it’s time to go all in on virtual leadership · virtual leadership development isn’t a passing...

IT’S TIME TO GO ALL IN ON VIRTUAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

{ perspectives } LEARNING DESIGN

HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING { 1 }

IT’S TIME TO GO ALL IN ON VIRTUAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

A few years back, leadership development profession-als were being asked why they were investing in virtual learning initiatives. Today, they’re more likely to be asked why they’re not.

With the opportunities they provide for collaboration, making connections with colleagues, and building net-works, face-to-face classroom settings can create highly engaging and memorable leadership development experi-ences. Conventional wisdom once maintained that these dynamic, career-changing experiences could not be rep-licated within a virtual environment. This thinking is being proven wrong by organizations of all shapes and sizes that are delivering high-impact virtual programs for leaders at all levels. These programs combine some of the

best aspects of high-touch, in-person training—the use of cohorts, live events, and plenty of interaction—together with learning content that busy leaders can access anytime and anywhere. The result? Leadership development that’s reaching a broader global audience faster than more-traditional methods. Virtual development enables leaders at all levels to acquire new capabilities without disrupting their schedules, and is opening up exciting new avenues for organizational learning.

When we look at our clients’ experiences across the past several years, we see accelerated adoption of virtual methods for developing the skills and capabilities required of leaders at all levels.

Virtual leadership development isn’t a passing fad or a strategy that only a handful of leading-edge organizations are testing out. It’s now a proven method for delivering programs that accelerate the speed and impact of learning and can scale to meet the needs of the global enterprise.BY JOSH BRAND AND DAVID ELBAZ

Two-thirds of companies use elearning methodologies in their leadership development programs, and more than half are using on-demand content.2016 HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SURVEY OF L&D PROFESSIONALS AND BUSINESS-LINE MANAGERS

{ 2 } IT’S TIME TO GO ALL IN ON VIRTUAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

What Do We Mean By Virtual? We use the term “virtual” to refer to leadership development programs that are a mix of live events, virtual experiences, and individual, anytime/anywhere access to learning content, enhanced with collaborative capabilities like online discussion forums. In-person, instructor-led sessions may also be part of the learning experience, but are not required. Our definition of virtual leadership development is not synonymous with on-your-own, self-paced training.

virtual programs for leaders, wherever they’re located. Today’s technology can capture in nuanced detail the facial expressions of both instructors and learners, their explanatory gestures, and overall body language, which help create a dynamic live experience. Capabilities like polling and chat enable active learner participation. Virtual learning technology allows leaders to transcend physical boundaries, encouraging interaction and critical thinking among learners and instructors. Cohorts can collaborate and share knowledge virtually with peers, mentors, and instructors to cultivate a common business culture and drive targeted change throughout an organization.

Engaging leaders through virtual learning has allowed our clients to benefit tremendously from the many advantages that virtual confers. Our clients find that virtual leadership development:

oo Makes it easier for leaders in widely dispersed loca-tions to connect with each other more frequently and react more quickly to changing global market conditions;

oo Accommodates leaders’ busy work schedules by reducing or eliminating the need to travel to tradi-tional, classroom-based development programs;

oo Provides opportunities for leaders to review and rein-force new information so that the acquired knowl-edge stays with them over time;

oo Presents content in a variety of formats that enables all types of learners to engage; and

oo Meets the expectations of today’s tech-savvy and connected leaders by giving them access to learn-ing when and where it’s most convenient for them, and enabling them to collaborate where so much of today’s business and life happens: online.

All this is made possible through technologies that reliably deliver a wide range of capabilities that ensure engaging

Middle management believes virtual classrooms are one of the more effective tools for developing new leaders.2016 HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SURVEY OF L&D PROFESSIONALS AND BUSINESS-LINE MANAGERS


1. SCALE LEARNING MORE QUICKLYThe traditional work model—where all employees work from nine to five under one roof—has become the excep-tion rather than the norm. Globalization is a major con-tributing factor here. With so many organizations growing their global footprint and expanding in new and emerging markets, the proportion of employees working outside their company’s home office continues to grow. Whether they’re assigned to the home office or working across the world, more and more employees are tapping technology to work virtually. A recent Gallup survey found that 37 percent of U.S. workers report that they have worked virtually. This is quadruple the number who telecommuted in 1995. When this increasing number of virtual workers combines with globalization and the 24/7 nature of business today, we have an unprecedented demand for development programs that leaders can access anywhere, anytime.

Virtual development allows organizations with distrib-uted workforces to quickly scale the delivery of engaging programs to multiple groups of leaders. This accelerates the alignment and development of key capabilities that leaders need to drive strategic initiatives across a large, distributed organization in real time. Think of how much more efficient and cost-effective it is to reach hundreds and thousands of leaders—at a variety of levels and located throughout the world—with virtual programs, rather than taking leaders off-line and flying them all to one location, one small group at a time.

Fluor is a Fortune 150 company that provides engineer-ing, construction, procurement, maintenance, and project management services around the world. Its leaders work on large-scale global projects. With a workforce of 42,000

and sites in more than 25 countries across six continents, the company is challenged to bring leaders together for face-to-face leadership development.

Fluor recently brought together groups of new manag-ers to participate in the Harvard Business Publishing New Leader Program. This virtual learning program is designed to help new managers make a successful tran-sition to the managerial ranks while also honing their leadership potential. The program reached new leaders virtually across eight time zones, allowing participants to connect and collaborate with peers around the world, strengthening networks and developing the critical skills required to succeed in their new roles.

Fluor also utilizes Harvard Business Publishing’s Leadership Direct program to strengthen business acumen and strategic thinking among its executive and high-potential populations.

Advantages of Virtual Leadership DevelopmentHarvard Business Publishing has worked with hundreds of organizations around the world to design and deploy virtual leadership development programs. Based on this experience, we have identified these key benefits of virtual programs for leaders and organizations.

“ With the flexibility to complete the program coursework on their own schedule and the ability to join the live sessions virtually, our learners were highly engaged and motivated to actively participate in the program.” ANDREW FOOTE, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, ASSET SERVICES, LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT, CBRE


2. GIVE BUSY LEADERS AT ALL LEVELS GREATER FLEXIBILITY

With leaders working longer hours than ever before, devel-opment can sink to the bottom of the “to do” list. Leaders may opt out of development because they can’t afford to leave the field for formal training programs. Or they enthusiastically sign up for a program, but find themselves so distracted that they aren’t able to fully benefit from the experience once they are there.

Whether it means leaders participating in a class exercise while sitting at their desk or accessing learning content via their mobile device when they have a few minutes to spare, virtual learning can be readily absorbed into the workday. Leaders are more likely to take advantage of these development opportunities. The time commitment for each session is shorter than in a face-to-face classroom, and learning is spread over time. Allowing participants online access to materials, including archived session recordings, offers even more flexibility. Learners who find themselves with some free time can use it as a learning opportunity, posting a question to their cohorts, reading a case that will be discussed, or catching up on a session they may have missed.

3. DRIVE GREATER RETENTION AND APPLICATION OF LEARNING

Development organizations have long looked for ways to overcome the “forgetting curve,” which holds that most

of the knowledge acquired during a training session is lost within a day or so. Learning integrated within daily work and delivered over time is “stickier” than knowledge acquired at a one-time session that offers no ongoing opportunities for leaders to absorb and apply information on the job. This is supported by research published by ATD and others that finds that wider spacing between learning experiences, together with more repetition, helps learners more fully remember what they’ve learned.

Unlike classroom-based programs, virtual learning can be designed to deliver information consistently over the course of several months, so that leaders can continually learn, reflect, and apply knowledge as they work. The self-paced aspects of virtual programs—being able to re-watch a recording of a lecture, drill down on especially challeng-ing concepts, or quickly review material when they have a few minutes—allow leaders to practice and reflect on what they’ve learned until they’ve mastered specific material. This keeps them from falling down the forgetting curve.

Because the logistics are simpler than those for face-to-face programs, virtual programs can also be set up more quickly. They can provide more timely and relevant information to leaders in the rapidly changing workplace. Think of the challenge you’d be facing if your company merged and eight people from a different corporate culture were suddenly added to a management team.

CBRE is the global leader in real estate services. The com-pany’s asset services group recently turned to Harvard Business Publishing to help with a leadership program for 350 regionally dispersed directors.

“Our leaders are not always able to take time from their demanding schedules to participate in classroom-based training initiatives,” says Andrew Foote, regional director, asset services, learning and development at CBRE. “Yet the competitive pressures of commercial real estate make it essential that these leaders continue to enhance their skills. Virtual leadership development makes this possible.”

The program CBRE implemented utilizes Harvard

ManageMentor®. It was spread over a period of five months and designed to enhance competencies around customer focus, change management, feedback, and innovation.

“Sharing knowledge and experiences with my peers from other business units and regions helped me broaden my network in the company. We also uncovered best practices from peers that we can now apply to our own area of the business.” CAPITAL GROUP PROGRAM PARTICIPANT


The program is proving to be highly effective, with 98 percent of the licenses in use. The results from one post-module survey were typical: 89 percent of respondents indicated that they found the module interactive and engaging. And 93 percent indicated that the ideas, con-cepts, or skills presented in the module were applicable to their job.

Imagine how helpful it would be if the leader of that team could attend a virtual seminar about leading successfully in these circumstances, then access relevant content on demand and bounce ideas off experts and peers as needed. The same leader might have attended an in-person class on this topic months ago—but would that knowledge still be fresh and relevant?

Capital Group, a global investment management firm with headquarters in California, is partnering with Harvard Business Publishing to deliver a customized leadership development experience that helps first-level managers Grow with Capital. For an organization that places great value on collaboration and relationships, managers are realizing tremendous benefits from virtual discussions and topics that delve deeper than traditional training sessions. “Sharing knowledge and experiences with my peers from other business units and regions helped me broaden my network in the company. We also uncovered best practices from peers that we can now apply to our own area of the business,” reports a recent program participant.

The collaborative partnership between Capital Group and Harvard Business Publishing has resulted in a highly effective and highly rated global leadership program. 97 percent of the participants reported that they were apply-ing or planning to apply their new skills, knowledge and insights to their role as manager, and 92 percent indicated that they had changed their behavior as a result of what they had learned. Additionally, their program satisfaction score, at 93 percent, places Capital Group as a leading partner for the New Leader Program. These results illustrate how virtual learning is having a positive impact on leadership at Capital Group.

Cognizant Embraces a Virtual Learning Environment

Cognizant is an organization with more than 50 delivery centers in 14 countries using leading-edge tools to facilitate collaboration across a global workforce. As a result, Cognizant employees were used to working virtually and across multiple time zones to manage more than 20,000 client projects. Yet the company’s leadership development programs had historically been conducted in a face-to-face environment.

The transition to virtual learning was initially met with some reluctance, as senior leaders expressed some skepticism about whether it would work. They were concerned that it was difficult enough to get participants to complete assignments in a face-to-face workshop, let alone when working independently.

They wondered how virtual groups would work and whether virtual learning would come at a cost in terms of participants’ ability to interact with one another and forge strong network bonds.

What they found was that virtual learning was more engaging, more appealing to a wide range of learners (especially millennials), and—because it was so well integrated with work—more likely to be applied and to stick.

The results from the first cohort of Cognizant’s virtual leadership program were impressive:

• 91 percent were observed to have made significant capability improvement

• 45 percent moved into target client partner roles within six months

• 100 percent were seen by managers as ready to assume their next role


A virtual environment provides a more level playing field and better opportunities for all leaders to learn and contrib-ute in a multitude of ways, including chat, online discus-sion threads, polls, and—for those who want to preserve their privacy—one-to-one questions to the instructor. In addition, virtual programs typically combine a variety of learning formats—including individual study, expert-led lectures, online collaboration, discussion forums, and action learning projects—that tap into different learning styles. As a result, well-designed leadership development programs can more successfully engage and motivate a broader range of learning styles than event-based, in-person programs.

5. BETTER ENGAGE ACROSS GENERATIONS

An organization’s workforce has always been composed of multiple generations, and today’s workforce is no differ-ent. Baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials, and even Gen Z-ers—who will be here before we know it—all work side by side. And technology is an important factor in today’s workplace, where we’ve now been emailing and remotely conferencing for decades. While it’s true that millennials were raised in an “always on” world and embrace tech-nology in all aspects of their lives, it’s become clear that they’re not the only ones. Baby boomers Facetime their grandchildren and deliver sales presentations remotely. Gen X-ers text their college-aged kids and collaborate on projects with colleagues around the globe. Busy leaders of any generation are comfortable using technology and have the expectation that their workplace will be up to date. They welcome the opportunity to take advantage of development experiences that don’t take them out of the office to participate in training sessions.

Technology Has Transformed the Field of Education

Ever-improving technological innovations have rapidly turned what was once a distant vision into a current reality. Learning today is drastically different than it was five or even two years ago. Educators are using video, social media, and collaboration technologies to engage learners in new ways. Teleconferencing platforms and virtual classroom technologies are reaching learners in real time, around the world, fueling a fundamental shift in the field of corporate education.

In 2012, Harvard and MIT, joined by the University of California, Berkeley, announced that edX, the nonprofit massive open online course (MOOC) platform, intended to reach a new, broader audience of learners. As of September 2015, edX had five million users, and it’s been estimated that, overall, 25 million users enrolled in MOOCs between 2012 and 2015. edX is also beginning to offer professional education courses covering topics like cybersecurity and big data, aimed at the corporate market.

4. REACH A BROADER GROUP WITH VARIED LEARNING STYLES

Virtual learning helps support a broader range of learn-ing styles. In a traditional classroom, participants may be physically in the room but hiding out in the back, letting their peers in the front answer questions and take the lead in discussions. The people who tend to participate in a traditional classroom are those who are comfortable speaking and being the center of attention. Less vocal learners, or those participating in a nonnative language, can become detached from learning when a conversation takes off without them.


It’s Time to Go Virtual Most organizations with distributed workforces are already delivering some virtual training to segments of their staff. Now more than ever, there is an imperative to expand virtual development programs to reach all leaders. With a virtual approach, development dollars are allocated to development itself, as travel and other expenses related to in-residence programs are decreased. Today’s technology tools and platforms are delivering the energy, engagement, and collaboration benefits of in-person experiences while more effectively driving business strategy across the orga-nization. Successful organizations are increasingly find-ing that virtual delivery is the best choice for leadership development. Harvard Business Publishing’s experience designing and delivering virtual leadership development programs illustrates this. In the past year, these programs

reached participants in over 75 countries across six con-tinents, and demand keeps growing.

Learning and development groups no longer have to jus-tify virtual. They now have to justify why virtual would not be part of their learning strategy, even for leadership development.

If you’ve hesitated to move to virtual, it’s time to go all in!

Using Virtual to Transform Organizations

Harvard Business Publishing is working with its clients to create MOOCs that are specifically designed to meet an organization’s needs. Recognizing how rapidly its industry was changing, one major global enterprise decided that it needed to change the way it leads. And the company wanted to expose tens of thousands of its employees—managers and knowledge workers alike—to its new way of doing business. The only way to cost- and time-effectively reach so many learners was through virtual learning. This client worked with Harvard Business Publishing to create a program that would change employee expectations about what it means to lead and manage, and to develop the skills its employees needed to make the transition. The initiative combines existing expert content with content that addresses the company’s unique specifics. The program combines self-paced asynchronous learning and synchronous, mega-group broadcast sessions. It includes small group activities, individual tasks, and discussion boards. And it’s all delivered virtually.

Our experience with this initiative, and those of our other clients, demonstrates the widening acceptance of virtual learning, for both MOOCs and for smaller cohort-based programs. And as a result of this acceptance, we now see corresponding shifts in learner expectations. Virtual is becoming a given, and learning professionals need to continually refine their approaches, leveraging the best of what’s available to reach and engage learners.


JOSH BRAND is senior director of global delivery and

is responsible for the delivery of Harvard Business

Publishing’s solutions for clients around the globe.

He has more than 15 years of executive education

and management consulting experience and has

built management education programs for clients

around the world. Josh was a member of the Babson

executive education team, focused on designing and

delivering customized executive education programs.

Before that, he spent more than a decade as a

management consultant, helping global companies

formulate strategy. Contact Josh at josh.brand@

harvardbusiness.org.

DAVID ELBAZ is a senior learning solutions manager

for Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning.

In this role, he is responsible for consulting with clients

and architecting world-class leadership development

programs that drive organizational impact by aligning

participant-centered learning with key business

strategies. David was previously the product strategy

director at Senn Delaney, overseeing the successful

implementation of strategic initiatives, product

development, and client solutions, all focused on

creating healthy, high-performing cultures among

global Fortune 1000 companies. Contact David at

[email protected].

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ABOUT CORPORATE LEARNING

Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partners

with clients to create world-class leadership development

solutions for managers at all levels. Our team leverages

the management insight, thought leadership, and

expertise of Harvard Business School faculty and

authors from Harvard Business Review to create tailored

leadership development solutions. With more than 25

years of practical experience, our innovative, technology-

enabled solutions drive meaningful and lasting business

results. Corporate Learning is a market group within

Harvard Business Publishing.

ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING

Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as

a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard

University. Its mission is to improve the practice of

management and its impact in a changing world. The

company achieves its mission through its relationships

with customers in three market groups: Higher Education,

Corporate Learning, and Harvard Business Review Group.

Through these platforms, Harvard Business Publishing is

able to influence real-world change by maximizing the

reach and impact of its essential offering—ideas.

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it’s time to go all in on virtual leadership · virtual leadership development isn’t a passing...

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