Chief Learning Officer â CLO Media

Video: Positioning remote learning for diversity, equity and inclusion

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 16:53:18 GMT

The shift to remote work, and therefore remote learning, presents a number of different challenges and opportunities in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, says Charlie Chung, vice president of business development and solutions consulting at NovoEd. Simple e-learning is not enough, but a well-designed learning program can help bring DEI to the forefront.

The post Video: Positioning remote learning for diversity, equity and inclusion appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

Amplify corporate learning with a digital marketing game plan

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 01:27:27 GMT

In recent times, corporate learning has gone through a series of major transformations, from traditional training to learning management systems and more recently to cognitive platforms that have the potential to merge diverse learning forms into a unified ecosystem and elevate the workforce experience. It is therefore paramount that today’s workforce has a clear focus on future-proofing employee skills with continuous learning and empowering employees to grow and be able to lead organizational transformation or take on new jobs in the market.

Meanwhile, the IBM Institute for Business Value reports that 60 percent of executives globally confirmed they are struggling to keep their workforce current and relevant. Employees expect learning experiences that are personal, engaging and authentic. As a result, there is an increased focus on influencing and designing irresistible experiences.

Learning and development teams can benefit by emulating key strategies used in digital marketing to help better predict the right learning for their workforces. This approach to learning secures the urge to stay relevant with enabling tools, shifting mindset and top-class learning. It also amplifies the rate and pace at which t professionals acquire unique skills, from content curators to community managers, solution architects, data and behavioral scientists, instructional designers and digital marketers, and so on.

Imagine shifting the behavior of your workforce to continuously learn, supported with data and behavioral insights. Imagine bringing consumerism to content without pushing it as mandatory content but rather architecting the choice. Imagine creating engagement around learning with socialized and gamified content that learners create, curate and consume.

We have seen the rise of digital marketing in human resources mostly in employer branding and talent acquisition, and indeed it’s an exotic job to do digital marketing in HR. However, there is a need to adopt this same methodology with skilling and future-skilling the workforce. This is paramount to bringing a unique value to how employees learn and grow because in this age and time, there’s still so much to learn. Hence, there is a need to devise a game plan of how digital marketing can deliver a user-centric learning experience and achieve faster adoption of learning recommendations.

One key element of this game plan is to “humanize” the learning platform experience and make it more relevant to each learner based on their interests, content consumption behaviors and career aspirations using relevant channels of communication rather than defaulting to classic emails, which is a suboptimum way to get the right attention.

Another critical element for the adoption of digital marketing in workforce learning is using digital nudges and digital marketing campaigns with personalized content via multiple channels and in the flow of work. When deployed appropriately, nudges can steer learners to make better choices. Digital technologies boost nudges’ scale and speed, making them a valuable tool for changing behaviors in organizations of any size. Nudges are a key tenet of behavioral economics. Professor Richard Thaler, considered its founding father, won a Nobel prize in 2017 for his work on the “Nudge” theory.

Digital nudges and learning digital marketing can help to architect the choice based on understanding the behavioral data. When integrated within an AI-enabled learning ecosystem, smart nudges can maximize the adoption of relevant learning choices.

Reimagining learning can only be done by reimagining the learning team structure around experiences, data and business priorities and embedding learning in the DNA of the workforce that is keen to thrive in an increasingly changing environment. This personalized approach to learning will surely lead to greater results stemming from an increase in campaigns engagement, adoption of new behavior and more content consumption.

The post Amplify corporate learning with a digital marketing game plan appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

Update on the SEC and ISO initiatives for human capital reporting

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 17:58:56 GMT

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed their first rule for human capital reporting one year ago in August 2019. The comment period closed in October. No final rule has been issued yet, in part likely due to the SEC’s need to address more pressing COVID-related issues. Hopefully, the final rule will be issued during the next 12 months.

For those not familiar with the SEC initiative, their proposed rule would apply to all publicly traded U.S. companies. Today, companies have to report only one human capital metric: number of employees. The SEC prescribes 11 other areas for companies to comment on publicly, including products and services, order backlog, raw material sourcing and more. Under the proposed rule, the SEC will no longer prescribe what must be disclosed. Instead, the rule will require all material information to be disclosed. Material means anything that an investor would want to know before buying or selling a stock, bond or derivative.

The SEC does say, however, that since human capital is now the primary driver of value, the disclosure will have to include human capital metrics and commentary about human capital initiatives. In particular, they comment that companies will need to discuss talent acquisition, development and retention, at a minimum.

What will investors want to know? If you were considering buying stock in a company, wouldn’t you want to know about the culture (engagement and leadership survey results), diversity companywide and at the top, time to fill critical positions, leadership bench strength, turnover (especially for critical positions), the prevalence of compliance training, and employee development (average hours, amount spent)?

What will happen if a company does not disclose? First, the SEC may bring enforcement action, resulting in a fine. More important, though, the company risks a shareowner lawsuit for failure to disclose material information. Suppose you paid $100 per share and the stock price subsequently declines to $60. You discover that the culture is terrible, the turnover rate is high, critical positions remain unfilled, the company cannot hire good talent and it is not investing in its people. If you had known these things, you would not have paid $100 per share. You sue for the $40 loss based on the company’s withholding of material information, just as you would if the company did not disclose material production or sourcing issues.

So, how can U.S. companies limit their risk of SEC action or shareowner lawsuit? We think one way would be to adopt the International Organization for Standardization standards released in December 2018. The ISO launched an effort in 2015 to identify and define key metrics from both an investor and employee point of view. So, while the SEC focused just on investors, ISO also focused on what employees would want to know about an organization and what management should know to best manage their human capital.

This effort concluded in 2018 with a list of 59 recommended metrics. Twenty-three are recommended for public disclosure by large organizations. Ten are recommended for public disclosure by small/medium organizations. The 10 recommended for public disclosure by all include total workforce cost, human capital ROI, turnover rate, development and training cost, percentage of employees who have completed compliance training, number of accidents, number killed during work, number of employees, number of full-time equivalents and revenue per employee. The first five metrics are generally not reported today and considered confidential. Number of accidents and those killed may be reported. Number of employees is generally reported today (the one metric required by the SEC), FTEs may not be, and revenue per employee can be calculated today from revenue and number of employees.

So, not all 10 are new in terms of public disclosure, but the first five are. Is your organization ready to disclose workforce cost, amount spent on training, human capital ROI, turnover rate or percentage who have completed compliance training? Are you even tracking these?

If you work for a large organization, some of the additional 13 metrics include diversity by age, gender and disability, diversity of the leadership team, leadership trust, time to fill positions, and percentage of positions filled internally. Beginning to get a sense of how big a deal this is?

True, the ISO recommendations are just that — recommendations. But they will be the natural starting point for any organization that wants to be best-in-class and for U.S. organizations that want to comply with the SEC’s rule. Many of us in the standard-setting space believe that the ISO recommendations will eventually be broadly adopted by all organizations, if not out of the desire to be the most forthcoming, then out of the need to be competitive in the market for investment capital and human capital.

In the future, when organizations are disclosing human capital metrics, would you go to work for an organization that does not? True, they may not be required by law to disclose, but why wouldn’t they disclose at least key metrics voluntarily? Probably because they are an embarrassment. Why would you work for an organization where the culture is terrible, where they don’t invest in you, where turnover is high and where there are not enough employees to do the work?

Today, you can say you didn’t know. Tomorrow, you will know.

The proposed SEC rule is available here. The rule is 116 pages, but the section on human capital is under section IIB7, pages 44-54.

The ISO document (ISO 30414:2018 Human resource management — Guidelines for internal and external human capital reporting) is available for purchase here for CHF138 ($140).

Note: ISO is just beginning to release technical specifications on how the metrics are defined and used. By mid-2021, specifications should be available on all 59 metrics. The specifications for five of the eight training and development metrics are now complete and in publication. They should be available soon.

The post Update on the SEC and ISO initiatives for human capital reporting appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

We can’t ‘flow of work’ our way into the future

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 15:25:18 GMT

For years, learning and talent development have struggled to expand our skills around offering embedded tools that deliver performance support. As a response to this deficiency, the phrase “learning in the flow of work” has become a part of the vernacular of most L&D teams and has leapt its way into learning strategy presentations in nearly every industry.

Here is the good news: We’ve made tremendous strides in finding our way out of using instructor-led training to solve every business problem, and, as technology stacks evolve, we’re doing a better job of embedding performance-enabling assets closer to our employees.

The bad news: No matter how much learning in the flow of work we enable, there will always be limits. The incremental delivery of small assets, designed to ensure additive learning, does not include the ability to solve for the wholesale capabilities transformation, which our workforce desperately needs. This is the kind of reskilling needed to prepare America’s workforce for the pace and complexity of the world in front of us. Put simply, the flow of work will never allow enough space for the “future of work.”

Learning departments across the nation are struggling right now with a problem — entire roles and job families are being displaced. Even in a downturn economy with high unemployment, we’re facing challenges filling roles with fully performing talent. We need entire teams, methods and systems within our learning and talent development function that are fully focused on reskilling efforts.

According to labor market analytics firm Emsi, models show that between now and 2025, we’ll cut nearly 12,000 data entry jobs, 48,000 executive and administrative assistant roles, 20,000 teller roles and 40,000 assembly-type roles. Meanwhile, we need to add 215,000 financial advisers, 243,000 registered nurses and 144,000 software developers. In the meantime, our workforce has increased in size only 10 percent since 2005, while demand for skilled employees continues to increase dramatically.

The path from teller to financial adviser won’t be created through job aids and learning-in-the-flow programs. Likewise, the transition from assistant to roles in health care won’t come through a performance support system.

Recently, I spoke with a learning leader preparing for a group of more than 500 system engineers to be displaced because of changes in technology. I saw firsthand an entire unit of hundreds of document scanning staff at a loan processing group be displaced by automation. The kind of strategic talent planning and reskilling needed in this situation can’t be done in the context of a curriculum or even within a department. We must step back, connect the dots between roles being transformed and gaps being created, quickly map critical skills, and leverage a combination of internal subject matter experts and external partners.

Recently, one L&D function made the decision to enter a brand new business vertical — one with some of the tightest labor markets in the nation. At the same time this is happening, automation and business streamlining are displacing thousands of employees.

This organization is planning years in advance and leveraging its tuition assistance program to create new pathways that map roles impacted by its new business strategy. Because the organization doesn’t have a depth of bench to deliver training in the new business vertical and external certifications are needed, it did an in-depth analysis of education partners it could bring in and match with tuition assistance that was nearly debt free. It’s also a tax write-off for the business to create the talent supply it needs to fuel its new business launch.

Here’s the most “can’t miss” part of this story: The Business Roundtable recently declared a commitment to invest in employees. In their own words, this “includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”

We need to take that as a call to action. Our talent development initiatives cannot continue to take the most educated and keep giving them access to the best content and programs. More than 88 million working adults need upskilling or reskilling to keep pace, and 64 million of them don’t have a postsecondary degree.

More important, 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of being entirely automated, primarily among low-paid workers. Our lowest-paid employees are the most at risk in this new future. We have an obligation as learning and talent development professionals to do something more than cosmetic plays at D&I — we must tip the scales in favor of our most vulnerable employees, help them map the skills they need, and unlock new opportunities and mobility. Only that will allow us to go beyond “learning in the flow” of their current job to unlocking the jobs of the future.

The post We can’t ‘flow of work’ our way into the future appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

3 steps to improving conversational capacity

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 17:56:46 GMT

We participate in conversations all the time. They come so naturally to us that we don’t even think about them. But we need to think about them because the ability to talk about issues without getting triggered and dysfunctional makes or breaks our effectiveness — as individuals, teams and organizations.

Almost nobody is born with the ability to have open, balanced, non-defensive dialogue about tough subjects in challenging circumstances. Yet, this is a skill that can be learned.

Our company recently teamed up with Craig Weber, an expert in the field of Conversational Capacity®, a discipline that teaches people to find the “sweet spot,” where candor and honesty are balanced with curiosity and open-mindedness. In the sweet spot, people move beyond personalities and focus on a bigger purpose. This is where breakthroughs and innovations happen.

As Craig points out, anyone can learn to have these powerful conversations by focusing on three areas: awareness, mindset and skillset.

Awareness: Tune into feelings and behavior patterns

When tough subjects come up, most of us have either a fight or flight reaction. We either become more aggressive, pushing our point of view, or we retreat, fearing confrontation. These reactions are usually automatic and unconscious — and both get in the way of productive communication. By becoming aware of our reactions, we can make conscious choices about how to respond.

Awareness also means paying attention to the big picture. We need to ask: What’s the purpose of this meeting or conversation? Is this discussion lining up with that purpose, or against it? By becoming self-aware, we can close any gap between our behavior and the purpose of the conversation.

Mindset: Turn the focus from ego to learning

All too often we let our egos push us out of the sweet spot between candor and curiosity. For example, when we’re an expert on a subject, we might want to show off our smartness. We might become overly assertive or even argumentative, pushing our point at the expense of others. In other words, our candor goes too far.

Or we might do the opposite. We have views and ideas, but we don’t put them out there, because we want to avoid scrutiny or rejection. In this case, we’re not candid enough.

Both these approaches squander learning. We need to put our egos aside and refocus on what we can learn from others or what others can learn from us.

Skillset: Cultivate candor and curiosity

By practicing the following four skills, we can lead conversations in productive directions and resolve difficult issues. The first two skills build candor; the second two build curiosity.

1. State your position concisely. Don’t be the person who fits one sentence into twenty paragraphs. Stick to no more than one or two sentences.

2. Explain the thinking behind your position. Use the phrase, “Let me show you how I got here.” Otherwise, you risk coming off as hyper-opinionated.

3. Test your thinking. Be curious about where you might be making an erroneous assumption. It’s hard to test your thinking with your own thinking, so bounce it off others. Say, “Here’s what I think; here’s why I think it. What am I missing?”

4. Make genuine inquiries into the views of others. If someone’s not participating, invite them into the discussion. For example, you might say, “Connie, we haven’t heard from you yet. Given everything you’ve heard so far, what do you think is the best course of action?” If someone has put something forward, ask them how they got there: “It would be helpful if you’d show us how you came to this conclusion.” If someone is rambling, refocus the conversation: “Bill, you’ve been talking for a while. I’m a little unclear; do you like this or not?”

Conversation is commonplace but not always effective. Trained in conversational skills, we can participate in fruitful discussions that lead to extraordinary breakthroughs. Plus, it’s a lot more fun to have conversations driven by the better angels of our nature, rather than by our base emotional impulses!

The post 3 steps to improving conversational capacity appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

From bystander to upstander

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 17:45:59 GMT

We’ve changed the laws. We’ve mandated sexual harassment prevention training. But nearly three years after #MeToo, studies show that these efforts still might not make any difference in workplace culture and attitudes. What does then?

Up until a couple years ago, anti-harassment training was usually organized in response to a specific incident or public moment. Cynical employees could immediately spot this as the HR “check-the-box” effort that it was. Then, in late 2017, #MeToo happened, and preventing inappropriate interactions at work became a front-and-center priority. HR departments in almost every industry went into overdrive, amending company policies and making sexual harassment training integral to organizational practices.

It’s now commonly accepted that employees should know how to identify and combat harassment. Many states now require businesses to offer anti-harassment training. California currently has the most aggressive legal requirement, stating that any business with five or more employees (supervisory and nonsupervisory) must put those employees through mandatory anti-harassment training — and many other states may soon follow suit.

So, how can business leaders design an anti-harassment training that actually resonates with employees and creates positive change in workplace culture?

Bystander communication works

When my organization began developing anti-harassment training programs for companies, we noticed one key issue that wasn’t being addressed in standard workshops: What about all of that stuff that happens before a situation turns into actual harassment or discrimination?

We had to acknowledge that, while it’s important to know what to do when someone clearly crosses a line, the real key to protecting employees is to stop that line from being crossed in the first place.

Bystander communication training is designed with an actual, real workplace in mind. It focuses on addressing microaggressions — the everyday slights and insults that can turn into harassing behavior over time — and teaches employees how they can spot red flags and intervene. Rather than simply highlighting what constitutes harassment, bystander training teaches employees how to communicate with a co-worker when they see red flags.

While many remarks or actions aren’t intentionally hurtful and may not seem overtly discriminatory, they can take a heavy psychological toll on recipients over time. Employees who know how to identify microaggressions, and understand why they are so hurtful, are more likely to intervene and talk to the offending party in a productive fashion. Bystander communication training teaches employees how to have the conversations that will make their workplace safer, more inclusive and happier overall.

The body of research supporting bystander training is growing. As a recent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report stated, “[Harassment] training is important, but it needs to be the right training.” According to the same report, “Employers should consider workplace civility training and bystander intervention training.”

According to Psychology Today, theory and research both suggest bystander communication trainings “foster context-specific attitudes, beliefs, norms, and skills such that bystanders: are able to quickly and accurately identify a situation as intervention-appropriate, experience action-motivating arousal (including empathy) in the face of the event, have positive attitudes towards intervention and perceive the benefits of action as outweighing the perceived costs, are empowered to act and feel confident in their ability to effectively intervene (bystander efficacy) and are resistant to evaluation apprehension and norms contraindicating action.”

In plain English, this means that bystander communication training makes people more aware and better able to confront difficult situations.

How these trainings work

We usually begin by talking about microaggressions, including how they can, over time, lead to actual harassment. We have participants think about what microaggressions they have encountered in their own life and encourage them to discuss those with their co-participants. It’s important to acknowledge in some way that workers often see these red-flag situations happening, but don’t know what to do in the moment — and that it’s natural to feel afraid or hesitant to get involved.

Based on our experience leading these workshops, here are some of the most common fears workers might have about speaking up or intervening when they witness a microaggression:

Retaliation, such as being fired or passed over for a promotion.
Hurting your relationship with your colleagues and feeling like it’s “not your place” to get involved.
Jumping to conclusions, or getting involved with a situation that turned out to be harmless.
Harm to your reputation at work or becoming known as “overly PC” or “no fun.”

Our trainers then aim to help workers think about the reality of these fears and strategize ways to overcome them.

Participants also learn the 4 D’s of bystander communication. Two of them are options “in the moment” and two of them are options for after the incident has occurred.

In the moment

Distract. This is a temporary action you can take in a situation where something needs to be done immediately, but you don’t have time to plan or go to someone else. Do something to interrupt the interaction between the person responsible and their target. If you notice a colleague is uncomfortable with another’s remarks, actions or jokes, make up a task you need their help with and pull them out of the situation.

Direct. Here, as the bystander, you make a brief, clear statement to stop the behavior. This statement shouldn’t be an attack on the person responsible, but it should be clear enough to send a message that you weren’t comfortable. For example: “You know, Josh, usually I like your jokes but that one kind of crossed a line for me.”

After the incident

Delegate. If you don’t feel like you are in a position to address the situation with one of the parties involved, go to someone with more power who can take appropriate steps. This could be as simple as reporting what you saw to an authority figure with formal power, such as an HR manager, or a colleague with informal power, who simply knows the people involved better than you do.

Dialogue. Using this step means you have decided to follow up with the person responsible and have a conversation about their words or actions. At first, this might seem like the most challenging task for bystanders, but it is by far the most effective in terms of long-term results. The trick to approaching a potentially volatile conversation like this is to listen respectfully to the other person while calmly stating what you saw occur. Be curious about their behavior and ask open-ended questions, such as, “What do you feel like the appropriate thing to say would have been in that situation?” or “Has anyone ever made you feel uncomfortable at work?” This may make them feel more at ease opening up about their behavior or acknowledging what they did was wrong.

A word about listening: Once you ask these open-ended questions, your goal should be to hear and understand what the other person is saying. That is very different from pretending to listen while you are actually thinking about and rehearsing your next response (which is human nature and often what happens in difficult conversations).

How the workshop unfolds from here is usually determined by the size of the group, the type of organization or industry we’re working with and how engaged the employees are. While these trainings can be done by someone on staff, such as an HR director, it’s usually best to bring in an outside organization to conduct them. It gives your company more protection in the event of a future lawsuit because it demonstrates that you brought in experts for the workshop. There is also a morale benefit: Bringing in outside experts shows employees you are truly invested in changing workplace culture.

Another benefit of an outside organization: They appear as a neutral party and create a safe space for employees to talk about issues. Often, employees feel nervous admitting that they have witnessed microaggressions or red flag behavior in the past and done nothing. With the right facilitators, these employees quickly learn that wanting to avoid confrontation is a natural, human response, and we have to acknowledge that.

Above all, though, when employees feel safe, it’s easier to focus on things that motivate bystanders to take action and move employees from seeing themselves as passive bystanders to active upstanders.

Case studies

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of quantitative data available yet about the effects of bystander communication training, but it’s something we are working on measuring at the National Conflict Resolution Center. In the meantime, we have seen some impressive qualitative results and visible changes in a workplace’s culture and interactions with one another.

My organization has led bystander communication training for companies of every size and across a variety of industries, from a warehouse company to the Los Angeles Times newsroom to large corporations like Toyota. The one thing they all had in common was that they wanted to do more than check the box. They wanted to help prevent discrimination and harassment rather than just address it and move on.

Here are two recent case studies from workshops we’ve led that illustrate the effectiveness of bystander communication training.

Case study No. 1: the power of nicknames

I was conducting a training with a group of employees at a company who all worked jobs that require physical labor, outside an office. During the session, I encountered some pushback while talking about microaggressions. I was giving examples of microaggressions and explaining how over time they can escalate and lead to harassment. As I was telling a story about a nickname that started out as a small tease but quickly escalated into a more serious workplace issue, one of the men in the room said, “Hey, listen. Joking and teasing is a part of our workplace. We don’t want to change that.”

I asked him what it was about joking that meant so much to the team. Through that process we were able to work through the underlying need he expressed: a sense of camaraderie among his team and a fun work environment. We talked about ways to uphold those elements of their work culture while being more sensitive to things that could intentionally or unintentionally hurt others’ feelings.

Finally, as we were wrapping up the conversation, one of the toughest-looking guys in the room raised his hand and said, “You know what, I’m so glad we’re talking about this. I hate my nickname. I’ve just never had the guts to say it because I like you all so much as friends.”

The room was shocked, and there was a huge shift in energy. Suddenly, everyone was more receptive to the teaching and realized the real-life implication this had on their colleague and friend. By not shutting down the original pushback, and instead working to draw out what was important to the participants in the room, we created a safe space for them to have a real and honest conversation — one that will hopefully have a long-lasting impact.

Case study No. 2: generating excitement

Two hours after a workshop I was leading concluded, the company’s HR director called me on my cell phone. I braced myself for whatever emergency I had imagined she was having: “Oh no, everyone’s grumbling about why they had to take time out of their day to be there.” Instead, I was relieved to hear her laughing on the other end of the line.

“One of my employees just ran in here exclaiming, ‘I just used it! I was just an upstander,’ ” she told me, with obvious pride in her voice. Instead of fostering cynicism, empowering employees to be good bystanders can have a significant impact on morale and fellowship.

Above all, what we find in most of our workshops is that the typical employee really wants to stand up to inappropriate behavior — they’re just not sure how.

Beyond the foundation

Telling employees what harassment is, and the many forms it can take, provides an important foundation, but HR departments can’t just leave it at that — this will only breed disengagement in a time when we need impactful cultural changes in our workplaces. Employees must be given the tools and confidence to speak up when they see something happening, and bystander communication training helps them realize that it is, in fact, “their place” to do so.

The post From bystander to upstander appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

From hardship to hardiness: 5 strategies for turning crisis into a catalyst for leadership ...

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 15:35:27 GMT

The unexpected nature of COVID-19 and the resulting flood of high-stakes decisions has put leaders to the test in ways that they might never have imagined. In the midst of all this, it is important to acknowledge the profound challenges that the pandemic has created in terms of the work overload, stress, anxiety and painful decisions so many have had to endure.

Simultaneously, leaders must recognize that there are important opportunities to learn and grow from this once-in-a-century crisis. COVID-19 is the type of crucible event that has the potential to embed profound leadership lessons, accelerate development and forge critical skills. It can be transformative, but only if handled correctly.

Hardships like COVID-19 fall outside the widely recognized 70-20-10 framework of developmental experiences, which is defined as 70 percent challenging assignments, 20 percent developmental relationships, and 10 percent training and coursework. However, the Lessons of Experience research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership that gave rise to the 70-20-10 framework also points to how hardships like the pandemic can impact leaders’ development. Hardships contain many of the same elements that make challenging assignments a powerful source of learning, including pressure, high-stakes, unfamiliar responsibilities, and rapid shifts in new directions.

While hardships share elements similar to challenging assignments, they differ in important ways:

They are often unplanned and difficult to control.
Because of the extreme adversity associated with hardships, few organizations would intentionally put their leaders through such experiences.
The pain often associated with going through a hardship can be a potential barrier to the learning and development that could otherwise take place.
With challenging assignments, the majority of learning comes from the success of meeting the challenge. With hardships, the learning comes from the lack of success.
Many of the lessons learned from challenging assignments are external in nature (“What did I learn about handling my job and working with other people?”), while the lessons of hardships are often internal (“What did I learn about myself?”).
The lessons learned from hardships often have less to do with the events themselves and more with how individuals respond to them.

The unique features of hardships can make them more challenging to navigate than planned or controlled development opportunities, but also have the ability to offer rare insights and opportunities for growth. Specific developmental benefits associated with going through a hardship include:

Improved self-awareness for leaders. Hardships force us to come face-to-face with who we are. The experience of hardship often reveals limitations, patterns, beliefs and skills leaders didn’t see or appreciate in themselves before. This shift in self-awareness is powerful. Leaders will have the chance to make new choices based on what matters; how they act, think and feel; and what they can and cannot do.
Increased compassion for others. A significant dose of humility usually comes with hardship. It is never easy to confront the truth that we are not perfect, invincible or immune to tough and terrible things. But going through hardship can open leaders’ eyes to the hardships of others. Receiving support and help from others may motivate them to give support and help more readily. Their sense of compassion can grow.
Resilience. Surviving hardship and willing ourselves to move forward builds added strength to tackle new challenges and face future failures. Resilience allows leaders to be flexible and durable as things change. It teaches them to be open to learning and agile in their approach as they figure out what to do next.

Many hardships — such as career setbacks, ethical dilemmas or errors in judgment — impact specific individuals or small groups. Major societal and organizational crises have the power to impact everyone and often trigger subsequent hardship events with widespread impact, such as business failures and reductions in force. The scale and scope of the COVID-19 crisis is not just an opportunity to transform your organization’s leadership — it is an imperative. Here are five approaches for making the most of this and other hardships experienced by the organization.

No. 1: Observe how leaders respond. Crises have a way of revealing a lot about leaders — not just character, but also previously undetected strengths and areas in need of development. Because everyone is experiencing COVID-19 simultaneously, it provides a unique opportunity to view individual responses across a spectrum. Who is being proactive? Who is leveraging others? Who is seizing opportunities for innovation? Likewise, who is frozen by ambiguity? Who is pointing fingers? Who is sticking to past formulas for success that have little relevance to the current situation? As you form your perceptions and tap into others’, look for patterns and themes — what do they reveal about the current state of your leadership? What requires immediate attention, especially to help the organization combat the current crisis?

No. 2: Encourage reflection. Responding to COVID-19 has us in a perpetual state of cognitive and emotional overload. It is hard to slow down and find calm in a crisis like this, but leaders can’t uncover fresh insights and meaningful lessons if they don’t commit themselves to purposeful reflection on what they’ve encountered and how they’ve responded to it, both positively and negatively. “What … ?” “Why … ?” and “How … ?” questions help to challenge long-held perceptions about what it means to lead effectively and help surface new perspectives. Reflection should take place at both the macro (the overall situation) and micro (specific critical incidents of success or failure) levels to yield the most insight. Reflection should also take place both in (or close to) the moment to capture vivid insights as well as after the fact to enable more perspective.

No. 3: Engage in dialogue. Reflection is important, but it’s not enough. Actively engaging leaders to help them make sense of what is happening and what it means is essential. Again, questions are an important tool for unlocking hidden lessons and confronting potentially sensitive issues. Questions such as, “How has dealing with COVID-19 shaped you? What have you learned about yourself as a leader from this experience? What do you wish you had done differently?” can help leaders more carefully examine their role in responding to the crisis and inform their actions going forward.

No. 4: Seize teachable moments. In any crisis situation, exemplary leadership should always be recognized and rewarded, but any response to a crisis (even if the end result is a success) will almost certainly be marked by myriad mistakes, shortcomings and even outright failures. It would be a further mistake to let these instances pass by without either recognition or accountability. The most effective (but often the most challenging) path is to hold others accountable for their actions while also leveraging those actions as a learning opportunity. A good series of prompts to help extract learning is:

Describe the situation.
What did you do? Why?
What was the outcome?
What did you learn from your actions?
How might you apply this learning going forward?
How can I support you to make sure you learn and grow from this?

No. 5: Explore strategic implications. If you and your colleagues are engaging in the above actions, you will inevitably be gathering a substantial amount of formal and informal data about how your leaders have responded to this crisis. Now it is time to take your own moment to step back and reflect on the meaning of that data. What does this reveal about the leadership culture of your organization? What skills and abilities should be celebrated and reinforced? What vulnerabilities have been revealed and how should they be addressed? How can the organization’s leaders be better prepared for handling future crises? These and other insights should be incorporated into a COVID-19 after-action review and inform the HR planning process.

We are shaped not only by the challenges that we boldly step up to and successfully handle with grace and aplomb. We are also molded by those experiences that make us doubt ourselves and force us to struggle to come up with solutions. Now is the time to ensure your leaders benefit the most from this unfortunate opportunity and emerge stronger, wiser and more capable of connecting with others.

The post From hardship to hardiness: 5 strategies for turning crisis into a catalyst for leadership development appeared first on Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media.

Chief Learning Officer â CLO Media