Ways to address AI and leadership training inefficiencies

"People frequently state lack of growth opportunities as the number one reason they leave. L&D pros need to capture the reasons why employees leave their company to build the ROI of training them," says Mary ?ajfar , Training & Development VP at Investors Title, in one of my interviews with elite OD professionals.

Ellie Busmire , Leadership Development Manager at Notion , highlighted that business leaders this year are specifically asking for skills around leadership, navigating change, and team effectiveness. But they often hold back on participating or encouraging their teams to attend learning programs because they think: "I cannot invest time away from the work itself unless I'm sure it's actually going to move the needle. I wish there was time for more development, but we are already too busy."

L&D must not become just a reactive facilitation machine for workshops. It does not move the needle without accountability to change. After Ellie's workshops at Airtable, she provides coaching questions for managers to ask their team members during their 1:1s to facilitate that accountability.

Michael Morris, Global L&D Director at Aptos, agrees with this idea: After training, we need to get people to demonstrate the application of the skills within 24 hours and hold them accountable to it.

Debi Wayne, SPHR , L&OD Director at Elastic, believes training is rarely the final solution to problems. You have to institutionalize a new way of thinking first and then new processes in teams for training to stick.

"One of the deadly sins of leadership development is making certain programs required. By doing that, you are basically saying that all people struggle with that skill.?

But do they really?"

That confirms the experience of Katie Lynch-Holmes , Head of L&D at Ellucian. "Leadership training that's one size-fits-all or one and done doesn't work. It's talking at people and not reinforcing desired behaviors. That's not the case here at Ellucian. While most people lack data to provide ROI -- data makes us happy here because we know how to tie our training results back to impact.”

Therefore, Ayesha Jamaspi, Director of Talent Development at Bitwise, is convinced leadership development should not be a copy and paste, but training needs analysis does not need to be linear. It's enough to have an idea, start a program, and see what other developmental needs unfold along the way.

The holy grail of training needs analysis is facilitating learners to identify their opportunities for improvement by themselves and then giving them fully customized training and support.?

"Leaders need an on-demand way to ask their questions. They need help to identify the root causes and symptoms of team issues. Who is feeling the pain? What's really working and not working?

We are piloting AI to help with this", shares Giuseppina (Giusy) Laurenziello , Global OD Director at Novartis.

There is a need to have information when people need it in a language that resonates with them.

"Using AI requires people to get to the point of their questions and communicate clearly. AI can be a thinking partner to help leaders understand the root causes of their observations, initial reflections and steer them to the next steps.? going on."

Global CHRO Gabriela Enriquez from Accelirate also emphasized the significance of providing employees with training in AI assistants to enhance their daily work performance. She stated, “It is paramount for us to guarantee that our employees are proficient in the efficient use of tools such as Chat GPT and Gen Ai to improve business processes, benefiting both our clients and our internal operations. This is reflected in our dedication to internal in-depth training sessions.”

We are running internal AI hackathons on how our employees can become more productive using ChatGPT in their daily routines, Pamela Mattsson, PhD , SVP People & OD at Outreach .

AI is not going to replace leaders. Somebody still needs to connect with their people and make sound decisions, concludes Mark Houston , Sr. Manager of Global Leadership Development at Circle K.

Do you want to run AI Hackathons so that each employee discovers his/her own use cases and automates a significant portion of their workload? Let us know.?