Hybrid leadership development: An actionable strategy to upskill talent

In a complex business landscape, companies hire leaders who are competent to chart a way forward for them. Considering the need to develop highly inspiring leaders in the new hybrid world of work, the upskilling of the leadership has become a key to the organisations’ growth trajectory and sustainability. In the digitally-driven hybrid era of business, it has become imperative in sustaining accelerated transformations to maintain business profitability. Companies that invest in the learning of leadership often witness improved performance and reliability in the organisation. 

Organisations looking to record high business growth move beyond short-term approaches to leadership development. Upskilling, which has become a crucial component of today’s modern-age talent strategy, helps leaders and managers to improve performance and prepare them for leadership roles. 

According to the stats - The World Economic Forum predicts that investing in upskilling and reskilling the global workforce will increase global GDP by $6.5 trillion by 2030. This clearly indicates – organisations are going to spend more on upskilling their talent in the coming years. 

Why do conventional leadership development programs fail?

In the typical conventional leadership development program, high potential leaders are sent to B-School training for a week or two courses. organisations spend a hefty amount on outdated training methods that are usually finished without any real-time application or post-assessment. As a result, leaders equip themselves with several growth ideas and contact books. However, they fail to implement them as a strategy in business. 

Human brains learn when they practice. Similarly, leadership development cannot become successful if it is not embedded. To nurture a leader’s mind, it is necessary to address the gaps in conventional leadership development programs, traditionally equipped with trainer’s scripts and rigid assignments. 

Designing a strong leadership development program

Upskilling is a long-term and thoughtful investment strategy. It augments knowledge, skills and competencies to make leaders for tomorrow. Apart from professional advantages, upskilling encourages personal growth and increases employee engagement at a hybrid workplace. However, determining what to include in a strong leadership development program can be complicated with the industry 4.0 uprising.    

To navigate the changes and challenges of the future world, organisations must adopt a very powerful embedded leadership development for employees at all levels.  The focus of these programs should not merely be on improving their goal-setting and goal-tracking process, rather it must focus centrally on goal achievement and value creation. There should be a converged approach with clear design elements of accountability, interaction, impact, and sustainability. 

Beyond this, companies must adopt an embedded leadership development approach for goal achievement. It should be equipped with design elements for building critical leadership skills, creating opportunities to immediately apply the skills and receiving critical feedback on the application. These can be a powerful experience for leaders and managers to achieve their goals at a much more elevated level.

Real-time skill application

Unlike conventional leadership development programs, embedded professional development provides learning along with opportunities to implement in real work situations. This helps leaders with effective skill-building while understanding the relevance of the program. Under new-age development programs, leaders can simply apply the newly learned skill in their workflow, practice it while learning and gaining a strong practical mindset. 

Instead of focusing on imparting knowledge, embedded professional leadership development programs help leaders with skill up-gradation and application in the everyday flow of work. It fills the ages-old gaps in professional learning and practical application that further results in improved performance and first-hand experience. This creates a win-win for both leaders as well as organisations with skill enhancement and improved business performance. 

Outcome focused approach

Technology is known to provide exciting ways of personalising leadership journeys. To achieve high-performance outcomes, tech-driven professional learning platforms integrate business context, leadership expectations and work culture which offers a personalized way of upskilling. In addition, leadership aspirants can take leverage of immersive learning that provides unprecedented ability to practice real-world scenarios and experience practical growth. 

Moreover, technology augments the professional learning and development of leaders by emphasizing customized training programs. For instance, learning leaders can emphasize bite-sized training that learners can take at their own pace. Further, their performance can be tracked with management consoles that can present weekly progress of leaders' effectiveness. 

Final thought

The modern-age hybrid leadership program can help in upskilling talent. They are effective in facilitating conceptual learning anytime anywhere, in enabling the application on the job towards achieving targeted performance outcomes, and in finally tracking the progress made on performance outcomes. The organisations must adopt an embedded leadership development approach integrated with modern technologies that automate all or most of these program design elements so as to upgrade the skills of leaders in the flow of work.