Where Corporate Learning and Development failed… At the Senior Levels

Having spent over 25 years with learning and development, I have been trying hard to address often stated issues like:

·        Why is the leadership pipeline superseded often when filling crucial positions?

·        Why is it that we don’t have people ready to fill the positions opening up?

·        Who can we send to immediately integrate the acquired company? 

I was fortunate to work in Corporate LnD, Leadership development and in a Business School. I think the current model of corporate LnD is flawed due to two reasons:

·        They have tried to mimic a B-School and thus gone for intense fragmentation – also happening as Academicians have been at the helm of Corporate LnD setups

·        Corporates need integrative decision making where leader’s mindsets, culture, strategy, process capability, financial acumen and people skills are often bundled together and they need to be processed to make decisions NOW – they do not have the luxury of endless time

What is the solution therefore? It’s not in gamification, it’s not about making content more engaging – it’s rather about capturing the success stories and the organizational failures (often guised as learnings) in the form of case studies, and then building capability based on those. These cases need to drive integrative decision making while subject matter experts can be engaged to provide purely theoretical constructs and explain the power behind using them. And for a motivated individual both can be done in a Virtual Environment. Those not motivated to learn – better not to waste time and money on them.

Two things therefore Corporate LnD needs to go with:

1.      There is nothing better than a good theory

2.      Build integrative decision making skills by focusing on success stories and learnings from within company case studies and free frank fireside discussions to understand mindsets – and they are more prominent in family scenarios and disguised in corporate settings.