Future of Leadership Development

My last post talked about some of my plans for the coming years and I also plan to write this month about what I see, hear and read about the future of Talent Acquisition, Talent Development and Succession Strategy.  I’ll do my best to share best practices I have found as well as sharing my own insights while I do this.

Today’s post will focus on the future of Talent Development and I have a couple of resources I’ll share that I found pretty interesting.  The first comes from Adam Gordon at IESE in an article from Forbes earlier this year.  Here are just a few of the insights from this article:

  • “Omni Learning” will continuously and digitally integrate all real and virtual learning sites
    • Continuous and Cross Context-integrated and knitted into everyday activities
    • Learner Led-participants lead the learning process for themselves
    • Data driven-these experiences will provide significant data to be used to measure and analyze learning

I found this information to be quite innovative and it feels pragmatic with the focus on experiential learning and development.

A second piece that I find to be innovative and useful comes from Nick Petrie at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).  This research was published in 2014, but still encompasses a number of innovative items worth discussing here:

  • Future Focus of Leadership Development
    • What and How of development
    • Horizontal and Vertical development
    • Each person owns development
    • Collective leadership spread throughout the network

One aspect that jumps out in the CCL research is the learner led piece that is also discussed in the IESE material mentioned above.  More and more I see the responsibility for leadership development being placed squarely on the shoulders of the learner versus this being the responsibility of the organization.  While this is exciting on one front, it also will require each learner to be alert and responsive to be aware of opportunities that arise so that they can taken advantage of these challenges as they come available.

I’ll share more on the implications of the future of talent development/leadership development when I write again next week.

What trends are you seeing in leadership development?