Group of business people talking during seminar
Before the pandemic, leaders had more relevance and were expected to be in charge. Suddenly, the shift to a remote workforce and a more volatile environment poses tremendous challenges for leaders. No wonder why, even though companies spend $15 billion annually on leadership development, a study showed that 75 percent of Americans say their “boss is the most stressful part of their workday.”
The solution is not to fix leaders by pushing them to work harder and hoping they will do better. The root cause of the problem gets fixed when we give leaders and team members a better map to navigate—a more precise understanding of what is expected and the power to set their own journey.
Employees need coaches and mentors that help them build new habits to increase feedback sessions, listen more and be more a facilitator than a director.
Furthermore, the 2022 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends Report found that employees believe professional development is the number-one way to improve company culture. To change the culture, all, especially leaders, need to learn new skills, but they need to learn them differently. Current methods are not effective.
What is the most effective way to develop leaders?
A Harvard Business Review research shows that making the learning experience more individualized matters to increase retention. These are three ways to do it:
1) Learn early and often: have continuous and short opportunities for training, from the onboarding and throughout the entire employee experience. The biggest obstacle to employees learning and developing is a lack of time, so you can either have a one day a month to dedicate to learning, like Linkedin does with their “InDay”, or allow the employee to access the content anywhere, at any time, through recorded sessions and mastermind groups.
2) Make learning a ritual: Just like the “InDay”, provide the employees with periodic opportunities to learn. For example, offer 1-hour weekly sessions, daily nuggets through emails, 5-minutes at the end of meetings or post posters on the walls with ideas and suggestions, like Google does.
3) Provide coaching to all levels of the organization: more and more companies are providing coaching to their C-suite and all levels. Employees need someone to talk to that helps them clarify their ideas without judgment or a hidden agenda. Sometimes their supervisors are not trained to do that or don’t have the time. Performance evaluations could be tackling issues too late, or after the fact. Giving them the opportunity to have a coach when needed (it doesn’t need to be weekly or monthly to be effective) can engage the employee by allowing them to react in a different way to a problem at the right time.
One of the most important skills leaders will have to develop is facilitating interactions to succeed in a changing environment. Your organization can hire external coaches to help them, or train leaders to have a coaching culture to learn to facilitate interactions and tackle relationship issues before they escalate.
