As we’ve entered a new calendar year, many people and most organizations are trying to take stock of what went well last year, what didn’t, and how to improve it in the future.
So what is the future of leadership and development (L&D) in your organization? Is it growing in importance? Do you have a seat at the leadership table? According to experts, L&D is becoming more central, cross-functional, and strategic than it’s been in previous years. According to the LinkedIn Learning report Building the Agile Future, the top four focus areas for L&D are:
- Aligning learning programs to business goals
- Upskilling employees
- Creating a culture of learning
- Improving employee retention
The report says 83% of organizations want to build a more people-centric culture and that 81% of L&D departments are helping. Do these stats match your organization?
Even the report’s title, Building the Agile Future, is a clue to what organizations are demanding from L&D? Is your organization agile? Is your L&D group agile? Has it driven change in the post-Covid world or is struggling to keep up? The best L&D groups take the lead in helping people create the future and not just react to it.
Fun fact: #Future was the 8th most-used hashtag of 2023 with 24 million searches and #Futurism was the 9th on the list with 23 million searches.
Shaping Your Agile Future
Agility is one of the key Social Intelligence skills that distinguish high-performing people and organizations. It’s the ability to change how we think about challenges in the workplace. Agile people have the skills needed to become an initiator of change, be more innovative, and a great problem solver. Agility training helps people and organizations overcome our tendency towards the status quo and to create positive action. Agility has implications for almost every job function and department, and certainly is valuable in L&D. And importantly, agility training provides practical techniques to quickly and effectively execute change.
“Agility is needed at the organizational level and the individual level. You want an organization that is able to move quickly. Exploit opportunities, get there before the competition gets there, be disruptive, do things in new ways. That’s what agility is all about. At the individual level though, it’s about changing your mindset. You can be more flexible, more creative, and come up with more unique and creative ideas. And then we prepare people to go a step further. To actually put those ideas into practice.” – Casey Mulqueen, PhD, Senior Director of Learning and Development at TRACOM Group
TRACOM’s agility programs are available for organizations in both web-based and in-person instructor-led versions.
TRACOM also offers a live, web-based agility course for individuals.
