In the traditional leadership space, typically we send leaders off to a course or to a one-to-one coaching scenario. The truth of the matter is that when you’re in a classroom or working with an executive coach, you’re working on your own and it’s about you and your need. When people go off on these experiences and return, they are the only ones that have access to that learning or skill development. It’s a very siloed and solo approach to leadership development.
Yet, when I think of particularly challenging times in my own leadership experience, the most powerful learning was when I’ve been able to share what I was going through with somebody else who’d maybe been a little bit further down the path or who had gone through a similar experience.
A Need to Belong
In training situations and the one-to-one coaching environment, we simply aren’t cultivating development together in a collective. While “wisdom from the front of the room” and one-on-one coaching have their place, as a go-to approach to leadership development it’s now entering the Jurassic Era of HR. This is the Era of Collaboration; we need to work in teams and in partnership with people.
Even during a time when the pandemic has sent us scuttling to our home offices, it’s never been more apparent that there is a hunger for belonging and a deep desire for connection – to each other and to the work we do.
New research is showing that employee experience and personalized learning experiences aimed at deepening engagement and critical skills are at leading the digital HR 3.0 revolution.
As organizations are adjusting to having their people work remotely and not being able to eyeball their people in the same way they’re probably used to doing, there are, no doubt, a lot of companies that are struggling with the question, “How do we go about keeping people engaged and how do we go about developing people in a way that’s meaningful?”
Harnessing the Power of the Collective
The thing that you’re missing out on when HR sends leaders off to this course and that coaching session is that you are not tapping into the collective wisdom of a group. It’s a missed opportunity for any organization to create collaboration within their leadership ranks and build sustainable learning communities, where leaders can not only support each other but pay it forward as organizational group mentors.
When you can harness the power of the collective, you can move from one-to-one learning to one-to-many learning. (And, let’s face it, leaders are time starved and 1-to-1 mentoring is hugely time consuming.) Whether it’s a common goal or an organizational challenge, if you can get a collective group sharing experiences, exchanging ideas and learning together, it is going to have a ripple effect in your organization.
Creating Organizational Learning Incubators
In a group mentoring situation, everyone is simultaneously both a mentor and a mentee. While a more experienced, seasoned leader might act as the facilitator, in our experience we’ve seen that learning and skills development flow both ways. By creating a space for the exchange of ideas around a topic, you are creating learning incubators.
The exciting part of this is that the leaders are building their capability and their capacity, but they’re doing it in a collective. They’re not on their own, isolated, trying to shift behaviours. As part of a collective coaching and mentoring group, they have allies and colleagues around them who are there to support them and hold each other accountable.
For any organization that wants to engage their employees and create a type of sustainable, scalable mentoring system, these types of learning incubators are a catalyst for leaders to be a be the change makers throughout the organization.
If you’re curious about how The Roundtable can help your organization develop a culture where leaders can move beyond their own teams to support each other through coaching and mentoring, let’s start a conversation.
