The 2018 State of Leadership Development Meeting: The Transformation Imperative

Transformation requires leaders who:

• Step up early in the transformation process. 
• Inspire extraordinary levels of engagement in employees, managers, and executives. 
• Tap into the power of teamwork and collaboration. 
• Quickly build business processes and systems to create the new while maintaining the old. Drawing on these abilities, transformation leaders swiftly make sense of the changes unfolding in their environments. And they act effectively and efficiently to build an organization that will thrive in a new landscape. 

Learning and Development (L&D) play important role as a Transformation Driver-Three Areas of Focus as bellow: 

TAKE ACTION: AGILITY

• Develop a new take on teams. Assemble taskforce-like teams to focus on your organization’s “must win” challenges, such as building capability to enter a new market category or helping to rapidly integrate newly acquired companies into the culture.
• Foster new behaviors and mindsets. Develop the behaviors and mindsets essential for shaping a culture that supports your organization’s transformation program. Key to any successful transformation is an organizational culture that is change ready and collaborative and that promotes a learning mindset.
• Streamline capabilities. Looking at the strategic vision for your organization, focus on the top three to five capabilities essential for your organization’s near-term and future success, instead of using the massive, more static type of competency model that is common today. Evaluate capabilities each year and align them with new business initiatives.
• Focus on resilience. Help people throughout your organization get comfortable with the uncomfortable by fostering a culture that takes calculated risks, learns from failure, promotes learning agility, and uses data analytics to make informed decisions.

TAKE ACTION: LEARNER-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT

• Encourage storytelling. Foster the use of storytelling as a leadership skill to help employees embrace and execute the organization’s transformation program. Make sure that in these stories, leaders provide the “why” behind the transformation.
• Use reverse mentoring. Use flipped classrooms and reverse mentoring programs to enable young leaders to mentor and coach senior executives. Provide opportunities for leaders at all levels to be seen as teachers.
• Enable experimentation. Provide programs that enable employees to explore new functions, work with different teams, and practice new skills on the job. This allows people to integrate learning with work and makes learning a continual process rather than a one-time event.
• Leverage new technology. Deploy technologies that make learning more engaging, more accessible, and more personalized. Take advantage of new tools and resources (such as virtual classrooms) that enable you to reach a critical mass of learners around a transformation under way in your organization.

TAKE ACTION: PARTNERSHIPS

• Focus development close to customers. Deliver development programs to younger, front-line leaders closest to customers and partners. They will be instrumental in executing your organization’s transformation.
• Learn from innovators. Look outside your industry to organizations that have innovative programs and approaches you can bring to your own organization.
• Foster talent mobility. Work with other parts of your business to design a facilitated talent-mobility program featuring job-to-job transitions and ongoing movement of people into new projects and assignments. Ensure that these experiences challenge employees as well as expose them to different business functions and regions.

For more detail and several cases, please read the HBR and McKinsey bellow in the pdf frame.

Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) in Leadership Learning Insights

  Source: Mckinsey: in How do I Implement Complex Change at Scale?