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Martin Yate, a career coach and former HR professional, is the author of The HR Career Guide: Great Answers to Tough Career Questions.

Martin Yate

Young professionals and recent graduates need to show that they're ready to solve problems.

How to Crush Your Next Job Interview

As a globally recognized futurist and expert on innovation, Lisa Bodell ignites new thinking at every event with high energy, humor, and audience engagement. She is an award-winning author and CEO of futurethink, serves as a global council member of the World Economic Forum, and has helped thousands of senior leaders ignite innovation at companies including Bloomberg, Pfizer, and Lockheed Martin. Rated as a top speaker at Google’s client events, Lisa brings her message to nearly 100,000 people each year in more than 30 countries. She wrote the bestselling book  Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award and was voted Best Business Book by USA Book News and Booz & Co. Her new book, Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters, will be released October 2016. Lisa has appeared on NPR, FOX News, and in Fast Company, The New York Times, and WIRED. She is a frequent contributor to strategy+business, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review. Lisa is an adviser on the boards of the Association of Professional Futurists, and Novartis’ Diversity and Inclusion Board in Basel, Switzerland. Lisa has taught innovation and creativity at both American and Fordham Universities. For more innovation news and ideas, follow Lisa on Twitter at @LisaBodell.

Lisa Bodell

Martin Luther King Jr. was many things, but few would see him as a great model for business leaders.King exemplifies two types of organizational leadership vital to today’s business environment, according to Christopher Neck, associate professor of management at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, and his colleague Jeffrey Godwin of Saint Vincent College. They argue that King was a transformational and servant leader, and enterprises today would benefit greatly from adopting his techniques.When Neck and Godwin started using King as an example of leadership in class, their categorizations differed—Neck saw him as a servant leader, and Godwin saw him as a transformational leader.Transformational leaders articulate a vision, while servant leaders believe in empowering and developing people on an individual level. Both types of leaders aim to empower employees and improve performance, but the transformational leader focuses more on the organization as a whole, while the servant leader focuses more on individuals. Both paths lead to the same goal, and in the end, the two types have more commonalities than differences, Neck says. “If you care about employees first, they will work harder, and their performance will improve. At the end of the day, it’s all about the organization.”In his research on King, Neck found examples of both types of leadership. King had a vision and set a model for followers to emulate. His expectations were high, and he challenged people about their assumptions. But he was also patient, advocating nonviolence and cooperation. He promoted equality and fairness and helped individuals believe in themselves, realizing that personal motivation was the key to social change.In research published in the Journal of Leadership and Management, Neck and Godwin examined a particular phase of King’s career: the “Chicago Campaign” of 1966. To end housing discrimination in the area, King moved into an apartment in the city’s west-side slums and began working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO).In August 1966, King led about 700 people in a protest march through all-white neighborhoods in Chicago. Angry residents gathered, but King was not deterred. Working with the SCLC and the CCCO, he planned another march, this time in the white, middle-class suburb of Cicero. Worried town leaders met with King and other civil rights leaders to discuss the march. The civil rights groups agreed to cancel the march, and in exchange, the city promised to guarantee accessible housing to African Americans.City leaders, for the most part, failed to follow through on the pact. King, though bitterly disappointed and angry, was not a short-term thinker.“It was one cog in his strategy to bring attention to his vision,” Neck says. “Even if the organizational outcome failed, he didn’t fail from a servant leader perspective. He helped people believe in themselves. He brought people together and brought attention to achieving equal education and facilities.”Though the business world has changed tremendously since King’s day, his leadership style is more relevant than ever.In the past, workers often stayed with a company for 20 or 30 years, and authoritarian leadership was the norm. In today’s fast-paced business environment, “it would be hard for an autocratic, top-down leader to survive,” Neck says. The pension carrot is gone. Frequent job change is the norm, and employers have a tough time finding and retaining skilled workers. Routine tasks are automated, and high-performance expectations are the norm. Employees accept the pressure, but only if they feel their work is valued and has meaning.A transformational leader provides a vision that inspires workers to come together and rise to challenges. A servant leader empowers them to use their best skills and make independent decisions that ultimately benefit the entire company.

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Leader to Inspire Businesses

As a measurement strategist, Whitney’s passion and expertise lies in the field of surveys and assessments. A self-professed “data nerd,” Whitney has a Master’s Degree in the area of Human Resources Measurement and Evaluation and has conducted extensive research on the predictive validity of various hiring assessment strategies. Whitney's company, ProActive Consulting, specializes in delivering data-supported insights into job candidates, employees, teams, leaders, customers, and organizations. Whitney was a highly rated speaker at the 2014 National SHRM Conference, and has had an article featured in the Harvard Business Review. She is also one of the authors of the 2015 anthology "What's Next in Human Resources."

Whitney Martin

Dovetailing neatly with the crowd sourced learning trend discussed in last week’s post, The Wisdom of the Crowd, is the concept of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Again, this was a huge trend in 2012, but if you’re not aware of them, MOOCs are a type of online course aimed at large scale participation and open access via the Internet.The roots of MOOCs lie in distance learning, and they initially took hold in further education. Again, the United States has seen commercial models emerge from the likes of Coursera and Udacity. Meanwhile the concept has spread to the UK. For example, JISC has funded the Open Learning Design Studio’s MOOC (OLDS MOOC) on “Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum,” which began in early January 2013. Collaboration is keyThe open nature of these courses means there are likely to be large numbers of learners and subject matter experts involved. This affects the instructional design. Everyone on this type of course needs to be able to connect and collaborate with each other to make it work. Crowd-sourced interactions, peer reviews, and group discussion all suddenly become more than a nice to have—they are now of fundamental importance to the structure of the course and the learning experience.Indeed, collaboration is a major key for success, whether that’s in terms of feedback and debate between learners, or in the development of the course material itself. In this scenario, learners will need to become more connected and collaborative than ever before.Don Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, recently wrote about the relevance of MOOCs to those of us involved in workplace learning and development: “MOOCs are a symptom of something larger—the seismic shifts that are taking place in our profession. In a few years’ time you may be asked to justify your training course against one provided by Harvard, by a local college in Hyderabad and by an online training company in Singapore. You’d bet start preparing your answer now.”Different types of MOOCsNew variations of MOOCs are now even starting to appear. A blog post by Martin Lugton describes the differences this way: xMOOCs include discussion forums, and allow people to bounce ideas around and discuss learning together, but the centre of the course is still the instructor-guided lesson. cMOOCs, on the other hand, are based on a connectivist approach in which learners set their own learning goals and types of engagement.But it is the cost of MOOCs and the crowd sourcing of content that can provide corporate organizations with the means to create enough cost-effective, regular material to truly democratise learning. The combination of a collaborative ethos and easy-to-use technology for authoring and publishing content can be realised in the model that my business partner, Martin Belton, has termed a mini-MOOC.  This might sound like an oxymoron, but in practice could really work as it’s not its size that matters.A mini-MOOC can be executed primarily in two different ways. The first is organisations within a particular industry work together to create an online course on an area that is currently affecting their industry. If several training managers, for example, can collaborate to create relevant content in the first place and share it via a single platform, it taps into a collective wisdom that can then be shared across an entire industry. This leverages a broader bank of knowledge than individual organisations would normally have access to—not to mention the potential cost savings.Internal MOOCs: where L&D steps inThe flip side of this is an internal model. This comes back to breaking down those corporate silos and getting the best information out of your best people, then using it to help others. . For example, if there is a need to improve sales training, the L&D team work with the high flying sales people internally and get them to contribute to the development of a mini-MOOC. Their contributions could be in the form of recorded interviews, or input into forums and learner feedback that can be used to form part of an online sales course that can also include e-learning and assessments.This not only taps into tacit knowledge that might otherwise never leave those sales people’s heads, but helps create genuinely valuable learning resources and a single course that becomes the de facto standard for sales across that organisation. The L&D team is at the heart of this process, facilitating the collaboration, supporting the creation of user generated content, managing the inputs, and distributing the outputs.

To MOOC or Not to MOOC, That Is the Question

This is the second post in a three-part series examining leadership.  (See post 1 and post 3.) In the present business climate, the leaders need to become champions of the “learning organization” as designers, teachers, and stewards (Senge 1990), rather than position themselves as the traditional charismatic hero (Steyrer 1998).  With that in mind, leading others requires constant learning and development (L&D) and designing of knowledge-creative workplaces that foster growth. Agile Skills Required Enter “design thinking.” Research reveals that design-driven companies, such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, IBM, Intuit, Nike, P&G, Starbucks, Starwood, Target, Walt Disney, or Whirlpool, have outperformed America’s S&P 500 large companies by an extraordinary 228 percent over 10 years (DMI 2014). Likewise, being smart about agile working, agile workforce, and agile environments and cultures should be on every leader’s list of priorities. In fact, a 2014 CIPD survey of HR leaders and employees found that improving “leadership and management capability” (64 percent of respondents) and “learning and development” (54 percent of respondents) are top tactics to deliver organizational agility. Meanwhile, respondents in the CIPD research ranked “reward management” (15 percent of respondents) and “increasing workforce diversity” (17 percent of respondents) much lower. In the 2014 report, Change Agents: The Role of Organizational Learning in Change Management, ATD Research concurred that organizations and their leaders should be more adaptive to change. Indeed, the research study found that 61 percent of organizations experience three or more changes per year, but they are not prepared to manage that change. Only 17 percent of respondents rate their enterprises as highly effective at managing change, and a mere 30 percent of organizations have change management teams. The good news is that there is clear evidence that an adaptive, generative, and knowledge-productive learning and development (L&D) approach to leadership development can provide the infrastructure for numerous progressive methods designed to produce adaptive leaders. Coaching and self-managed learning are clear examples of this approach. Why Coaching Works Through my own research into leadership development, I have found that coaching is about building and sustaining high-quality links with others. Extremely good coaches energize, ask, listen, invite, and equip others to develop themselves and achieve their personal and professional best. How does this work? The coach energizes the relationship, while the coachee empowers it. As a result, the link re-energizes the coachee, so that he or she is better able to discern, ideate, transform, and deliver (Tkaczyk 2014). More importantly, numerous coaching skills can be applied routinely with clients, peers, or direct reports. They include setting the stage, bringing forth positive leadership presence, tracking information, identifying issues and key factors, playing back exchanges and checking-in, giving and receiving constructive feedback. In addition, one of the most important tools when working with others is the skill of positive inquiry (Tkaczyk 2014). Meanwhile, Stanford’s 2013 Executive Coaching Survey revealed that nearly 100 percent of CEOs enjoy the process of coaching and receiving leadership advice from professional coaches and outside advisors. Although CEOs are receptive to making changes based on these interventions, the Stanford study found that a majority (66 percent) do not receive leadership advice or coaching. To be sure, the benefits of coaching for developing leadership skills are tangible. ATD Research’s report, The Coaching Approach: A Key Tool for Successful Managers, concluded that, in reality, coaching improves communication (69 percent), raises engagement (65 percent), improves skills-to-performance transfer (63 percent), and stimulates productivity (61 percent). Becoming Self-Managed Learning Leaders As leaders grow, they need to become “L&D crafters” (Tkaczyk 2014). To maximize their leadership presence and learning agility, rooted in design thinking (Austin and Devin 2003, Martin 2009) and positive organizational scholarship (Cameron at el_._ 2003, Cameron and Spreitzer 2012), such L&D crafters may routinely use a “continuing developmental portfolio” comprised of two components: Continuing Executive Development Check-In: A disciplined L&D system, self-managed by an individual who constantly “checks in” with themselves by asking reflective questions regarding any critical and opportunistic incidents that happened in the workplace or outside, daily or in the past week.Design: A natural and drilled L&D mechanism that is self-guided by the leader, in which they constantly “design” their own L&D by asking developmental inquiries regarding what it is that they still want to learn and develop, and how exactly they will execute their development plan. International research conducted by the Learning Entrepreneurs project from September 2011 through September 2013 found that such self-managed learning produces personal gains: upgrades your skills and helps monitor your learning in an evidence-based way (91 percent) and boosts your credibility as a reflective and creative leader (90 percent). It also offers organizational benefits: unlocks HR potential (80 percent) and builds “knowledge-creative” workplaces (73 percent). Interestingly, participants in this global research project represented diverse geographies, including Africa, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and North America. Still, more scientific research is needed, especially as Asia/Pacific leaders were not represented in the study (Tkaczyk 2014). For more on “self-coaching” as a self-managed leadership development method, see my August 2014 TD article, “Daily Check-Ins Stimulate Self-Improvement.” Finally, other approaches for developing leaders for future success can include:cognitive or relational job re-designjob enlargementsposition transfersjob rotationssabbaticalsexternships—professional development through a full-time temporary position at another organizationself-assessment inventories360-degree feedbackpsychological profiling and strengths-findingleaderless group discussions in which a team of multiple leaders is assigned a complex challenge and must work together to work it out within a certain time periodacting and storytellingconcept mappingrepertory gridscritical incident technique, as utilized in job analysis,mentoring·one-on-one Personal Management Interview (PMI) programs, namely purpose-finding and role-negotiation sessions—approximately 60-120 minute each, and preferably twice per month, depending on life cycle rhythm of work. The final installment in this leadership series will address future vistas in leadership.References ATD Research, 2014. Change Agents: The Role of Organizational Learning in Change Management, Association for Talent Development (ATD), Alexandria, VA.  ATD Research, 2014. The Coaching Approach: The Key Tool for Successful Managers, Association for Talent Development (ATD), Alexandria, VA.  Austin, R. and Devin, L., 2003. Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.  Cameron, K., Dutton, J., and Quinn, R. (eds.), 2003. Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, CA.  Cameron, K. and Spreitzer, G. (eds.), 2012. Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.  CIPD, 2014. HR: Getting Smart About Agile Working, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London.  DMI, 2014. “Design-Driven Companies Outperform S&P by 228% Over Ten Years—The DMI Design Value Index,” Dialog, Design Management Institute (DMI), Boston, MA.  Martin, R., 2009. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.  Senge, P., 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Century Business, Random House, London.  Stanford, 2013. 2013 Executive Coaching Survey, Stanford University/The Miles Group.  Steyrer, J., 1998. “Charisma and the Archetypes of Leadership,” Organization Studies, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp. 807-828.  Tkaczyk, B., 2014. “Critical Clarification on Coaching,” International Coach Federation (ICF).   Tkaczyk, B., 2014. “Positive Inquiry Skills: Crafting Vital Coaching Questions," Association for Talent Development (ATD).  Tkaczyk, B., 2014. “Crafting Continuing Learning and Development: A Positive Design Tool for Leadership Development,” Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 5-8.  Tkaczyk, B., 2014. “Daily Check-Ins Stimulate Self-Improvement,” TD, Vol. 68 No. 8, pp. 72-73.

Leadership Development in Post-Heroic Times—An L&D Orientation

Karie Willyerd is the senior vice president and chief learning officer for Visa globally. She was formerly head of SAP’s Global Education business unit and was the Workplace Futurist at SuccessFactors, an SAP human capital software company. Prior to that, she was the cofounder and CEO of Jambok, the industry’s first video-based informal social learning software platform, which was acquired by SuccessFactors in 2011. Willyerd served as the chief learning officer for Sun Microsystems, and in that role, she was responsible for employee, customer, partner, and Sun community learning. The Association for Talent Development named Sun the number 1 BEST learning function in the world.Willyerd is the coauthor of the award-winning bestseller_, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today._ She is a regular blogger for Harvard Business, coauthored a feature article on Mentoring Millennials in Harvard Business Review, and has authored dozens of other articles or publications.In prior roles, she was a chief talent officer for Solectron (now Flextronics), led the people development function at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, and ran executive development at H.J. Heinz. Willyerd holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University, a master’s degree in instructional and performance technology from Boise State University, and a doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University. She serves on the global leadership council for the business school at Colorado State University. Additionally she serves on the board of City Year, San Jose supporting the young leaders who are making remarkable changes in high school dropout rates. Her newest book is Stretch: How to Future Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace, which was selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick in Business and Leadership in 2016. ATD honored Willyerd with the Distinguished Contribution to Talent Development Award in 2017.

Karie Willyerd

Kate Markin Coleman directs ias advising LLC and is former executive vice president, chief strategy, and advancement officer of YMCA in the US. She spent the first half of her career in the private sector, transferring to the social sector after she and her colleagues sold the fintech firm they ran. Coleman was a top official in one of the country’s largest nonprofits, the national YMCA, where she advanced innovation and effectiveness. She studied cross-sector collaboration as a Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellow and is the co-author of two books that offer practical insights on how to design effective solutions to challenging urban problems.

Kate Markin Coleman

Summer 2022 - CTDO Magazine

It's time to redesign the talent development system to have a broader reach and more precise skilling.

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