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Leadership Development

A new way to approach sustainable learning at organizations

Today, most large companies have different options for learning and personal development available to their leadership teams, and smaller companies (which we tend to work with) are growingly appreciating the value of providing a guided learning track to their leadership team.

However, in the existing processes that we’ve seen in various companies fall short in some ways. They usually offer a (relatively) static transfer of existing knowledge, often through school-like workshops and the curriculums involved are usually generic and not tailored to the actual everyday challenges of the participants.

One further problem with “modern” approaches to corporate learning tracks is the shallowness of topics (be wary of “mindfulness” in this context). These topics seem intriguing at first, but usually do not turn out to have a lasting impact on the learners, as they are only taught on an intellectual basis, not an experiential one.

So what’s the antidote? You’ll want your leadership team to be highly engaged in short, digitally-based learning instances, focused on learning directly with what is deeply relevant to them in their lives, and being assisted to meticulously measure the success in implementation.

It’s the reason why our process follows these steps:

1. Gather data through Interviews & Questionnaires

2. Sort & model data by employing various tools and frameworks

3. Develop a customized learning curriculum

4. Iterate on the process

Each step of this process offers a different form of learning:

The first step is learning about what can be seen and experienced. It’s usually a set of questions, challenges or roadblocks. This step can be expanded by additional questionnaires and 360 feedbacks, but usually, a well-conducted interview with all major stakeholders is what provides the process with enough data to begin.

The second step is about applying models to the data. The leadership frameworks in our arsenal range from mainstream (Posner, George, Kofman) to indie (Wilber, Laloux, Coyle) and even the fringe (Almaas, Kegan, Beck/Cowan). The theories only matter as much as that they might be able to provide us with new insights in regard to the data. Without relevant data, most models serve as merely intellectual stimulation for the interested, or as lifeless theory for the more practically inclined.

The third step is about extracting what needs to be done. This is where we’ll develop a set of workshop sessions, focussed on developing individuals, teams and companies towards practically learning on how to work with topics that are truly relevant to their organization.

Especially in these digital-only times, it is important to us (and the time and wellbeing of the leaders we work with) to provide a set of shorter sessions rather than sets of never-ending, day-long workshops.

Our approach is inspired by various tools we’ve encountered over the last decade. We’ve seen most innovation in truly applying knowledge come through the field of computer science, and especially Data Science and Machine Learning. It’s from these processes that we became inspired to use modeling of data, measuring and constant refinement to a seemingly very different field.

If you are thinking about offering your leadership team (or other team, for that matter) a track of continuous learning and support, please reach out to us.

We’re happy to arrange a first call free of charge to see if we can provide what you are looking for.

Contact us.