How will you maintain optimal levels of high-performing employees and leaders in 2024? As businesses achieve results from digital transformation efforts, some companies are operating with less headcount. Yet, human talent is the critical component to successful, profitable outcomes as businesses continually deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA).
Employers that retain resilient leaders will succeed. But how do you attract, develop and engage them? Research shows that people are more loyal to employers that invest in their development. Now that you’ve persisted through unprecedented times (a global pandemic, The Great Resignation, The Great Reshuffle and more), it’s time to arrive in a new era: The Great Resilience. With the right talent development program that blends the humanity of coaching with the scalability of online learning, employers can develop resilience and other leadership competencies both cost effectively and at scale.
Layoffs in 2023
In 2023, employers dealt with both labor shortages and surpluses. Over-hiring was partly to blame for 2023’s uptick in layoffs. After two years of layoffs, 2023’s higher layoff activity — particularly in the tech sector — captured people’s attention.
Why so many layoffs? Employers may have been over-eager to hire talent to get ahead of The Great Resignation (which primarily took place in 2021-2022). About 50.5 million people quit their jobs in 2022, besting the prior record set in 2021, when nearly 48 million people (about 23% of the U.S. workforce) quit their jobs.
Pew Research shows that 63% of workers who quit their job indicated “no opportunities for advancement” among their reasons. Losing star talent drains organizations of internal knowledge, weakens culture, and puts your company at risk. That’s why development programs are a good retention tool. When employers enroll individual contributors in management training programs, they send a strong message: “We want you to stay; you have a future here.”
Resilience and Retention Go Hand in Hand
Talent managers are always eager to learn why people leave. While retiring baby boomers have been a big factor, many younger workers have given up on corporate jobs. Expanding learning opportunities — and coaching — can help retain talent. The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported that 68% of employees say they would stay with their employer if it made an effort to upskill them.
Lesson learned: Organizations need to invest in leadership development for rising leaders so this group knows they are valued and are being provided a clear path toward career advancement.
But retention isn’t the sole motivation to scale leadership development. Development can create lasting behavioral change and foster greater collaboration and innovation. These are key growth factors for any business.
Another overarching benefit of larger scale professional development is resilience. Employees will be learning soft skills to help them cope with all the VUCA in their life — at work and at home. They won’t just be learning how to lead, they’ll be learning how to persevere through rough times.
Businesses benefit as workers learn how to become more resilient. Numerous books and articles have popularized the notion that younger employees may lack resilience.
However, Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, resists the idea that any particular age group is more or less resilient or prone to anxiety. Rather, Prinstein thinks that younger people are simply more likely to use social media to share their feelings than past generations. Certainly, attitudes about mental well-being have changed.
Evolving Views on Mental Well-Being and Leadership
The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) 2023 poll on mental health reveals that most American adults believe a person’s mental health has an impact on their physical health (78%). And they believe that untreated mental illness has a significant negative impact on families (78%) and the economy (64%).
“The majority of the public understands something we’ve been saying for a long time: your mental health is about your health,” said APA’s CEO and medical director, Saul Levin.
These evolved values put greater pressure on today’s business leaders. Today’s leaders must act with more evolved leadership skills to arrive at decisions that benefit both the business and the employees. Today’s corporate leadership development programs should focus on developing these more highly evolved skills, such as emotional intelligence and compassionate leadership.
Embrace Online, Self-Directed Learning for Leadership Development
How do you improve leaders’ soft skills — and do so at scale? You need tech-enabled solutions. Recent college grads entering the workforce are already familiar with online learning. About one-third of higher education was entirely online before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, it’s been further adopted by major universities and even medical schools. According to the Changing Landscape of Online Education’s (CHLOE) survey of 367 chief online officers in higher education, titled “CHLOE 7: Tracking Online Learning From Mainstream Acceptance to Universal Adoption,” nearly all respondents agreed that today’s college and university students will be online for at least part of their education.
Employers are embracing online learning for soft skills training for both leaders and employees. Businesses, just like universities, have found online learning to be an effective learning modality. In 2023, 67% of organizations reported their intent to increase the number of online learners who complete courses in leadership and management.
Top Online Leadership Development Platforms Leveraged by HR and Talent Leaders
LinkedIn Learning appears to be the favored platform for leader development, based on a 2023 IMPACT Group survey of CHROs and leadership development experts. 43% leverage LinkedIn Learning for leadership development. (See Figure 1.)
Benefits of Online Learning for Leader Development
The debate has finally ended. Online learning for leadership development is the way forward. It’s cost-effective, highly scalable and measurable.
Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas, writing for Harvard Business Review, agree. “The way forward lies in the personal learning cloud (PLC).” The PLC, which includes online courses and interactive platforms, “is transforming leadership development by making it easy and affordable to get personalized, socialized, contextualized, and trackable learning experiences.”
Being “trackable” is important especially in the corporate training industry. Return on investment (ROI) metrics have been historically elusive. By tracking and reporting training metrics, even if a recession is coming (and training and development budgets are at risk of getting cut) it may be easier to justify continuation of learning.
Online learning for leadership aligns well with today’s employee values. Asynchronous, self-directed learning offers flexibility for those juggling family responsibilities, such as millennials — who will represent about 75% of the workforce in 2025.
The Ease and Scalability of Online Learning Is Appealing, but Comes With Pitfalls
Online learning by itself has limitations. 63% of talent and human resources (HR) leaders agreed that engagement is a problem when it comes to using online learning platforms to build leadership competencies, based on IMPACT Group’s 2023 study of online learning for leader development. Another drawback of using online learning by itself is a potential absence of behavior change. Online learners may absorb content, but they may not apply what they’ve learned to their daily work performance.
A Blended Approach Preferred by Experts
New knowledge doesn’t lead to new behaviors. Behavior change happens more typically through a development process that incorporates certain essentials such as practice, reflection and feedback. A blended approach, including a coach to support online learners, helps sustain engagement in online courses and creates more rigor and results.
Asha Pandey, writing for TrainingIndustry.com, agrees that coaching is a viable strategy to help drive behavior change: “In a healthy learning ecosystem, blended learning solutions that incorporate coaching and mentoring serve as an additional nudge to change behavior.”
Satyajit Datta Roy, CEO of ThinkR, agrees, nothing that, “…with the fast developing, physical (Physical+Digital) environment, it is important to consider blended solutions which bring in the best of online self-paced learning….”
Coaching Elevates Online Learning Results
While online platforms are transforming leadership development, they are no replacement for a human coach. Coaches can offer feedback, nudges, and opportunities for leaders to role-play and practice what they’ve learned. Through one-on-one coaching, the coach and leader can focus on the content that directly applies to their real-world, current situations.
This blended model is key to ensuring that your talent benefits in ways that are meaningful to their careers and to the business. Most talent experts (84%) surveyed by IMPACT Group believe that online learners are more likely to put new skills to use if they also work with a coach who encourages behavior change.
Knowledge without practical application doesn’t benefit the business. New solutions combine online learning experiences with proven, performance coaching. Each learner completes online courses and then meets periodically with a coach to help take action and build new behaviors. This solution is both effective and scalable.
As you explore ways to retain talent and invest in their development, consider what will bring the most sweeping change to your organization.
More than just retention, tomorrow’s most successful organizations will be led by resilient leaders. Resilient leaders understand that, no matter what we confront in our VUCA world, the one thing we can manage is ourselves: How we react, view opportunities, collaborate and take action.
