Embedded professional development: Force multiplier for leaders

Embedded professional development: Force multiplier for leaders

Hariraj VijayakumarUpdated: Saturday, December 18, 2021, 04:35 PM IST
article-image
Professional development involves a shift in the mindset of the leader. | Unsplash

Leadership is all about people. It needs greater optimism to accelerate business growth and success. The first step towards empowering business organizations to disrupt the market is to create highly inspiring leaders driven by a positive outlook. Business leaders at all levels are primarily required to maximize their ability to lead people and business. This calls for an urgent need for businesses to focus on leadership development in today’s volatile, complex and ambiguous environment.

Conventional learning approach

Organizations and online learning platforms spend a hefty amount on learning and development programs that don’t pay off. It needs to be fixed only after understanding that the era of content and classrooms is over. There are two main issues with this erstwhile approach – commoditization of learning content and disconnect from the performance context.

Learning content is a general commodity now and even high-quality learning content is freely available on the internet. Another bigger concern is that the business environment and the performance-context of leaders are more complex and volatile than ever before. Considering the dynamic industry trends, any classroom method in isolation remains woefully disconnected from the ground reality of the leaders.

On the other hand, the era of one-on-one or group coaching as a stand-alone method is transient, even though it makes an effort to be contextual. Though coaching as a method is effective, most of the time it is not efficient and scalable. Its practice is hampered by the conventional approaches of in-person (virtual or physical) sessions and the lack of rich contextual perspectives outside of the leader being coached. As a result, organizations are compelled to experiment with in-effective content-based solutions that do not have a direct impact on the outcomes.

Understanding embedded professional development

Professional development involves a shift in the mindset of the leader. It is attributed to an improvement in the skills required and an upgrade in the knowledge of frameworks and mental models that can come in handy in any professional situation. These elements of professional development require a brand-new solution.

Embedded professional development enables leaders to operate on their stretch goals while being enabled with the shift in mindset, skillset and toolset as they perform their critical tasks at work. This spreads the development effort over time (which is the only way for adults to learn and change) and creates the agency for the leaders themselves to calibrate the time investment they make in development based on the returns they see in their immediate leadership performance.

Embedded professional development scores the perfect trifecta of marrying the aspiration of the individual leader, the mandate of the employer organization and the immediate performance ask of the context. This creates the force multiplier effect for a leader to remain engaged in their work and in the culture of development.

Technology to amplify professional development

Professional development that utilizes the potential of technology involves integrating the learning content and context for professional leadership development. There are startups and new-age learning platforms that offer personalized leadership journeys. It takes into account business context, leadership expectations, and work culture to achieve performance outcomes. This helps in democratizing employee development and managing human ROI in business terms. In addition, these platforms use a nudge engine that enables habit building for critical leadership actions.

The new-age platforms are also equipped with management consoles that act as a weekly dashboard of pre and post-program leader effectiveness. It enables tracking and managing the development at scale.

What’s next?

Considering the diversity in professional learning, we will see more of learning and development through the approach of development integrated into the flow of everyday work, led by service providers and creators from various professional disciplines who understand the context. Intelligent technology platforms that simplify and democratize powerful designs in professional development are already emerging. Embedded professional development as theapproach, wielded by creators who offer expertise in diverse disciplines will leverage and lead this change.

(Hariraj Vijayakumar is CEO, NWorx-a B2B SaaS platform)

RECENT STORIES

Ecos (India) Mobility Submits Draft Paper To SEBI For IPO Fundraising

Ecos (India) Mobility Submits Draft Paper To SEBI For IPO Fundraising

How Data Is Enabling Innovation In Biomedical Devices For Healthier Lives

How Data Is Enabling Innovation In Biomedical Devices For Healthier Lives

Heralding Mediated Dispute Resolution Over Litigation: The Mediation Act, 2023, Future Of Indian...

Heralding Mediated Dispute Resolution Over Litigation: The Mediation Act, 2023, Future Of Indian...

Force Motors Shifts Gears: Exiting Tractors And Connected Activity Business At The End Of FY24

Force Motors Shifts Gears: Exiting Tractors And Connected Activity Business At The End Of FY24

'From Shop Floor To Success': Anand Mahindra Backs Elon Musk's Call For Recognition Of Manufacturing...

'From Shop Floor To Success': Anand Mahindra Backs Elon Musk's Call For Recognition Of Manufacturing...