A showcase of learning and leadership development best practices from three high-impact organizations
Who’s Telling the Stories
Story time is 11am Eastern on April 28th at Bersin & Associates’ IMPACT Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. Don’t miss it! Learning and leadership development executive leaders from Nationwide Insurance, Prudential Financial, and Morgan Stanley will lead us through lively discussion and personal stories of their learning and leadership development challenges and successes--what works and what doesn’t in today’s global and complex world. The panelists, including Jason Gallourakis, Associate Vice President Learning Solutions at Nationwide Insurance, John Hom, Vice President of Leadership Development International at Prudential Financial, and Bob Vulpis, Executive Director Learning & Development at Morgan Stanley, will share their thoughts on high-impact approaches to learning and leadership development strategy and programs that drive their organizations’ business goals. Even these best companies are rethinking their approach to development. Should you be doing the same?
Why Are the Stories Compelling?
Today’s business challenges are dominated by complexity, uncertainty and quantum shift. Talent and trust, learning and decision making, innovation and risk management are more crucial than ever before for success – above all, a business-oriented focus on learning and leadership development will make the crucial difference between an organization’s success and failure. With these business challenges and changes, come the talent challenges that we are enduring: heightened competition for talent, development cost reduction pressures, an aging and diverse workforce, increasing global mobility, a real need to embed development within the workplace not the classroom, a movement to create the business case rationale for accelerated investment in learning and leadership development initiatives, executive level commitment, and business unit leader buy-in.
Given this, your HR/Talent/Learning/Leadership Development Team must work upwardly with senior leadership and cross-functionally with your business unit leaders across your entire (global) enterprise to build a strong leadership bench, deploy learning and leadership development programs that build new 21st century leader competencies, leverage social and other forms of informal learning, and prepare your organizations to compete and thrive in an increasingly borderless and complex environment. With the rules changing daily, tackling these business and talent challenges and capitalizing on these strategic HR opportunities aligned with business goals, requires leaders and their organizations to radically re-think what constitutes effective learning and leadership development today. Nationwide, Prudential, and Morgan Stanley have leveraged learning and leadership development strategies and development initiatives that ensure their business success.
How Do I Get My Own Stories Started?
So where do you start? The game plan looks slightly different at every organization because it must start with and stay aligned with the unique business goals of that organization.
But there are a few guiding tenants for all:
1. Identify Strategic Initiatives & Breakthrough Development NeedsExamine your current business strategy, leadership strategy, learning and leadership development strategies. Identify key development initiatives that develop leaders in alignment with your business goals. Assess your learning and leadership development needs and define the metrics to measure the business impact of your development initiatives.
2. Assess the Supply and Demand of Your Leadership TalentConsider your organization’s leadership pipeline needs and individual emerging leader needs. Develop the learning and leadership development initiatives that are necessary to develop individual competence for all leader levels: emerging leaders, first line leaders, mid-level leaders, senior leaders, and high potentials.
3. Implement Business-Driven Development InitiativesLaunch business-aligned development programs, assessments, tools – formal and informal – for all leader levels.
4. Measure Business Impact Compare the scores of your baseline metrics to those after leaders complete learning and leadership development initiatives. Has your turnover decreased? Engagement increased? Analyze the data and share it regularly with all stakeholders: senior leaders, business unit leaders, HR leaders, participants and employees.
5. Define Successes and Lessons LearnedLeverage post-mortems or after-action-reviews to determine the continuous improvement efforts that need to be made to your learning and leadership strategies and/or your learning and leadership development experiences and activities.
What Business Results Can I Count On My Stories Generating?
Now, you’ve invested in these transformational, strategic approaches to learning and leadership development, what results can you expect? A winning position! As the executives from Nationwide, Prudential and Morgan Stanley will share and as Bersin & Associates’ high-impact leadership development research this year validates, the company with the best leaders is guaranteed to come out on top.
Join me at my own presentation at IMPACT on early findings of our 2010-2011 high-impact leadershp development research and tune in to my next blog to gain some early glimpses of what Bersin & Associates’ 2010-2011 high-impact leadership development research reveals about our six best-practices of leadership development and their associated 21st century leadership development trends.
What learning and leadership best practices does your organization have in place that makes you a winner?
Please write to me at barb.arth@bersin.com and share the learning and leader development approach at your organization that sets you apart from the rest.