Equipping your leaders with the best tools and enabling them to navigate the complex and changing situation is vital to creating a culture of effective leadership as businesses go through a transformation.
The BTN partnered with CoachHub for an exclusive VIP roundtable of executive People leaders to discuss the current state of leadership and some of the evolving trends and tools that can help to facilitate an improved leadership experience.
The interactive conversation looked at where the leadership gap is evolving due to the challenges around the lack of skills and competencies, generational shifts, changes in workplace culture and identifying, selecting and developing talent.
The following takeaways came about from the conversation:
Create a mixtape of learning that is best for you
There is no magic solution for leadership. One of the most common themes to come about from the conversation was that one of the enablers for the digital shift is leadership.
The role of technology has been forced to the forefront of the People agenda with the rapid advancement of a remote workforce. As Learning leaders, how can we train the workforce to learn the digital skills that they need as the business evolve? Can we create a culture of pull learning?
There were varied experiences around the table about what had worked and what had not but some common trends were around ‘Video Burst’ learning, whereby quick soundbites as a learning style enabled employees to engage with digestible content. The need for agility in learning was brought to fruition with the question asking about how do we get learning out to our employees as quickly as possible?
Some of the People leaders spoke about the huge benefits that have been reaped from the role of coaching and mentoring over the past 12 months as employees strive for a more personalised experience whereby they are on a self-awareness journey.
The role of a manager is to make people better and blend best practice with technology. The aim will always be to transfer learning into the daily life of the employee but how we track whether it’s being implemented and that a culture change is embedded?
We need to help our people understand what is most impactful for their role in terms of where they can upskill. There is the ability for AI to have a positive influence with matching skills that an employee has with the potential skills that a specific employee could need to create a personalised learning experience.
The traditional view of leadership is changing, find what works for your organisation and continuously evolve.
Vulnerability is refreshing, not scary
Safety comes from honesty. The best engagement is always with the most authentic response. Leadership doesn’t mean that you can’t be vulnerable, you just need to trust vulnerability. The group brought many ideas to the table with regard to leadership initiatives that have been rolled out across their organisations and the levels of success that these may have had. Some of the initiatives focused on the well-being of their leaders as a result of the impact that the pandemic has had on themselves and their teams. One of the guests spoke about creating reflection sessions for their employees to help them understand at all levels of the business how they are truly feeling by creating a roadmap to take them through the past 18 months and highlighted at each stage what they found difficult. These sessions allowed employees to feel ok about saying they ‘struggled’.
The role of leadership during transformation was highlighted and the importance of an effective communication strategy with specific focuses being around the humility of admitting we did X wrong but we are now doing it this way because of Y. The openness with employees as to why situations happened, the end goal that we are aiming for and more importantly, the role that a specific employee has in that journey. If senior leadership speak openly with vulnerability, we can create honest conversations built on a culture of trust that ultimately drives performance and effectiveness.
Showcase value through Emotional Intelligence
Employees will always be sceptical as you look to take them on their journey.
Transitioning the career pipeline into a true leadership pipeline creates holistic development at all levels resulting in our employees’ career growth is built upon responsibility. Attendees spoke about giving more junior people within their organisation more ownership and accountability for their role, ultimately empowering them for their career. How can we as people leaders encourage our people to want to be accountable and continue to give them the support to do it? Culture and behaviour have a huge impact on this and learning can be the differentiator that helps to cultivate the behaviours to improve.
The pandemic has made people more resilient and this is the first time that everybody across the world has been in the same situation, therefore use your EQ to drive the change that your organisation is going through.
Bring your leaders & future leaders on your evolving digital shift.
The huge amount of uncertainty that the future brings will undoubtedly bring new challenges for leadership but if the past 12 months have shown anything, this can bring huge opportunities. There is no organisational change without individual change across transformation so the role of the leader is being put under ever-evolving pressure as the leadership gap comes under new scrutiny.
If there ever has been a time to invest in your leadership, it has been now!
About CoachHub
CoachHub is a leading “digital coaching platform” that enables organisations to create a personalised, measurable and scalable coaching program for the entire workforce.
A pool of top coaches from all around the globe and the applications available for access from web and smartphone allow live coaching sessions via video conferencing. This way we prepare managers for better leadership, teams for better group performances and employees for personal and professional growth. Our vision is a personal coach for every employee regardless of career level.
