Offbeat
Monthly publication/newsletter giving you insights on the latest things that happen in the Learning & Development Space.
Nifty Learning SRL
Bd. Carol I, nr. 23
700507 Iasi, Romania
RO37878850
J/2124/2017
Highlights:
* Leadership is more nurture than nature; virtually anyone can develop their leadership skills.
* Leaders come in all shapes and sizes: charismatic, quiet, deliberative, introverted; not every leadership style works in every situation.
* Companies can support leadership development through formal and informal learning interventions and opportunities. Most companies will settle on a hybrid approach.
* Formal leadership programs are most necessary when a company is trying to reset its values and kickstart a new leadership journey.
* You can’t expect to make a complete leadership culture switch in a short time; it takes months and even years for a company to see significant lasting changes. This is especially true for large companies or situations where a radical culture change is needed. A relevant example is Nokia’s failure to change its culture before running out of time and resources.
* A big problem with leadership programs in large companies is that they are not persistent enough and not properly integrated with the rest of the culture.
* The organization leaders’ task is to show to employees that they’re consistently embodying, promoting, and supporting a change for the better.
* Cutting corners on culture will send the wrong message to employees; if you plan to make significant changes in leadership behaviors, you can’t compromise when these behaviors are put to the test. Otherwise, employees will perceive that this change is not being taken seriously by management, and they won’t adopt the changes themselves.
* Improvements in leadership are hard or sometimes impossible to measure objectively. It’s mostly a matter of observing, over time, if positive changes in culture are noticeable by both leaders and employees.
* L&D should be part of the leadership team and take part in the decision-making process when deciding to implement new learning programs that have a substantial impact on culture.
* L&D does the bulk of the work of understanding the organization, creating leadership development strategies, planning activities, and creating/curating learning content.
* L&D should equip themselves with resilience, as leadership development programs take a long time to create sustainable change.
* L&D creates the development opportunities, but only the leadership team, through its example, can make or break the success of any leadership development initiative.
* Where decision-making cannot rely on data, this is where a leader’s experience comes into play, alongside their judgment and them keeping in mind the best interest of the company and its employees.
* Most leaders fail to make significant cultural changes by not being intransigent enough in situations where they discover intentionally destructive behaviors.
* Having the right kind of culture and leadership mentality in the company is the number one job of the CEO.
* “The culture of a company is defined by the worst things leadership is willing to tolerate.” – found in “School Culture Rewired” by Steve Grunaert and Todd Whitaker, as well as in a podcast episode on How to Build an Inclusive Workplace by Adam Grant.
How to start developing leadership learning programs:
1. Define the vision of the intended to-be leadership behaviors that you plan to develop – this takes place within the leadership team of the organization; L&D should be part of this team.
2. Break down the newly defined vision into values, then competencies and skills.
3. Create learning opportunities to promote and develop these skills.
4. Start with a pilot, then showcase the results to leadership to ask for a wider launch of the same program. Keep in mind that the company’s leadership team is one of the internal customers of L&D, alongside learners and the various business units with their own goals.
5. Arm yourself with patience, as leadership development is a long-term endeavor.
Some of the skills that make a good leader: negotiation, assertiveness, sociability, common sense, learning from experience, consultancy, asking for feedback, empathy, decision making, self-management, prioritization, communication, ability to handle uncertainty, handling divergent opinions, long term thinking and planning, change management and mass communication, consistency between behavior and message.
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We're joined by Andrei Postolache, founder at Xeriously, leadership & soft skills consultant, and author of Fun & Fearless Leadership. Our conversations explore the intricacies of being a good leader in a complex working environment, the discipline and skillset required to put together and lead high performing teams and how that ties into L&D initiatives in the organisation.
Create and maintain your company’s catalog and advertise it to your employees. Assign courses and pre-work, manage materials, and configure all of the pre-requisites for a specific course.
Have a real-time overview of your training plan. Create, schedule, and track in-person or remote training events. Register participants, mark attendance, and automate the pre- and post-event communication.
Forget about manually managing your waitlists and approval flows. Your L&D team doesn’t need to constantly go back and forth to handle last minute cancellations and unresponsive managers.
Move as fast as your organization needs you to. Plan training events rapidly by looking directly at the real-time training requests submitted by your department, line managers, or learners.
Automate communication with learners. With our beautifully designed training newsletters, your learners are notified about new opportunities for learning and professional development.
Gather in-the-moment feedback from your training participants, to get actionable information that improves your learning offer and to get more engaged audiences.
Track training event expenses in real-time. Add delivery costs, venue fees, and others as soon as they are paid, so you don’t have to go through piles of paperwork later. Extract info such as price per learner, business unit budget, cost breakdown, financial efficiency, etc., in seconds.
Use learning items as building blocks to create targeted learning programs. Organize your learning content to satisfy a multitude of business requirements (such as a new job role, a program that the employee must go through).
Publish your learning materials (SCORM, PDF, video, etc.) and send them to your learning audiences.
Assign learners to custom groups automatically, so they have access to the right learning at the right time.
Instantly see and share the data that matters with the help of automated reports. Gain visibility over your training operations using fully detailed reports.
Get a real-time overview of what’s up, what’s next, and what’s left to do for the L&D department. See the data change over time in Nifty’s intuitive Analytics dashboard.
Navigate local, national, and international learning requirements with automated tools and reports that take the effort out of compliance, wherever or whoever you’re training.
Simplify your team’s user management and access.
Securely manage your most valuable asset. However large or small your training database is, we’ve got the controls in place to handle your employees’ training data safely.
Our dedicated product specialists will have your teams up and running in days, not months — and will keep being available to answer questions at any time.
Every Nifty Learning customer has access to our Customer Success team to create, build, and deploy great learning experiences.
We provide an integration API, and we can integrate with any of our customer’s 3rd party systems (HR system, ERP, CRM, calendar, room booking system, content provers, learning platforms, etc.) to provide a seamless merge between our platform and your current tech stack.
The platform allows the L&D manager to decide how much of the workflow can be automated.
Either fully automated actions, where the L&D manager only adds a new session and the platform does the rest until completion, or manually managing each step of the session management process.
