Leadership Self-Development Matters

In recent years, L&D leaders have increasingly emphasized the importance of employee engagement and corporate learning. However, while senior executives have agreed that corporate learning and actively engaged employees are crucial to the success of a business, they are not including themselves in the re-engagement strategies designed for both personal and professional growth. If your senior executives are not engaged or are uninterested in their own self-development, how can they expect to improve their leadership capabilities and drive their teams to success?

As a Chief Learning Officer, convincing your fellow senior executive peers to take a step back and realize that their engagement in self-development benefits both them and the company is a difficult task. While there is no denying leaders are busy, the company can’t grow if they don’t – or worse, the company will grow and leave them behind. Invite your team to a Lunch n Learn and share these top 3 reasons why self-development is important to everyone, including the executives.

Communication, Communication, Results

Leaders know that having effective communication skills is necessary to getting work done; great leaders know this too, but they also know that communication is a two-way street and is something that can always be worked on to build relationships and strengthen teams. When a senior executive makes the time to develop their communication skills, their entire team appreciates it. Executives that are open to receiving feedback from their employees and ones who listen rather than just delegating orders, create an open and collaborative environment for their employees to feel valued and appreciated. As a leader develops their personal communication skills, their team members’ do too – collectively they can work together to produce successful results.

Congratulations, You are the New Face of…Learning!

The ability to mentor and lead by example are must-have traits of senior leaders. If your executive team does not care about corporate learning or enhancing their personal or professional development, their team members will stop to care as well. The team members that do care will begin to feel as though their values are unaligned with their leaders and in return, leaders risk losing passionate employees. By having a senior executive that is an advocate for learning, the team will continue to grow together, help each other, and offer support to drive success. On the personal side, when leaders show that they enjoy learning new skills out of the office, they show the value of work-life balance and encourage their employees to do the same. With outside learning, leaders can even set up out of office excursions and enhance the team building experience.

Creating a More Well-Rounded You

Senior executives miss out when they do not engage with their self-development. Doing the same thing every day expecting different results (or worse, not caring about getting different results) will harm both the executive and the team. However, once a senior executive opens up his/her mind to re-engagement and learning more about themselves, their possibilities are endless. To start, a leader may realize they are an excellent communicator but may not be flexible with their methods – by zeroing in on their qualities and taking time to know themselves will help them succeed professionally. Further, for a senior executive, going to networking conferences might seem impossible to fit in their schedule, however, by attending, they get to meet like-minded individuals, strengthen their interpersonal skills, collaborate, and learn new ideas to implement into their strategies. Finally, by embracing self-development, senior executives learn to embrace change, value mistakes and rely on their internal drive to achieve success.

Are you a Chief Learning Officer or VP of L&D? Join the Corporate Learning and Development Institute group here on LinkedIn to share your expertise with your peers who, like you, value learning and are looking for creative ways to encourage learning in the workplace.