Reinvent Leadership Development
We set out to develop online management training that is as good as face-to-face training and is automatically assigned to people when they most need to and most want to learn.
We developed a new way of training to help our managers be great. Research has found that (only) face-to-face management training is not effective enough. The most effective way to develop managers is to hire high quality professional coaches, who meet with every manager on a weekly basis, but this option is extremely cost prohibitive.
But there is another way to solve management development.
FIRST: WE CREATE ENGAGING CONTENT
There is so much weak training content online. We shoot for the stars and create content that is both highly engaging and informative.
When it comes to developing management training, there is not a lack of books, TED talks, or information. The biggest problem is that it is hard to know where to start. There are hundred of thousands of books written on management. If you review them closely, you will find tremendous similarities between the presented ideas. Our goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but to collect all the best information and present it in a logical sequence when managers need it the most.
Example of our intro video for internal Grovo managers by our Director of Learning Alex Khurgin.
SECOND: WE ADJUST THE FORMAT
Use a microlearning approach. Microlearning are short bursts of information delivered to have the greatest impact. You can use all types of formats, like videos, podcasts, text, and gifs. We feature these formats in easy-to-consume flash cards. Yes, we cover sophisticated topics with micro learning. Instead of one 60-minute video that people won’t watch, we create 60 one-minute microlearnings that will be delivered programmatically in a 3-week learning program.
One of a series of cards on 1:1s. In this introduction I explained to our managers why to have 1:1s.
THIRD: WE ENSURE TIMELY DELIVERY
People are not always motivated to learn. Other times when people are motivated, they don't have the opportunity. Often when an individual contributor is first promoted to a manager role, they have to wait for months until the next face-to-face training session is scheduled. By then, they already learned (bad) habits and sitting in a training session may be the last thing on their mind.
We have found that people are highly motivated when certain events happen. For example, managers are highly motivated in management training in the weeks just following a the promotion. Or managers are motivated to learn about the perfect onboarding a week before their new hire starts. Or managers are more motivated to learn about the topic of feedback, if they received a lower score in that area on their manager survey from direct reports
We have countless other examples. We are implementing content related to those areas and methods to link our HRIS or Survey Tools to our learning management system, so we can automatically assign this training at the point employees need the information most.
It is a massive project, but it is so valuable. Our initial experiments show fantastic results in terms of people actually changing their behaviors and being excited about the content they receive.
