Leadership development and learning on the job.
“I learned something new every day.”
Ask a room full of people to describe a time in their life when it was great to come to work, and that’s the most common comment. Our best learning and growth experiences happen when we have both a reason and a way to learn.
In his post, “Embedding Learning in Work: The Benefits and Challenges,” Charles Jennings identifies four of many studies that reached the same conclusion. But if you’re responsible for leadership development and you want to reap the benefits of leadership development embedded in workflow, you have to make some changes.
Change your view of your own work
Traditional leadership development activities have been designed, delivered, and measured. But if you want to do things better you need to give up control and shift from creating and managing to enabling development experiences.
Change the culture of learning
Simply making resources available will not get the job done. Learning on the job needs to become “the way we do things around here.” Review your evaluation process and your reward and recognition systems so that those who learn and help others learn gain from their efforts.
Provide resources for self-directed learning
People must have the resources and understand the ways to make embedded leadership development happen. I asked Charles Jennings for some examples of activities and he suggested the following partial list.
- ‘reflective sessions’ as part of leadership meetings;
- reverse mentoring using checklists for leadership issues rather than trying to train;
- organisation-wide storytelling;
- work narration;
- ‘real’ reflection on project outcomes.
So, now it’s up to you. As they say on those televised competition shows, “Your time starts now!”
