Building a Leadership Culture and Supporting the Leadership Learning Journey ([email protected])

Leader need to take responsibility for organizational development and for building a learning journey for all employees.  They need to connect and collaborate with each and every learner.  Their focus needs to be on three key areas:

1. Competency development which maximizes knowledge transfer.  2. Engagement between the learners and their challenges that can have personal learning value.  3. Learnings which are based on business requirements, and on driving the actual utilization and application of the new skills.

Yes, we understand that all leaders are different.  They have different personalities, skills and strengths.  Forget their shortcomings and weaknesses.  Rather, recognize that the ideal organizational development approaches may vary and can be based on a combination of influencing factors.  Some leaders may use the more traditional approaches to development, such as group learning workshops.  These events should be customized to meet very specific desired outcomes, and always be assembled based on several engaging activities.

Other components to a learning culture and different leadership styles can be based on building one-on-one coaching relationships and feedback sessions.  The intent would be to help grow self-awareness and highly focused skills.  Driving organizational performance and successes will be further enhanced through the utilization of the new competencies as well as insights, resulting in soft-skill growth such as authentic leadership behaviors.

Leadership development and the building of a learning culture s important to drive outstanding organizational results and outcomes.  Two very interesting "learning outlooks" have been reported by Chief Learning Officer magazine based on a BIB survey:  A. Wikis and blogs are overhyped.  B. The use of external vendors for leadership development will increase during 2016. 

The key is to accept the critical fact that leaders are important in defining the needed development and identifying an approach to delivering value to the organization.  These leaders help drive the maximization of employee talent through energetic coaching and even have themselves in roles of coaching-leaders.  They help lift employees out of the weeds and clarify the long-term big picture direction as well as to enhance a focus on situational solution-solving.  They build achievement paths based on team connections which drive both effectiveness as well as efficiencies of employee groups and their value-oriented learnings.

Leaders need to listen from the heart and always help broaden the growth aspects of learning.  This is done by permitting employees and others to dynamically dream their view of the big picture.  They must always keep enhancing relationships throughout the organization by encouraging risk-taking with courage, and showing acceptance for challenging behaviors which are based on internal beliefs.  Leaders need to develop other leaders, and help them embrace humility and find ways to be humble.  They need to encourage other leaders to focus on what really matters.  They need to fuel optimism beyond just motivating, and inspire truly engaging behaviors.  All of these types of growth help employees gain alignment with the organizational goals as well as company values.  Authentic leaders help others feel empowered in their roles, regardless of level or responsibilities.

So, here is the final recommendations for all leaders in their building of a learning culture:

• Take time to be happy
• Take time to listen more
• Take time to say thanks
• Take time to let go of the some of the challenges
• Take time to always show support of others
• Take time to be yourself
• Take time to build relationships
• Take time to do self-reflecting and to make self-discoveries