Four Benefits of Collaborative Learning and Leadership Development
The ability to learn on the job, much less be identified and developed for a future leadership position, can be difficult for employees, regardless of classification. Every company claims it plans for the future, but the reality is that the mindshare required – the domain and business expertise and the leadership that drives it – usually slips away with the best intentions of having the learning and development as well as the succession plan in place.
According to Bersin by Deloitte, leadership will be a big challenge in 2014: “Executives are struggling with leadership gaps at all levels — from first-line supervision through top leadership (more than 60 percent of all companies cite ‘leadership gaps’ as their top business challenge). This year, baby boomers will begin to retire in large volumes; one oil company tells us that they expect to lose 30 percent of their workforce in the next three years.”
What’s clear is that when it comes to developing future leaders, too many organizations are simply going through the motions, or worse yet, doing nothing at all. These companies are losing out on a host of benefits, including:
- Better business planning—Learning and leadership development leads to better succession planning, which then leads to developing and then putting the right people in the right leadership roles at the right times. When organizations know they have the right people in the queue for key positions, they can proactively plan for the future of the business far more effectively.
- Improved retention and lower turnover—Sound learning and leadership development helps to ensure that employees know they’re being groomed for a particular position, which gives them a strong sense of having a clearly defined future within the company. This is a strong retention tool and keeps people from leaving their companies for greener pastures. The resulting cost savings can be substantial but it takes a long-term investment.
- Improved employee engagement—Obviously, showing employees a learning plan and defined future with an upward career trajectory are powerful boosters of employee engagement and emotional commitment. And, as Gallup Employee Engagement research showed the past few years, companies with highly engaged employees experience financial growth rates nearly four times higher than those of companies with lower engagement.
- More accurate recruiting—Sound learning and leadership development also helps improve recruiting as well: when employers have a clear understanding of their organizations’ gaps in skills and leadership qualities, they can sharpen their focus on recruiting for specific future roles (even those not yet defined by succession plans), shortening the recruiting process and increasing sourcing accuracy.
Learning and leadership development should be part of an organization’s total approach to talent management—which, in turn, should be integrated with their overall business strategy. This integration ensures that talent management activities are aligned to business goals and objectives, that employees are given the learning opportunities they need to develop their leadership skills, and that the organization itself will have the leaders it needs for the future.
Unfortunately today’s learning management systems focus more on scheduling and taking courses than delivering learning development results. Companies are looking for scalable, holistic and comprehensive leadership development solutions that create thriving learning and leadership communities where participants create and curate relevant content to then share with peers and colleagues.
There are viable models that exist today for knowledge sharing, and while they’ll never entirely take the place of formal classroom coaching, private industry and university movements like MOOC’s, or massive online open courses, and online learning sites like the Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera and SkillShare have dramatically changed how learners attain knowledge in thousands of different subjects.
These online learning sites and services have released knowledge from the time and space boundaries of the formal classroom; organizations can also do this for their leaders, simultaneously developing their leadership skills while continuing their day-to-day work. Plus, busy leaders don’t always have time to sit in a classroom to wait and watch lectures, so learning must come to them in the form of easy-to-consume mediums like video.
Leadership development is a collaborative learning and development exercise, one in which mentors and instructors should share information virtually via peer-to-peer videos, and where peers can learn from each another long after formal instructor-based learning is completed.