With the start of another year comes our annual analysis of the latest trends in leadership development. Read on to discover the skills leaders are prioritizing and to explore some of the top techniques that designers are using to create more effective training experiences.
Resilience and Agility: Key Traits for Future Leaders
Fostering Empowerment
Whether it is due to the proliferation of new teams, revised organizational structures, or the desire to maximize each employee’s contribution, many clients are seeking training on the topic of empowerment. In many organizations, leaders find themselves asking, “How can we get our people to take ownership of projects and decisions? We don’t have the time or ability to have them sit back and wait for direction.” Addressing empowerment can help create clarification between leaders and their people, while enabling employees to become more autonomous and self-directed.
Key Elements of Empowerment:
- Giving employees authority to make decisions
- Enabling and supporting employees in their work tasks
- Providing the information and resources employees need to complete work tasks
- Creating the conditions for employees to optimize their contribution and take pride and ownership in that contribution
Underpinning Skills for Empowerment:
- Communication
- Trust
- Delegation
Best Practices in Training for Empowerment:
- Connecting empowerment to organizational expectations (risk-taking, innovation)
- Opening dialogue between employees and their leaders to establish ways of working, roles, and expectations
Creating Accountability
Accountability is another hot topic for leadership development. This has become particularly complex in the age of remote and hybrid work, where intentional focus on roles, goals, and collaboration are essential. Here, the pain point usually sounds something like, “We aren’t making much progress on initiatives. When everyone has so much on their plates, how can we actually get things done?”
These struggles could be due to a variety of factors—lack of role clarity or empowerment (see above), team staffing and structure, or even an organizational culture that may discourage constructive feedback, thus impeding progress towards results. For leaders of projects and people, accountability is twofold. Transformative leaders work by first taking accountability for themselves before turning a critical eye to the work done by and through others.
Key Elements of Accountability:
- Responsibility – a mindset and mental attitude of ownership
- Empowerment – taking personal action to produce results
- Resourcefulness – finding avenues to achieve results and overcome barriers
- Commitment – standing by the results of actions after the fact—for better or worse
Underpinning Skills for Accountability:
- Feedback
- Communication
- Teamwork/collaboration
- Role and goal clarity
Best Practices in Training for Accountability:
- Start by defining what accountability means to each individual and to the organization. Try to debunk negative connotations associated with the term, which may be rooted in past experiences.
- Embed accountability measures into the training itself as well as the post-training—make learners “walk the talk” right away!
Prioritizing Career Development
Career development is an especially hot topic right now, due in large part to the recalibration of work and life brought on by the pandemic and the reshuffling of individuals and teams caused by the Great Resignation. Although it’s true that much of what’s done in leadership and talent development contributes to the development of one’s career, the explicit and intentional planning given to this topic as its own separate moment is key in bringing maximum value to the individual and the organization.
- Underpinning Skills for Career Development:
- Self-Awareness
- Connection (to both opportunities and people)
- Advocacy
Best Practices in Training for Career Development:
- Pair career development with assessments to increase self-awareness and individualize and contextualize the experience for each learner.
- Train both managers and their people for two reasons.
- Managers need career development too!
- Equipping both audiences helps create a common language and sets the stage for optimizing understanding and support.
Personalization in Leadership Development: Tailoring Growth Paths
Effectively addressing empowerment, accountability, and career development requires a shift to both mindset and skillset, which are critical to highlight in the learning experience. Like most of our leadership development efforts, allowing learners to put the learning into the context of their own reality is a best practice for making the learning relevant and sustainable.
How to Develop Better Leadership Content
Now that we’ve broken down a bit of the what, let’s examine the hows of leadership development; how are learning experiences being designed and consumed?
Adding New Technologies to Blended Leadership Journeys
Blended leadership development means something different now than it did just a few years ago, due to the emergence of new technologies which have allowed for fresh combinations of multi-modal learning. We are now working with clients to combine digital asynchronous experiences with live events like webinars and VILTs, as well as immersive experiences such as VR. Although these combinations can create some complexities with scalability, they have great impacts in terms of learning retention, application, and community building.
Designing Content That Connects with the Learner
Connection is another key piece of learning and a key driver of the desire to blend modalities as seen above. It’s true that designing for connection can be challenging, particularly with large learner populations. The key for talent development is striking a balance between the technology that allows leadership development to be individualized, scalable, and accessible to all, with the need for context and human connection. Done right, this produces benefits that last far beyond the training efforts.
Sustainable Leadership: Driving Long-Term Impact Through Strategy
Now more than ever, businesses are realizing the role of effective leadership development in achieving strategic objectives. This can involve utilizing engagement survey data, HRBPs, or employee focus groups to determine needs and learner personas, in addition to aligning training efforts to competencies, core values, and organizational goals and objectives. This is not new to many organizations and training professionals, but it is becoming much more prevalent with many of our client organizations.
Continuous Learning: Developing Leaders for Tomorrow
These lists are by no means exhaustive, as each organization is unique in its approach to leadership development, its corporate identity, and its goals and objectives. If you’re struggling to unlock your leaders’ full potential, GP Strategies can help. Our Digital Leadership Suite is designed to help you develop effective leaders at all levels of your organization.
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