A new approach to training for a new kind of leader

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

The rapid pace of technological innovation is forcing businesses to adapt their leadership training practices and requiring those leaders to develop new skills, while also giving them new tools for doing so.
Leadership training has historically been conducted in large group settings at a designated time and place separate from daily work activities, such as conferences, seminars and lectures. The pandemic, however, forced many organizations to evolve to a more flexible, digital and on-demand approach, and put a greater emphasis on the more human aspects of leadership.
More recent business challenges are evolving leadership training further, inspiring a re-evaluation of the kinds of skills leaders need to be successful, and how to best deliver that training.
'As opposed to the lengthy seminars that we used to go to for maybe a full day, we're starting to see more micro-learning programs,' says Lisa White, a leadership consultant for Trinity Training and Development, which is based in Austin, Tx., but has a remote team. 'It tends to give them bite-sized learning, and it tends to give them skills to work on, so quite often they'll have assignments that they need to work on and come back and report on.'
Ms. White adds that since she began her career 15 years ago she's seen a significant evolution in the kinds of leaders organizations are seeking.
'It used to be more my-way-or-the-highway, and the focus tended to be a lot more on discipline and authority,' she says. 'Modern leadership training tends to be more of that boss-to-coach mentality, so you're there to help guide people, to look after the people in your charge, as opposed to being in charge.'
Like those who report to them, leaders need to quickly learn and adopt new tools and technologies as they're integrated into the business. At the same time, they're also being asked to develop more of their human or 'soft skills.'
The most popular business skills training programs globally offered by online education provider Coursera, for example, are human resource technology, risk mitigation and control, workplace technologies, stakeholder communications, and work force development. Within Canada and among leadership and management training courses specifically, programs in the top 10 include titles like 'the art of storytelling' and 'talent acquisition' and they sit alongside those dedicated to project management and execution.
'There's a lot of pressure to build technical skills as a leader, but at the same time what we're seeing in our Coursera data is that human skills are still important,' says Coursera's chief learning officer, Trena Minudri. 'We're seeing exponential growth in the space of AI [artificial intelligence skills training], but human skills are still in our top 10, and it's everything around communication, conflict management, emotional intelligence – those skills, especially in the age of AI, are becoming even more important.'
That transition, Ms. Minudri says, speaks to a longer term transition of the archetype of strong leadership.
'There was a focus on charisma and speeches and inspiring in a very extroverted way, and what we're seeing is that's no longer the case,' she says. 'We're seeing a kind of 'quiet leadership' gaining influence.'
Just as AI is reinforcing the importance of human skills it's also giving learning platforms like Coursera new ways of delivering more personalized training and development programs.
'Leadership development is really about helping leaders learn effectively and efficiently, and building AI into learning makes it much faster,' Ms. Minudri says. 'You're not sitting through content that doesn't matter – it's really geared towards what you need to know, how you need to know it, in the way that you can learn best.'
On-demand video-based learning and AI-driven personalized education have been gaining in popularity, but there has also been a return to more in-person leadership development following a pandemic pause, says David Gibbons, senior client partner for global management consulting firm Korn Ferry in Vancouver.
While e-learning and generative AI can teach leaders what to do, 'the actual practice and building skills and capabilities requires more human interaction to bring that to life over time,' he says. Some AI programs offer feedback via chatbots, but 'because we are leading people, having that human interaction is still important.'
More so than the learning format, Mr. Gibbons says leadership training is evolving to become less one-size-fits-all and more closely tied to unique business needs and outcomes or designed to solve specific organizational challenges.
'Businesses are coming to us to say, 'here's the big shift we're making, here's our growth aspirations, we need leaders to shift in this way that's really contextually relevant, so can you help us shift them?' ' he says. 'We're seeing new strategies come out more frequently now, because of the pace of what's happening in the world and the variety of changes requiring organizations to constantly reinvent their business models, their growth aspirations and their strategies.'