the deep thinking aspect is extremely relevant.
When it comes to leadership development, are leaders born or can they be developed?
I may have to do some deep thinking on that, or better yet, you can create your own question around it, and provide it to your prospects.
I mean, if they you think born is #1, then why is that person in your leadership development program?
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