• Leadership Development

How to Assess Leadership Skills for a Leadership Development Program

Deanna Foster

April 11, 2024

Employers predict that 44% of workplace skills will be disrupted in the next five years, and the rapid rise of AI this year alone might make that a conservative estimate. What we know for sure is that learning and development will be an essential feature of the next era of work. L&D teams will be responsible for creating a culture of continuous learning, including targeted leadership development initiatives. To design the kind of agile programming demanded by the pace of change, they’ll need a reliable understanding of where their learners are at.

Organizations should get in the habit of consistently assessing organizational and learner progress, but this can feel daunting, especially for companies that aren’t as data-driven. This guide walks you through the steps to creating and maintaining a culture of assessment that serves your team and your learners.

Start with strategy

Leadership development programs don’t exist for their own sake—they should always proceed from a high-level organizational priority and drive toward a tangible impact. L&D teams should already understand the overall business strategy, but an additional alignment process might be necessary to narrow down to key goals for a leadership development program. Too often, L&D leaders accommodate an ever-expanding list of priorities from their colleagues. This is a mistake. It’s better to facilitate active debate among executives and other stakeholders about where to focus scarce development dollars for optimum impact.

Begin with a simple question: Where does the organization need to go, and how can leadership development support get to that destination? The answer should be clear enough to fit on one presentation slide. Before you begin designing your program, get clear on these four outputs:

1. Key Business Priority

This is the high-level business goal that the program supports. Achieving it is essential to the health of the business. Increasing revenue, improving efficiency, controlling costs, and managing risk are the most common ones.

2. Performance Outcomes

These behaviors deliver on the high-level business goal. For maximum impact, we recommend choosing two or three to focus your program on. Any more will lead to exhaustion among your learners or dilute impact on the business.

3. Success Indicators

Defined in advance, these are the concrete results of behavior change. They should be both qualitative (“More confidence in decision-making”) and quantitative (“More innovative projects in the pipeline”).

4. Metrics and Methods

At the most granular level, these are the metrics you’re aiming to hit. You should have a methodology and the resources to measure them before and after the program.

These outputs will shape the learning experience design. Assessment will answer the question: Where is the organization right now in relation to these goals?

Assess the organizational context

We often think about leadership development in terms of individual potential and progress, overlooking the organization’s capacity for change. Organizational systems have a huge influence on program success. The latest thinking on leadership development prioritizes changing systems to encourage new behaviors before asking leaders to learn skills and apply them on the job.

Consider the performance outcomes you’re targeting in your program, and evaluate if the organization supports them. Maybe you want leaders to be more agile, but you know your organization tends to move slowly (which is probably why you prioritized agility in the first place). Identify the challenges created by entrenched norms and systems: Are senior leaders resistant to change? Is the approvals process cumbersome? To surface these organizational obstacles, you can conduct a series of stakeholder interviews or a more wide-ranging internal survey. Then, with the help of influential leaders, remove or mitigate those obstacles. This is necessary to clear the path for leaders to apply new behaviors, but it also demonstrates commitment. 

Behavior change takes time and effort. It builds trust for learners to see that the organization is committed to setting them up for success.

In addition to removing obstacles, get loud about your learning initiative. Make sure the whole organization understands the desired performance outcomes and how they connect to company strategy and goals. This creates a broad awareness of the behaviors you’re trying to cultivate and primes others to recognize and reward their application during the workday.

Listen to learners

Ultimately, learners are the most important audience for your leadership development program. L&D teams are well aware of the challenges in engaging them: time constraints, demands from other priorities, inconsistent attendance, perceptions around the value of training, and so on. It’s critical to engage employees from the very beginning to build trust and excitement.

Learners are most motivated when the leadership development programs support their individual aspirations—not just organizational priorities.

Though you’ll likely pull data from yearly evaluations and manager feedback, learners shouldn’t feel like their performance is being passively judged. They should have an active role in evaluating their own skills and defining program aims and content. Self-evaluations can be compared to the results from managers, surfacing gaps in perception and potential systemic obstacles. Surveys can also provide information on desired skills (potentially for inclusion in this program or earmarked for the next), preferred learning media, and other useful data. Learners are most motivated when programs support their individual aspirations, not just organizational priorities. Make sure that personal goals are acknowledged and reflected in the learning and development program.

Talk to managers

Now you’re ready for an external assessment of skills at the aggregate and individual levels. You may already have some prior data from yearly evaluations, but it probably won’t correspond directly to the performance outcomes you’re prioritizing in your program. You’ll need to establish a baseline specific to those skills to measure success at the end of the program. Depending on the number of unit leaders in your organization, you may want to conduct interviews or send out a survey pegged to the performance outcomes.

Managers can provide more than just feedback on skills. They also add important context on organizational obstacles, current capacities, and tips on how to engage the leaders they manage, like what kind of learning materials are shared socially inside the unit, and where there are good opportunities to apply learning in the flow of work. This information will help you design a more effective and relevant program.

Collect mid-program feedback

Assessment isn’t just for the beginning and end of the program. Mid-program assessment for pilot programs can point to a need for course correction or deeper resources, show which audiences are most and least engaged, and surface issues within user experience. Mid-program optimization keeps learners on the path to reaching those tangible program goals.

Where possible, integrate opportunities for feedback and make it easy for respondents to answer questions or offer suggestions.

Quantitative data typically includes engagement, social sharing, and learner satisfaction scores. Qualitative data can be gleaned from chats, discussion boards, and program comments. These integrated feedback moments can be more natural and generative than formal surveys, which require time and consideration outside of the program environment. Integrate opportunities for feedback and make it easy for respondents to answer questions or offer suggestions. Having a point person to monitor and moderate the learning experience is also helpful, so learners know who to contact with spontaneous feedback. In our learning programs, we often provide that role for our partners, but in other instances, it will probably be a member of the L&D team.

By rigorously collecting and analyzing mid-program feedback (which is especially important when the solution is being piloted for the first time or when the organization is in flux), we can identify places to adjust, augment, and smooth the way for participants.

When we partnered with a leading financial services firm on their executive development program, we used mid-program assessment to respond to rapid changes in the business. Working with the L&D team, our moderator was able to clearly link the skills that the learners were developing with the changing business context. Participants were able to self-identify how to use the new skills immediately, increasing their sense of the program’s relevance to their professional success.

This client also used data to help navigate challenging topics. Their L&D team coached the firm’s executives who were featured in the learning and development program about what was top of mind for the learners, and even offered suggestions on how to respond to some sensitive topics that were likely to arise. The firm’s executives felt better prepared and demonstrated more humility about the organizational changes.

Learn from the continuous assessment

Leadership development is an investment, so value creation should be front and center. We recommend a formal summative evaluation for all programs. This holds the L&D team and their partners accountable for creating value for the individual participants and the organization. Summative evaluation should answer some key questions:

• To what degree did the program enable learners to engage in the process of personal change?
• If personal change did take place, how likely are learners to demonstrate new skills back on the job?
• What organizational barriers or norms are likely to reduce or enhance the use of new skills in the workplace?
• If the learners consistently demonstrate the new skills on the job, where will this positively impact the business priorities?

Summative evaluation is also a great way to capture lessons learned about program design, delivery, and application. Based on the data collected, team members should be comfortable sharing candidly what worked well and what needs to be improved. By reflecting on both, the team has a direction for scaling the solution in the future. 

When we partnered with Hyatt on a leadership development program for future general managers, their L&D leaders learned through listening, shifting the way they collected feedback from written forms to video-recorded conversations that were much more generative. They evolved from asking about “program effectiveness” to learning how to help leaders solve problems based in the business.

Digital platforms make it easier to consistently assess individual progress on desired skills, allowing L&D teams to use that data to plan future initiatives and inform self-serve learning paths. To achieve this, you’ll need to establish a complementary rubric between yearly evaluations, learning and development programs, and perhaps even career pathways, but it’s well worth it.

Perhaps most importantly, make sure learners see your team as a partner in learning. Let them know that assessment is a two-way street and that your team is always open to ideas and feedback that can improve learning.

Have a question about leadership development programs? Get in touch with one of our learning design specialists.

For a complete guide to leadership development programs, check out our series on How to Create a Successful Leadership Development Program.

This is a joint blog by Deanna Foster, Senior Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing, and Dr. Gregg Kober, Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing.

The post How to Assess Leadership Skills for a Leadership Development Program appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

How to Create a Successful Leadership Development Program

Deanna Foster

February 23, 2024

As organizations evolve in response to technological advancement, external events, and generational paradigm shifts, it can feel like the only constant for leaders is change. If so, there is no greater leadership asset than the drive to keep learning. And there is much to learn. Today’s leaders have a broader scope of priorities than ever before. They must manage volatility in the short term while maintaining a vision for the long term. They must be silo-bridgers, thoughtful innovators, and stewards of company culture. Companies that prioritize continuous learning can realize extraordinary potential; those that don’t will stagnate.

Learning at this scale doesn’t happen without a plan. It’s great to set development goals for leaders during yearly evaluations, but without a solid leadership development plan that directly connects to business outcomes, other priorities and distractions will take over.

At Harvard Business Publishing Impact, we partner with companies to create curated learning experiences for leaders at every level. Though each partnership is unique, there is a proven process for designing and developing impactful learning initiatives. This guide shows you how to use that process to shape, implement, and optimize a leadership development program for your organization.

Process for designing and developing impactful Leadership Development Programs

1. Alignment: What do you need?
2. Goals: How will performance change?
3. Assessment: Where are you now?
4. Development: What kind of learning experiences will work for you?
5. Executive Involvement: How can senior leaders support learners?
6. Implementation: How will you integrate the learning experience?
7. Feedback and Evaluation: How are learners performing?
8. Measuring Impact: How effective was the program?
9. What’s next?: Creating a culture of learning

Alignment: What do you need?

A generic leadership development program will yield generic results, so your plan should be grounded in a firm understanding of your organization’s unique values, challenges, and priorities. The process begins with alignment on one foundational question: What is the business priority driving leadership development? In the most general terms, most business priorities fall into a few broad buckets: Companies want to increase profits, cut costs, and mitigate risks.

Once you’ve established the key business priority, identify how employees can support it. What do you want leaders (and by extension, their teams) to do differently as a result of the program? Do leaders need to be more agile? More innovative? More inclusive? These performance outcomes will shape the structure, content, and measurement of the learning experience.

Concentrate on the most critical needs. It’s tempting to try to improve everywhere, but learning experiences are most effective when they focus on a few key outcomes. If your goal is to inspire leaders to innovate more, ask yourself: What is preventing them? Skills gaps might include digital competency, navigating complexity, cross-functional collaboration, or even talent development. Identifying these gaps will ensure your learning objectives have the greatest impact on the business’s most important priorities.

The process begins with alignment on one foundational question: What is the business priority driving leadership development?

When we partnered with the global theater chain Cinépolis, their key business priority was growth through innovation. Their primary performance outcome was developing innovative leaders from the C-suite to the frontline. Cinépolis had total alignment on what they wanted, so their leadership development program could be highly focused. Their program used a cascade approach, beginning with intensive training for senior leaders and extending all the way to individual theater employees. The culminating exercise asked employees to propose one-page solutions to identified problems, which resulted in innovative new projects that increased revenue and customer satisfaction.

Checklist for Alignment

• Align on the key business priority
• Choose a focused set of performance outcomes

Additional Resources

• Key Alignment Questions
• Top 10 In-Demand Leadership Skills for the Future of Work

Goals: How will performance change?

Now that you’ve identified your business priorities and performance outcomes, you can set leadership development goals. Your program should deliver impact in three areas: learner experience, on-the-job performance, and impact on the business. Success indicators might include strong engagement in the program, more confident decision-making, and improved retention, respectively.

Whether success indicators are qualitative or quantitative, each will need corresponding metrics to measure at the beginning and the end of the program, and each metric should have clear methods and sources for measurement. Success indicators should be specific to your organization and the unique ways you measure performance.

Leadership Development Program Goals Example

Checklist for goals

• Set program goals, including success indicators and metrics

Additional Resources

• How to Define Impactful Leadership Development Goals
• Learning Experiences That Get Results

Assessment: Where are you now?

With detailed goals in hand, leadership skills assessment can begin. Start with an honest assessment of your business’s organizational systems and norms. Can they support the changes you’re advocating for? If entrenched company culture or processes will disincentivize leaders from applying new skills and approaches, the investment in training will be wasted. If you expect leaders to evolve, the broader organizational culture must welcome and support it.

The clarity you established in the previous phases will be helpful here. Ensure that senior leaders understand the leadership behaviors you’re targeting and the business priorities they serve. Encourage executives to raise awareness of why certain leadership behaviors are needed and reinforce those behaviors by highlighting success. Celebrating early wins by sharing success stories—the “what,” “the why,” and most importantly, “the how”—will link those behaviors to desirable outcomes and encourage other leaders to practice these new habits.

If you expect leaders to evolve, the broader organizational culture must welcome and support it.

Now you’re ready to segment leaders by senior, mid-level, and frontline (or whatever distinctions make sense for your organization) and assess their baseline. You may already have a strong anecdotal sense of what each level needs, but data will always surface fresh insights. You may be able to leverage yearly evaluations or previous survey results, but you’ll probably want to do a new survey to capture more targeted data that you can track through the end of the program.

Make sure you’re hearing from individuals as well as supervisors. We’ve found that employees clearly understand their own needs. In our survey “How the Workforce Learns in 2019”, 85% of respondents recognized the skills needed to improve their current performance. It’s worth understanding what leaders want to learn, because employees are most engaged when learning is linked to individual goals and aspirations, not just company performance.

With data in hand, consider the gaps between the current state and the ideal one. Where are the gaps most significant? This will help you prioritize who and what to focus on.

If your business is at an inflection point, your program should target leaders at all levels. The learning experiences will vary in content or method, but they’ll all be driving towards organizational transformation. You’ll want to decide if learning will be segmented, conducted in parallel with tailored learning experience for each level, or cascaded, where leader-teachers train their staff.

If you’re working towards a narrower goal, focus your effort on the learner levels that will be most impactful. For example, in our work with Fortune 2000 global companies who want to innovate, a common goal is getting leaders to foster group norms of innovation on their teams. To that end, we’ve found that starting with mid-level leaders is most impactful.

Checklist for Assessment

• Assess organizational context
• Consider the gaps between the current state and the ideal one
• Identify target audiences

Additional Resources

• How to Assess Leadership Skills for a Leadership Development Program
• Don’t Let Your Company’s Culture Stifle Leadership Development
• How L&D Can Create More Effective Learner-Driven Experiences

Development: What kind of learning experiences will work for you?

Leadership development programs are a significant investment. Not only do they cost time and money, but they also connect to individual emotions about workplace performance and worth. Employees feel valued, engaged, and empowered if the program is worthwhile. If it isn’t, it can be a powerful drag on morale.

Because the stakes are high, organizations often partner with learning experts like Harvard Business Impact to guarantee that their investment has value and impact. Through decades of research and continuous focus on improvement, we’ve found that clarity, thoughtful design, and quality content yield the most successful programs.

The right experience will consider what leaders at each level need and how much time and focus they can devote. Self-guided programs are consistent and low-maintenance; immersive group experiences allow for more nuance and depth.

Different leadership levels have distinct responsibilities, needs, and expectations. The architecture of the learning experience should consider these factors. Frontline leaders who are new to management may feel isolated and can benefit from an experience that connects them with mentors and peers. Mid-level leaders, managing both up and down, are highly leveraged and can benefit from micro-learning and skill practice that is directly applicable to their work. Executives benefit from depth and high-touch interactions with peers and experts that provide an outside-in perspective.

Most enterprise leadership development programs leverage a combination of experiences. Our partnership with Capital Group, designed to reinforce leadership standards and priorities across locations, included a mix of in-person and virtual learning with curated content, facilitated discussions, executive sponsorship, and structured assignments that pushed participants to apply learning on the job.

Content is another critical factor. There’s no shortage of leadership development resources, and a coming wave of low-quality AI-generated content will only exacerbate that. Resources should be vetted, relevant, and applicable to learning goals. This is essential to building trust in the program.

With learning content, less is more: too many choices will overwhelm the learner; too many priorities distract from the key goals. Keep the program focused, even in the face of pressure from senior leaders to add new things to the mix. Generally, what is highly relevant is much more important than what is “interesting.” Make learner relevance your touchstone.

Checklist for Development

• Define the learning experience
• Tailor architecture for different leadership levels
• Curate content

Additional Resources

• Strategies to Effectively Engage Learners Across the Enterprise
• When Designing Employee Learning Programs, Less Is More

Executive Involvement: How can senior leaders support learners?

The behaviors that are reinforced and rewarded by senior leaders greatly influence how employees act. If time and structure allow it, consider how you can integrate senior leadership in your leadership development program, beyond simply seeking buy-in.

Our learning solutions often include a “leader as teacher” element. Leaders might share a personal story at the program’s kick-off, host a discussion, participate on a panel, or sponsor an action learning project. Some of our clients also use formal mentorship programs to reinforce learning. Whatever the method, the payoff is significant: the presence of leaders as teachers significantly increases relevance and engagement.

Even if leaders aren’t directly involved, they should be very aware of the context of your learning initiative so they can identify teachable moments in the day-to-day work. Regular updates from you will keep the program content top-of-mind for them.

When American Express wanted to strengthen close to 16,000 mid-level leaders, we co-created a virtual, blended cohort program customized for relevancy and immediate application. Over 100 senior leaders acted as sponsors, sharing career stories and contextualizing learnings to American Express’ business environment. Frontline, mid-level, and upper-level leaders got to explore how important topics like collaboration really worked at American Express. For sponsors, it was a good opportunity to connect authentically with a large number of leaders in a psychologically safe space to discuss topics they were passionate about, which helped build these senior leaders’ personal brands in the company.

Checklist for Executive Involvement

• Determine how senior leaders will be integrated into the program

Additional Resources

• How to Turn Your Busy Leaders into the Teachers They Need to Be

Implementation: How will you integrate the learning experience?

Successful implementation requires clarity, ease, and support. Leaders’ time is precious, so program delivery should be relatively seamless. Experiences can be integrated into an existing environment to minimize learning curves and platform fatigue or delivered on a separate, all-in-one platform. The right choice will vary by organization, but the most critical factor is ease. It should be easy to access lessons, content, schedules, cohort information, and progress indicators. Make sure there’s a responsive support contact to provide platform training and field questions.

Before you launch a leadership development program, make sure everyone understands how the program aligns with your learning development strategy and the organization’s broader business strategy. Drawing clear connections between desired behaviors and business outcomes will encourage employees to prioritize learning. If it’s one of multiple learning initiatives, help employees understand the unique part this program plays.

Drawing clear connections between desired behaviors and the ultimate business priority will encourage employees to prioritize learning.

Beyond serving company goals, leadership development has a lot of value for individuals. Defining “What’s in it for me?” for employees is a powerful motivator, especially at the beginning of the program. Share the scope of the learning development plan with participants so they understand that it will be relevant and practical, with clear outcomes that align with what leaders believe will make them even more successful.

Checklist for Implementation

• Choose the right platform
• Delegate a support contact for participants
• Contextualize the program before launch

Additional Resources

• The Changing Face of Leadership Development

Feedback and Evaluation: How are learners performing?

Leaders can read a thousand articles, but if they’re not putting learning into practice, the effort is wasted. Managers and leadership development teams must cultivate a safe space for application and experimentation. Digital simulations and peer discussion groups can help, but it’s just as critical for senior leaders to encourage and support applications of learning throughout the workday and to provide regular feedback.

You shouldn’t wait until the end of your learning experience to find out if it worked. Some digital platforms, including Harvard ManageMentor® and ManageMentor Spark®, can provide real-time reporting in aggregate, in groups, or at the individual level, including real-time polling on behaviors. With this data, managers and learning partners can adjust lessons and content to address gaps and areas of challenge. Over time, trends can be identified, helping organizations deepen their understanding of organizational strengths and weaknesses. This also provides useful information on how leaders learn best, to guide future programming.

Checklist for Feedback and Evaluation

• Create a plan for learning application and feedback
• Collect data for analysis and optimization

Additional Resources

• Decisions, Decisions: How L&D Can Use Data to Gain Insight on Learning
• How to Give Feedback—Especially When You’re Dreading it

Measuring Impact: How effective was the program?

Once a leadership development program ends, you can analyze its business impact and learner engagement and satisfaction. Depending on your program timeframe and goals, it may be months before some quantitative business metrics like increased revenue or retention are proven out, but others—like program engagement and application of learning on the job—can be assessed immediately.

Engagement data might include participation by team and level; hits and return visits for specific content; and social and sharing metrics. Application data can be quantitative (number of learners who used new behaviors on the job) and qualitative (self-reported ratings of success, confidence, and desire for more practice).

An end-of-session satisfaction survey for participants provides feedback on many points, including perceived value, program strengths and drawbacks, logistical and platform feedback, success stories, and more. A survey aimed at supervisors can determine if the program influenced behavior change. We typically recommend conducting a follow-up survey two or three months after the learning experience to assess the program’s impact on behavior.

Change requires effort and risk—make sure participants know their efforts are appreciated.

Evaluating satisfaction, engagement, and impact data will provide valuable information about the levers you can pull to improve future learning experiences. But no matter what the outcome is, be sure to celebrate employees for their commitment to learning. A third of employees don’t think their companies provide enough recognition or reward for the learning they’re doing. Change requires effort and risk—make sure participants know their efforts are appreciated.

Checklist for measuring impact

• Measure outcomes against the baseline
• Celebrate program success!

What’s next?: Creating a culture of learning

Analyzing your learning experiences will yield important information about the structure, content, and concepts that work. You can bring that information into the next learning initiative, which might tackle a new business priority or scale the program for a different leadership level or geography.

Between formal learning experiences, learning and development teams can offer self-guided options and resource libraries to help employees maintain a continuous learning cadence. We’ve found that companies with strong learning cultures share a few key strategies.

Strategies that Nurture a Learning Culture

• Offer personalized and relevant resources
• Support autonomous learning with convenient platforms
• Engage employees in social learning and knowledge-sharing
• Collect, understand, and use data to ensure efforts are impactful

The leadership development journey is ongoing. Critical skill sets are rapidly evolving, and there will always be new leaders entering the field who need to learn the evergreen skills of management. Developing a culture of continuous learning is one of the most forward-looking investments a company can make in an era marked by uncertainty and disruptive shifts.

Additional Resources

• Create a Culture of Learning: Five Critical Strategies
• Six Ways to Scale Corporate Leadership Development Quickly for Strategic Advantage
• Driving Learning Across the Organization at ABB

Explore further

Ready to level up your leaders? Use our checklist to help your organization develop a leadership development program that delivers results.

If you have a question about leadership development programs, get in touch with one of our learning design specialists.

Checklist

Creating a Successful Leadership Development Program

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This is a joint blog by Deanna Foster, Senior Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing, and Dr. Gregg Kober, Director, Global Solutions at Harvard Business Publishing.

The post How to Create a Successful Leadership Development Program appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Strategies to Effectively Engage Learners Across the Enterprise

Deanna Foster

September 14, 2021

Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly offering employees at all levels, across the enterprise, the opportunity to learn at work. This helps their workforce build the portfolio of knowledge and skills needed to thrive in today’s fast-paced and complex environment. These learning opportunities are available on demand, meeting learners in the moment, enabling them to rapidly acquire new skills that they can apply to their own work, and that support their organization’s strategy, needs, and culture. The best of these learning opportunities acknowledge the time-pressures that today’s learners are experiencing, without disrupting their everyday work life.

Learning at speed and scale happens collectively, but within each individual’s own time, pace, and space; to work effectively, special attention must be given to motivation and engagement. Focusing on relevance as well as the learning experience are essential to achieving impact at scale.

How to motivate your learners – and keep them engaged

Learning at work is motivated by purpose. Linking learning to development plans, professional goals and career aspirations provides each learner with a path to achieving a meaningful goal and personalizes learning at scale. Finding ways to hook learning into your performance management processes demonstrates its significance to individual learners and to the organization. That combination gives meaning and relevance to learning and shouldn’t be overlooked as a motivator.

Designing learning for speed isn’t about reducing learning, it’s about creating learning opportunities that are right-sized. This means providing content that will fit into the time an individual has allocated for learning in their already jam-packed schedule. With ten minutes after lunch earmarked for learning, a learner might view a three-minute video on a topic that’s important to them, and then spend the remainder of their time reflecting on what they’ve just watched – and on how they can apply it. And, right-sized doesn’t have to mean all content is three-minute bite-sized. Right-sized is about respecting learners’ available time and providing the right amount of content to get the job done.  A learner might have time to read a longer article that takes a deeper dive into a topic that’s piqued their interest, so be sure to vary the content length.

Right-sized content matters. So does right-shaped content – meaning the content is available in a range of formats that work for all different learning styles and can spark broad engagement with variety. A long-form article may be perfectly suited to one learner, but a turn-off for other colleagues who prefer listening to a podcast, viewing a video, or reading a shorter “how-to” article. Having content that’s right-sized and right-shaped will engage all learners and motivate them to stick with their learning.

Peer interaction when learning is individualized and self-paced

Peer interaction is critical to learning, and that holds true even when learning is individualized and largely self-paced. Peer interaction is easily built into cohort-based learning, but it can also be embedded when learners are acquiring new skills and knowledge on their own schedules. You can encourage your learners to connect with their peers using internal channels (like Teams or Slack) where they can compare notes, ask for advice, bounce ideas off each other, and encourage each other to try new ways of working. You can also formally set up learning pairs or small groups to connect with and learn from each other or collaborate on a project. Individualized and self-paced learning doesn’t have to mean learning alone.

Learning at speed and scale

Deploying learning at speed and scale will help your organization build the skilled and knowledgeable workforce today’s environment demands. The key is to pair self-directed learning with motivators and support structures that encourage follow-through and keep learners engaged.

What are you doing to engage your learners?

The post Strategies to Effectively Engage Learners Across the Enterprise appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.