Boost Value And Develop Your Employees' Leadership Skills
The global annual budget spend for leadership development and training is estimated to be over $50 billion. Personal leadership development in organizations helps improve business results by up to 25% [1]. This number surges when leadership training is delivered not only to seniors but also to middle and junior specialists. At the same time, nearly two-thirds of millennials report a lack of development opportunities for their leadership skills [2], and 58% of managers say they don't get any management training [3].
Employees tend to think that their organization is obliged to provide them opportunities to develop during the whole span of their tenure [4]. The disappointment from this expectation can lead to less engagement in work, poorer results, decreased corporate loyalty, and, ultimately, a strong desire to leave the company.
When investing in corporate learning, companies expect to make a real impact on business outcomes. Nevertheless, only 1 in 4 senior managers reports that leadership training tangibly influences a company's outcomes [5].
Why Do Corporate Leadership Programs Fail?
Corporations spend plenty of resources on traditional employee training based on out-of-date methods. Many courses are considered to be successfully finished without any feedback or post-training assessment. They provide zero or little real knowledge and skills, turning the investment into a hemorrhaging of time and money. But combining elaborate assessment with any development program boosts bench strength by an average of 30% [6].
The issue is quite hard to address due to the lack of human resources within an organization for nurturing a leadership mindset and supervising. For instance, consider using video courses with personal feedback for each student from a coach. This approach is hard to scale because the trainer's time is limited.
How Can This Issue Be Addressed?
This problem can be solved by automating the personal leadership program so that a script carries out the role of trainers and their assistants. It can be a personalized, interactive web platform or mobile app that will complete such tasks as:
Collecting Learners' Data To Tailor A Program
Traditionally, before starting a course, a trainer talks with each user and verifies the data to create an appropriate learning path. This stage can be automated to save human resources. How does it work? The virtual "trainer" explains key concepts and definitions in videos with transcripts and infographics. Then, the system asks a learner a series of questions to determine their initial data together with the intermediate and final goals. Ultimately, the system analyzes all the gathered information to build a personal learning road map and accomplish the goals step by step.
Tracking Learning Progress
This helps to see whether a learner manages to stay with a training plan or not. How does it work? When a user completes one of the tasks, the system automatically calculates and shows the results. Also, the learner can see their overall progress on the road map. The user can mark the steps where mentoring is needed. The training platform autonomously analyzes the process and is able to send detailed reports to the curator if requested.
Increasing The Effectiveness Of Learning
Using different motivational techniques boosts the learners' intentions to proceed with their eLearning and achieve goals. How does it work? You can enable the community, coaches, or L&D department to track learners' progress for supporting and cheering them on. Elements of gamification can also be implemented for this purpose.
The Seven Best Features To Implement In Programs To Develop Employees' Leadership Skills
In order to make the training course truly engaging and easy to use, you can utilize popular technologies today.
Conversational Learning
This is an innovative training model in which a learner interacts with a virtual coach, assistant, or chatbot in the form of a dialogue (question-and-answer approach). Online assistants can also be involved in checking exercises to make sure that everything is clear.
Social Learning
This feature allows people to get feedback from each other and exchange knowledge. Usually, it looks like a special community on the platform where learners share their experiences or opinions. For example, one eLearning project provides an option to invite friends, colleagues, and family to describe a learner's unique qualities to help build a personal training road map.
Gamification
To enhance users' interest, fun, and engagement, it makes sense to add gamification elements to your training process. It may be worth considering different achievement badges, the ability to unlock new levels, leaderboards, gems, etc.
Business Simulation
This method boosts mistakes-driven learning and encourages risk-taking management instead of avoiding stress and giving up on challenges. To automate this process, you need to collect your real business situations and your managers' skill gaps. Then you create a digital workplace environment with different virtual characters to train both the hard and soft leadership skills of your employees.
Implementation Of AI
AI is a handy tool to provide personalized learning opportunities that will align with a learner's plan [7]. Also, this feature gives coaches additional advantages, such as allocating time to strategic tasks by automating routine operations.
Chatbot
This assists with different organizational moments, such as creating and sending templates. For example, it can create a template of a message that will be sent to friends for collecting opinions about a learner's strengths.
Proactive Alerts
Many users forget about their training process because of work overload and distraction. Friendly reminders help them keep track of a training plan and complete its stages in time.
How Can You Launch An Effective Training Program To Develop Employees' Leadership Skills?
No matter what kind of platform and features you choose, there are a few typical stages of building your product. First, you should set an accurate budget for your corporate leadership development program that will include training platform expenses. Then, you need to create content. If you have only a paper version, you need to find resources to digitize it. The next step is UI/UX design, and after that, choosing a tech stack and development. Finally, software testing ensures uninterrupted work, quality compliance and, consequently, a higher value for your employees' leadership training.
References
[1] 24 Leadership Training Statistics: Data, Insights & Predictions
[2] The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey: Winning over the next generation of leaders
[4] Leadership Training Shouldn’t Just Be for Top Performers
[5] Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It
[6] Recent Leadership Data and Statistics that You Should Know
[7] What Challenges In Education Can AI Solve Today?
Originally published at www.forbes.com.
