Making Leaders

They say that leaders are born not made. I don't know who "they" are but I disagree and so do others including Colin Powell.

Think about the best boss you ever had. I'll bet he/she had years of experience. I'll bet he/she had plenty of stories of successes and failures that shaped managerial behavior. I'll bet he/she empowered you to make decisions, recognized your hard work, provided feedback and coaching and rewarded results. In other words, these leaders were made, not born. They had learned how to translate the vision of the organization into actionable practices. They learned how to communicate their own vision of excellence and how to model it and reinforce the behavior that supported it.

What does all this mean for the learning organization? Learning and organizational development go hand in hand. To develop future leaders, organizations utilize sound succession planning strategies and encourage development plans and professional growth. This works well for the high potential employees who have been selected as future leaders. To truly grow leadership, I would argue that you need to cast the net a bit wider.

1. Teach the fundamentals across the organization. There are a core set of communication and feedback skills that everyone should know. These skills should be used every day between managers and employees and between peers. The skills are the basis for every other leadership paradigm. For example, Situational Leadership is a very popular coaching model (you can learn more about the model at wikipedia.org or through a very well put together online course). I am a huge fan of Situational Leadership, but asking someone to diagnose and then engage in the correct leadership style is still a tough task. They can probably make the right choice but do they have the skills required to handle the conversation and respond appropriately. When everyone in the organization has the skills, they are more likely to hold everyone accountable to the behavior.

2. Continuing Leadership education. It is not enough to roll out the yearly management skills course, or hold biannual leadership conferences. These are great tools and go a long way to maintaining a consistent leadership environment. I would also add informal learning to the mix. Provide opportunities for leaders to share success and failure and learn from each other. Some of my most successful classes involved sharing the "war stories" and allowing leaders time to learn from each other. Consider creating easy to implement tools that leaders can take back to their work groups to continue leadership education on their own and gather feedback. There is plenty being written about leadership in books, articles, white papers, web seminars and other places. Create a clearinghouse through which your leaders can easily access these resources and enjoy them as needed.

3. Create a culture in which feedback is a good thing. Some people love feedback. They see it as an opportunity to improve and receive recognition for their effort. Many people fear feedback and with good reason. I've seen (and received) feedback delivered poorly and it does very little to improve performance. Teaching people how to give and receive feedback goes back to my first point. Once the foundation is in place, create opportunities for people to receive feedback on a regular basis.

4. Create vertical alignment. Leadership starts at the top of an organization. If the senior leadership isn't bought in to leadership development, no amount of training intervention is going to matter because the senior leadership doesn't recognize it or reward it. Fortunately, this isn't the case in most organizations. Keep the top of the organization in tune with the leadership training by offering them a place in the program as a speaker, facilitator, or participant. Offer them access to the same informal opportunities to leadership content.


Leadership is a hot topic these days. Plenty is being written and there is always room to improve it and drive performance. Make sure that in your organization leadership is something everyone is involved in, not just a select few.

Leading, Learning and Change

Everywhere you look, learning professionals and consultants are writing about coping with tough times, surviving the downturn, or bracing for the worst. I don't blame them, times are tough and many people I talk to are cutting corners and balancing expenses. By people I mean friends, family, and business contacts. Personally or professionally, anyone with a checkbook is paying even closer attention to what's going out.


So when I ask training leaders, and I've spoken to quite a few, what the biggest learning need is in these times, I get a handful of answers: leadership, continuing development, and change management top the charts. I think these are very achievable and can be closely aligned with your business results.

1. Leadership Training. Spend the time developing leaders to be more successful and building your succession plan. And face it, they will leave. Strong leaders will help guide your company in these challenging times and then be tempted away when conditions improve. How you keep them is a different conversation, but make sure you have their successor lined up.

The other benefit to leadership development is the establishment of a shared language. Leadership development, done right, involves both the leaders and the led. It creates a common understanding of the role of leaders and accountability for leadership behaviors. Employees know what to expect from their leaders, managers are better able to provide peer coaching and feedback, and executive leadership has an "apples to apples" way of describing and identifying high performers in the organization. For more on leadership and succession planning, Talent Management has a very good article on developing emerging leaders.

2. Continuing Development. Many organization are adopting the "do more with less" mentality these days. I don't have a problem with that, as long as people are prepared to do the work you need them to do, and that might mean more training. Yet in the "more with less" mindset, the learning organization has less to work with. Once again, social media comes to the rescue as does a proactive communication plan.

• Let the organization know you are creating informal learning and development opportunities.


• Communicate the topic areas and the means to obtain training.


• Partner those who have skills with those who don't for more peer training and informal development.


• Have experts answer questions on discussion boards or document success in wikis.


• Create lunch and learn sessions through which experts can share experience and answer questions.


• Remind employees to document learning opportunities and time spent practicing new skills.


• Remind your experts to document time spent teaching, training or mentoring. Ask them how you can help develop them further by making them better trainers.

This continuing development should fit hand-in-hand with your leadership development and succession planning process.

3. Teach people how to manage change. Change management isn't just a task for the senior leadership or the training department. Managing how team members cope with and respond to changing conditions falls to front line leaders. Since these line managers may be formal or informal leaders, it is important to create an awareness in the population of how people handle change and how to help people use the tension to move forward and be productive. I'm not arguing for enterprise-wide change management training. I am arguing for creating opportunities for the entire workforce to learn about the change process and some of the ways that successful organizations handle and grow from change pressure.

To be successful, organizations need to continually grow, develop and innovate. By focusing on a leadership platform, all team members share accountability for leadership. Through continuing development, team members have an opportunity to grow and be successful. Continuing development doesn't have to draw on excessive resources when information sharing becomes the norm. Finally, create a culture that knows how to adapt to and use the tension caused by change events and you will have an organization ready to cope with the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Training with the Experience in Mind

While perusing the blogs I follow, I reacquainted myself with this article from Josh Bersin. I was pleased to see that my ideas align pretty well and I was able to learn a few new things. I love the focus on informal, casual learning and the value of networks. I've been blogging about informal learning quite a bit and was pleased to see I'm on track.

I also enjoyed some of the specifics regarding human networks outlined in this recent article in CLO magazine. It got me thinking about the power of people and the kind of experience they have getting the information they need in a practical, timely fashion. User experience always brings me back to the work of Lou Carbone and his book Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again. This book really changed the way I viewed the guest experience and as such changed the way I think about developing learning tools.

1. Develop tools with the end user in mind. Specifically, what is the emotional connection you want users to make with the tools or learning experience? Developing learning interventions can become fairly methodical. Great learning professionals also consider the overall experience of the user and strive to measure the degree to which participants feel confident, secure, knowledgeable and prepared.

2. Develop tools with the customer in mind. Your clients eventually interact with your organization's clients. How would those individuals describe your people? The tools prepare learners to perform on the job, but are they performing in a way that creates an enjoyable experience for the guest and a profitable experience for the organization? For example, sales teams are provided plenty of material on "up-selling" or "adding value." I would ask how the guest perceives the outcomes of the training. Do they feel like they are getting a better service experience or do they feel are they being pushed to purchase things they don't want.

3. Keep it simple. Make learning tools easy to obtain, easy to use, easy to reuse, easy to share. The Bersin article calls it "Facilitating Learning." Learning organizations have plenty of informal tools and can guide and enable learning rather than focus on delivering training.

To come full circle, I think high-impact learning organizations also make the learner experience an important part of their design process. More than just a look at the user requirements, training solutions should be built within the context of the entire learning structure and organization's cultural experience.

Ben Franklin Would Tell You To Go With The Blended Solution

"Moderation in all things -- including moderation." - Benjamin Franklin

Lately I have been in several friendly debates with high school teachers over the use of Second Life in secondary education. There seems to be some hesitation in some quarters about losing face time with students. Great teachers have learned to measure the effectiveness of their training session by a glance around the room. They value that face-to-face contact.

On the other hand, many companies and universities are taking their training more and more virtual. Second Life and webinar tools have become viable options for conducting group sessions. Presenters can deliver content, manage breakout groups, have groups report findings, create flip charts...all the tools of the classroom. Voice over IP has even enabled users to hear each other rather than spend the time in text chat.

Some argue that virtual worlds and social networking are the next progression of our social evolution (check out this article from the New York Times, online). In many ways, social networks are logical extensions of our tribal culture: we share ideas, we trade virtual trinkets, we form groups based on common interests and goals.

But what about human interaction? Aren't we social animals with a need for face time, to see a person's expression and react? I would argue that all this virtual time makes actual face-to-face time that much more valuable to learning. Great learning solutions can be built that engage people on both levels.

1. Create engaging online experiences. Use Second Life, webinars, or online resources to create virtual tools and resources that learners want to reuse. Let those experiences create excitement, interest, and healthy tension.

2. Teach people how to facilitate discussions. Once the online piece is complete, have people meet to discuss the content presented. They will all be part of the group called "People who experienced online content." They will have a shared history and experience to get them started and will begin to collaborate and build group norms. Train leaders to facilitate group discussion and draw out ideas and action plans. Encourage learners to form these groups in their work place rather than online to build social interaction and support networks.

3. Use virtual space for continuing development and follow-up. Once a group has formed in real space, encourage them to extend their influence into virtual space through online meetings, wikis, blogs, and discussion boards. By working through the first steps, groups may "unlock" (to use a gaming term) additional content and resources.

Classroom learning is becoming too costly to remain the predominant delivery tool of corporate training. Online delivery is becoming less expensive, easier to produce and sometimes, in the case of Second Life, as good as classroom learning. Human interaction is still an integral part of learning for many people and shouldn't be eliminated entirely. The best options usually combine the flavor and benefits of multiple delivery vehicles.