10 Key Insights to Unlock Your Company's L&D Potential

In my Corporate Learning Network post of June 28, 2021, I featured leadership lessons from the milestone issue 100 of Leader to Leader, where I have been managing editor since 2011. I’m following up with key insights and pertinent quotes from authors published in the subsequent four issues. I believe these nuggets of information will have particular resonance for Corporate Learning Network readers, especially given today’s ultra-uncertain times, when nothing can be taken for granted, and little can be safely overlooked.

1. Learning Journeys for the Entire Organization

Ekpedeme “Pamay” M. Bassey is CLO/Chief Learning Officer and Chief Diversity Officer of The Kraft Heinz Company. She describes her role: “First, I drive the company’s global training and learning strategy, programs and initiatives, and second, I drive a culture of continuous learning, bold creativity and intellectual curiosity.”

She also contends that leaders must be role models for continuous learning: “Taking time to learn does not get in the way of leaders reaching targets, making strategies come to life and delivering results. It is the way.”

2. Adopting Peer Coaching Approaches

Meredith Bell, co-founder and President of Performance Support Systems, a global software company, contends that “companies often hire executive coaches for top-level leaders. But these services are expensive, so it’s not practical to invest in them for all levels of leadership. The answer is peer coaching—leaders coaching leaders."

For further benefits, she writes that “for organizations committed to improving how leaders communicate with others, a leader-to-leader peer coaching program is a realistic way to make sure new skills become permanent habits.”

3. Feedback as Coaching and Inspiration

Fred Reichheld is the creator of the famed Net Promoter System of management. He and Bain & Company Loyalty colleagues Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns write: “People have to believe that it is safe to give and receive feedback. They have to believe that coaching and inspiration—rather than judgment, evaluation, or punishment—are the intent. Conversely, if team members feel that the feedback process is designed to rank-order them, shame low performers, or make their failures a part of their permanent record, they will focus their mental energy on reframing, excuse-making and blame-shifting.”

4. Who Cares? Start With You

Heather R. Younger, CEO and Founder of Employee Fanatix, a leading employee engagement, leadership development, and DEI consulting firm, says that a “caring leader makes sure to set time with their people one-on-one and listens intently to what their employees need from them to do their best work. When this type of leader is around, employees feel like they matter. They feel a deep bond with this type of leader because they feel they can be their authentic selves and are appreciated for their time, effort and work.”

5. Being in a Broader Human Spectrum

April Rinne, a futurist and organizational advisor, writes that “Not a single person in any culture sees the full picture. The best anyone can do is become aware of, and then learn to see, what they are missing. The way we see anything—and everything—is influenced by our social norms, which emphasize certain values and goals over others. Of course, social norms serve an important purpose … However, by and large, any set of social norms represents only one way of seeing and being in the world: one slice of an infinitely broader human spectrum.”

6. Mentoring Is a “Transfer of Knowledge”

Brien Walton is Director of the Richard E. Dyke Center for Family Business at Husson University, in Maine. He writes: “Mentorship should be viewed as a “transfer of knowledge.” The goal is to provide lessons learned that will help the employee succeed long after the mentor has retired. Ideally, those lessons reflect business best practices the employee could use in any occupation.

The indirect benefit of this approach is the employee will often perceive the mentor as their ally or advocate, who can help them safely navigate the challenges of a non-diverse work environment.”

7. Normalizing the Intuitive in Leadership

Natalie Nixon, president of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC, and an authority on creativity, writes: “Think of leading with intuition as three concentric circles. Wonder is at the core because stillness and observation are required for us to hear that little voice inside. The second circle is discernment—finding the strength to act on our intuition and speak up. Rigor often comes into play here as we dig deep to find the data to back up our intuition. The outermost circle comes from making a practice of listening to and acting on our intuition. This is the point at which intuition becomes an essential tool in our leadership tool kit.”

8. Counteract ‘Us Versus Them’ Dynamics

Cross-cultural consultant Laura Kriska writes that “the great myth of the Us versus Them mentality is the belief that the only way to prioritize some people is by marginalizing others. Retaining your top performers by allocating resources to support those performers is part of any manager’s job.

It rewards and incentivizes performance and reminds those top employees that they are important to the organization. But achieving this sense of importance by allowing high performers to flaunt rules or treat others poorly can have a negative impact on the whole organization.”

9. Co-creation Is Not Just a Buzzword

Terry Jackson, leader of JCG Consulting Group LLC, explains that “Co-creation refers to the collaboration among interested parties to create something better than either could have created on its own.

The concept was made popular in 2000 by C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in their Harvard Business Review article “Co-opting Customer Competence,” and in their 2004 book The Future of Competition, in which they defined co-creation as “joint creation of value by the company and the customer; allowing the customer to co-construct the service experience to suit their context.”

10. Beware of Collaborative Overload

According to Rob Cross, a professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, and an oft-cited researcher, “Collaborative overload is insidious in that it feels good right up until it doesn’t. You feel like you are in the thick of things and that people need you. Right up until a disruption like losing a key employee, absorbing yet another role expansion or a significant other that says “no more.”

Each of the above takeaways has direct implications for how people learn and lead, and the conditions set by management and leadership that either advance learning, or make it more difficult. Which ones resonate most strongly with you, and how do they reflect current practices in your workplace?