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Martin Levy

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April 2022 - TD Magazine

No Bullsh!t Leadership by Martin G. Moore and Leadership Levers: Releasing the Power of Relationships for Exceptional Participation, Alignment, and Team Results by Diana Jones

Book Capsules, April 2022

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

While assessments are known to help with the hiring process, the assessment process can provide far more value beyond recruiting.

How to Leverage Talent Assessments Beyond Hiring

Want a Global Mindset? Integrate Global Skills into Training for First-Level Leaders

Michael Martin is a sales and sales enablement leader with more than 20 years of experience in various sales and sales support roles. Michael is currently leveraging his experience to enable aPriori's go-to-market teams to become more productive and accelerate the growth of an industry-leading digital manufacturing organization. During the past five years, Michael has built several world-class sales enablement programs from the ground up. Michael earned the CEO Circle of Excellence Award in 2020 and was recently promoted to global head of corporate learning and development.

Michael Martin

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This advanced-level certificate program helps you master all aspects of training delivery.  Earn the respected title of ATD Master Trainer. Register today!

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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.

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