Leadership Post : Management and Intergenerational Leadership Coaching, Employee Engagement, and Performance Management Training

By the year 2014, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that 47% of the population will be comprised of Millennials-Digital Natives (born after 1980) who were raised playing video games and surfing the Internet to get information.

What does this mean for corporate learning? How are they preparing for a younger generation of workers who are attuned to learning using the latest technologies?

The most fatal flaw in learning and development today is that we are not using the myriad of 21st century innovative technologies available to us – mobile devices, social media tools and games.

When you look at the learning preferences of those entering and already in the workforce, it becomes apparent why, if we are to have “ready now” leaders, we must begin to re-imagine training and development.

• Receive information quickly and from multiple sources
• Parallel processing and multitasking
• Processing pictures, sounds, and video before text
• Random access to hyperlinked multimedia information
• Interacting and networking simultaneously with many people
• Learning “just in time”
• Instant gratification and instant rewards
• Learning that is instantly useful and above all FUN.

If this is true and, I believe it is, then there must be a “Millennial Learning Style” and it should be taken into consideration when designing training programs. We should consider employing:

• All forms of multi media technologies
• Learning by doing
• Lots of links to relevant Web sites
• Placing performance before competency
• Building social media platforms to encourage “informal learning”
• Encouraging risk taking and learning through failure
• Anytime, anywhere access to ideas, information and each other

What innovative learning strategies is your company considering in order to attract, develop and retain tomorrow's leaders today?  I'd like to hear from you.

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“Better Ideas Through Failure,” is the title of an article in a recent Wall Street Journal. Those of us in human resources have known for years that people can learn from mistakes and that innovation comes from taking risks and making mistakes. Yet when someone does make a mistake they are made to feel bad rather than patted on the back for trying.

I agree with Judy Estrin, a founder of seven high tech companies and author of a book on innovation when she says, “Failure, and how companies deal with failure, is a very big part of innovation.” I’m happy to see that companies such as Grey New York are handing out “Heroic Failure” awards to employees who try something that was worth trying and fail and learn from their failure.

For Baby Boomers like myself, trying something new was not encouraged – in school, especially Catholic school, or in the workplace. If you made a mistake it was usually the blame game rather than owning up to it.

For me, the younger generation – the Millennials and those coming up behind them – have learned to embrace failure from the day they were given their first computer or iPhone on which they could play games. James Gee, a professor at Arizona State University believes that a well-designed game allows players to explore and try new things. In fact, as Gee says, “in a game, failure is a good thing.”

Organizations could learn from playing games and lower the cost of failure and encourage employees to explore and play with ideas. To quote Gee once again, “that type of learning – risk taking – can’t happen if the cost of failure is too high.” So, corporate America, perhaps it’s time to starting playing games!

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I recently met with a colleague, Laura Mindek, who attended the National Human Resources Planning Society conference in California. Laura is past president of the New York affiliate and she and I both served on its board for a number of years.

I asked her what was her key take away from the conference and what are the challenges facing Chief Human Resource Officers (CHRO). She spoke about two:

1. CHRO’s Need to Focus On The Global Big Picture

The U.S. is competing with everyone from everywhere for everything – specifically, against smart and hungry countries like China and India who are no longer doing just the repetitive administrative work that we outsource.

2. Companies That Survive Will Reinvent Themselves

Companies that reinvent themselves will be the ones that are successful.
Strategy will still be important, but reinvention will come at an operations level, particularly from middle managers collaborating on breakthrough ideas.

So what are CHRO’s to do to help their organizations meet these challenges?

How To Compete Globally

The prediction is that by 2020 China and India along with Russia and Brazil will be the dominant centers of economic influence.

CHRO’s need to help senior management wake up and get their heads out of the sand. They need to educate their leaders and create a sense of urgency so they can start preparing to be competitive before it’s too late.

Today, companies need leaders:

• Who know how to adapt quickly to meet the demands of the global marketplace and have a “speed to market” mindset, and
• More importantly, see the bigger picture.

Just like people, companies tend to be either Introverted (focus inward) or extroverted (focus on the external world). From my perspective, most U.S. companies are way too introverted.

Ron Heifetz, senior lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, captured it well when he said that leaders tend to get “swept up on the dance floor.” On the dance floor you usually only see your partner or those people dancing closest to you. In order to get a broader view – global - one needs to “get on the balcony” where they can see the entire dance floor. Leaders must also be able to move back and forth between the dance floor and the balcony in order to adapt.

So, wake up America and get on the balcony before it’s too late. Are your leaders “on the dance floor or, “on the balcony?”

How to Survive and Reinvent Yourself

Innovation most often comes from those on the front lines who are closest to the work and the customers. Until recently it was difficult for information to make its way around an organization to reach the masses.

The advent of Web 2.0 and social media tools such as blogs, wikis and internal social networks have helped companies capture and share knowledge and create common communities where all employees can access and share information easily.

The best companies are already preparing for the future by using social media and social networking to collaborate and accelerate innovation.

Companies such as P&G, Lego and Boeing allow employees to share information and knowledge for the purposes of R&D, the implementation of more innovative products and services, more effective marketing and working smarter.

McKinsey conducted a global survey of 1700 executives who reported using social media in a variety of ways:

• 41% use social media internally
• 34% use it to connect with customers
• 25% use it to work with external partners and suppliers

For more information about how companies such as Deloitte, Cisco, JetBlue and Nokia are using social media, I highly recommend that you read Jeanne Meister and Kelly Willyerd’s new book, The 2020 Workplace. It’s chuck full if ideas on how you can tap into the collective wisdom and knowledge of your employees to help you innovate.

Is your company taking advantage of all Web 2.0 has to offer?

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Last week I participated in Jeanne Meister's webinar, Corporate Learning in 2010, hosted by Chief Learning Officer Magazine and I learned that there is an incredible innovation going on in the way companies are using social media for training and learning. These are just some of the innovations that I want to share with you.

Mobile Phones
The use of mobile phone is proliferating. 70% HR executives said they plan on using mobile phones for learning in the next 18 months. Merrill Lynch was one of the first to use mobile phones for compliance training and other financial services firms are now experimenting with the idea. Community bankers at Wachovia who spend most of their time traveling to meet clients use their  Blackberrys to have product knowledge at their fingertips in order to enhance sales. And, Watson Pharmaceuticals expects that within the next few years every sales person will use a smartphone with an app that says WatsonU.

Social Networks
According to DukeCE uppermost on the minds of most CEO’s is how to drive innovation. IBM successfully has addressed that issue by using technology called “innovation jams” to identify business problems and allow their 300,000 employees to easily connect to solve them. Computer Associates and Agilent Technologies also use internal social networks as a way for their employees to collaborate and share information.

Job Skills Accreditation
More job skills will be accredited. In addition to receiving accreditation from a university employees will be able to enhance their personal job skills portfolio. The focus will now be on what they learn not how they learn. In this day and age of job insecurity and cutbacks, this is appealing to employees who want portable skills that they can take to another organization.

As organizations become more complex and virtual, it is critical for them to use social media to be competitive. Whether you are trying to increase employee productivity, drive innovation or simply on-board new hires, social media is the tool to help you achieve this in an efficient way.

For more information on innovations in learning visit Jeanne Meister’s New Learning Playbook.

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