Leaders and Learning

The effectiveness of your learning and performance strategy depends on how well you leverage leaders. There are at least three major leader categories you should be thinking about strategically:

The Manager

A manager can make or break on the job performance. Of course they play a role in providing direction and feedback, but they also are often an individual’s most important support resource. How are you accounting for the leaders of your learners (and don’t forget, they’re even busier than you are… so you may need to get creative!)?

The Business

Trying to develop and launch any significant training program without business involvement will be painful if not entirely unsuccessful. Who can you bring along as a sponsor or a champion? Have you considered forming a steering committee or council? These leaders will not only set you on the right path, but they’ll also help remove blockers when you inevitably run up against them.

The Learning Leader

If this is you, great! Easy. But for a lot of us, we have to bring along other learning and enablement leadership to (1) make sure we are impacting the highest priority work and (2) get the leverage needed to bring along the relevant necessary elements like technology, operations, reporting and the like. The best way to do this is to partner on long term (quarter or half) planning and build shared priorities (even better if you can share OKRs or goals!).