In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape, having a strong learning culture is essential for driving employee growth and achieving business outcomes. As the Director of Strategic Accounts and Customer Success at Qstream, Lauren Boynton has witnessed firsthand the impact of a programmatic approach to learning and how Qstream’s adaptive learning journey works alongside existing learning tools to create scalable and measurable learning experiences. In this six-part series, Lauren will explore various programs starting first today with leadership training:
Video Transcript: The Leadership Journey
My name is Lauren Boynton, Director of Customer Success and Strategic Accounts here at Qstream.
During my almost eight years with the organization, I’ve witnessed firsthand the importance and impact of a strong learning culture through the customer relationships I’ve maintained and fostered Over the years, these insights have helped me to better support our clients and create a map to success for them through Qstream’s programmatic approach.
So what is the programmatic approach? Qstream’s programmatic approach is defined as an adaptive learning journey that promotes exponential employee growth and generates actionable analytics.
A customer’s training efforts must require an ongoing strategic approach to enable professional growth and drive business outcomes.
Qstreams microlearning and knowledge reinforcement technology works alongside the customer’s existing learning tools and programs to create robust, effective learning journeys that are scalable and measurable.
In this six-part series, I’m going to discuss several programs, some of which may already exist at your organization. The first program we will discuss is the ever-evolving leadership journey.
At the end of 2022, Forbes magazine put out an article titled Three Skills Leaders Will Desperately Need In 2023. Those skills were: skill one – building, teaching and living values.
It is a proven statistic that employees are more engaged when their organization has a well-defined set of company values and lives up to those values.
Skill number two: reducing frustrations. The majority of work frustrations that employees identify, they’re fixable, but fixing those frustrations will require leaders to ask directly and without defensiveness for employees to share any and all frustrations
Skill number three: hiring for attitude. Great hiring decisions are going to require a lot more than merely selecting candidates with the right skills Over the years, I’ve seen leadership training take many forms, some training has spanned over multiple years and some have been quick hit approaches.
If the above skill set tells us anything, it’s that the importance of setting managers up for success is critical to the success of your organization.
Using the framework in the article, for example, training on skill number one would most likely start with reinforcing company values and then moving to scenario-based challenges that showcase real life examples of addressing employee issues and what attributes to look out for when hiring. The program shown here offers a more formal approach, but before any training is delivered, the foundational stage addresses the need to understand your leaders first.
How do they communicate, what are their strengths, having this baseline level of detail could then inform the rest of the training to ensure a more holistic view of your participants.
Whether you’re looking to enhance an existing program or create a new one, it’s critical to create a clear and transparent path for your leaders to advance the training and achieve mastery. setting the expectation of what they will learn, where they will learn it, how it will be reinforced and what criteria must be met to progress.
John van der Voort is the Co-Founder and CEO of Remote. He wrote that until proven otherwise, assume that your employees have good intentions and want to further the organization with work.
They’re part of a well thought out leadership journey, follows his three pillars of engagement, creating connection, building a strong foundation of trust; Setting expectations, setting clear expectations and goals for the role and make sure it’s all well documented; And number three: tracking the right metrics, ensure they are clearly defined, reasonable to achieve and central to the job’s responsibilities.
An investment in leadership is an investment in the success of your organization and Qstream’s programmatic approach will ensure your initiatives are outcome oriented, consistent and clear and in the flow of their daily work.
