Over the past few weeks, we had intensive discussions with clients and colleagues about how to become an excellent leader, trainer or an oustanding expert. The widespread logic suggests us that a few days training + exercising a lot is the right way to be an expert. It makes sense at first, however there are some issues with this approach. Besides the short-term impact a training provides, the whole logic is based on several false assumptions.
A few weeks ago we delivered an interactive session at MERIT Singapore, an HR conference titled Smart Learning. Agile Business. We carried out a quick on-line poll with the participants (Senior HR Managers, Talent Management and L&D professionals) to figure out if their companies apply digital tools in leadership development. 54% replied yes, while the other half of our respondents are still fully analogue in this area.
Imagine a manager with a crammed schedule (there are quite a few of them running around on planet Earth), who permanently feels rushed, and can’t sit down for weeks or even months to do what he or she finds really important. There are just simply too many urgent tasks to do and opportunities to explore.
Recently, I have read First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham one more time, where the author shared the results of several extensive Gallup research projects. In one of them, 80.000 managers were interviewed, many of whom led an organisational unit that significantly stuck out from the crowd in a bunch of relevant performance indicators.
It was four years ago when Dora Solymar (then Leadership Development Manager at Telekom, local subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) came up to us and asked if we would be interested in developing a mobile application for mentoring. She dreamt of a mobile tool that could support their managers as a kind of a digital mentor in their actual people management challenges on the spot.
When we think of the impact leaders make in an organization, it is not what they say or think that matters, but what their subordinates actually do. If a team is underperforming, the need is articulated to develop its manager. Many cases smart buzzwords, spectacular training sessions or a never-proved-but-extremely-well-sounded-flash-experience is where the story ends.
