One of the largest regional credit unions in the United States was built on a directive approach to leadership, where leaders control and are responsible for the goals and work of their teams. This leadership style worked well as the credit union grew.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed how the organization worked, introducing a hybrid work model and a heightened emphasis on employee wellbeing. The credit union’s members increasingly expected a modern, digital experience and so did newer employees. In addition to its technology, it needed to modernize its leadership and people development strategy.

As it looked to the future, the credit union recognized the imperative to transform.

A Cultural Paradigm Shift

The increasing relevance of digital transformation brought a new lens; it was the perfect setting to take a closer look at the organization and begin making improvements to better equip employees so that they could, in turn, take even better care of members. To do this, the credit union introduced leadership development as an official function in the organization, and in doing so realized transformation required significant shifts.

“People often forget that transformation starts with changing mindsets, and that can be a massive leap for a traditional organization that has always done things a certain way. Our senior executives understood that to continue to hold our position at the forefront of finance, we had to embrace new ways of communicating, relating to, and leading people,” said the credit union’s Vice President of Leadership Development. “We had the will; we just needed the way.”

The credit union already had, in pockets of the organization, people who were actively mentoring and supporting leaders, but wanted to make the shift to deliver consistent leadership development at scale and gain buy-in across an organization during a fundamental cultural shift.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)® came alongside to support them.

Featured Solutions

All-in-One Leadership Development Subscription: CCL Passport

Access tailorable training and tools with an all-in-one leadership development subscription to help you support and scale your in-house corporate leadership training initiatives.

Better Conversations Every Day

Our conversational skills training program increases communication, active listening, and feedback skills, providing coaching training for leaders that improves organizational culture.

Solution

“When the credit union came to us, we knew the first thing we needed to do was really listen to understand. We also wanted to make sure that they knew they were not alone,” said Anne Credi, CCL Strategic Business Partner.

“Since COVID, organizations have been coming to us, in some phase of transformation — each knowing that the change is inevitable to their survival, yet struggling with its complexity within an increasingly unpredictable environment. We knew the credit union was headed in the right direction, and we were impressed that they knew they had to engage and motivate all people leaders around this shift. The question was, how?” recounted Credi. “Our priority was to join forces with the credit union — understanding their needs and leveraging our evidence-based solutions to achieve their goal. We understood they needed meaningful leadership at scale, where leadership development wasn’t limited to small groups of high-potentials; rather, a solution that allowed everyone to be included — allowing a rising tide of shared understanding, practice, and language of leadership.”

The solution? CCL Passport.

A Subscription to Trusted Leadership Development

CCL Passport offers a flexible, licensed leadership development subscription to content that organizations can modify and add their brand to. But Passport isn’t just a subscription — it’s a partnership. We work closely with organizations to provide unlimited use of our programs, content, and tools, and help them navigate and make the most of their leadership development journey. Backed by our 50+ years of research and experience pioneering industry best practices, Passport makes scaling leadership development affordable, replicable, and fast.

“CCL Passport was exactly what we needed. At the time, there were just 2 of us in the newly formed leadership development function, and Passport helped us prioritize goals with content that is fully developed and ready to implement. It had digital content that we could scale to all 1,400 leaders and in-person classroom content with presentation decks, facilitation guides, workbooks, and communication plans. Passport is very much like the easy button for leadership development content. The only hurdle was deciding which content to launch and when, and that’s where our partnership with CCL has been instrumental,” said the VP.

We collaborated with the credit union to identify the best place to start. They chose Better Conversations Every Day (BCE), a coaching skills program designed to help participants improve their leadership, coaching, and communication skills with in-person classroom training and practice.

Initially, the credit union invited all senior leaders to voluntarily participate in the BCE program with the goal of creating evangelists on the executive and senior leadership teams. We ran the first session, training and certifying 3 credit union trainers to ensure they felt confident delivering the program.

A group of 24 senior leaders attended the first session. While the VP and her team had anticipated a slow rollout to the rest of the organization, the participating leaders were so enthusiastic about the experience that they insisted BCE be rolled out for all credit union leaders within 2 months.

To date, over 1,000 of the credit union’s 1,400 leaders have voluntarily attended BCE.

Results

The impact has been magnetic. “What has taken me most by surprise is the demand for more and the dedication to communicating better. We have leaders who have asked to return to class because they feel that they need one more practice day with their peers of having better conversations,” said the VP. “The demand is high and attendees are constantly asking us what else we have to offer.”

The impact has not just been on other leaders — the VP has experienced it herself.

“As the VP of a brand-new department at a large organization, I needed (and still do) all of the support I could get. I truly credit our CCL success manager with coaching and encouraging me, challenging my own limiting beliefs, and supporting me through this journey,” said the VP. “One of the most surprising impacts we’ve seen has been how leaders who thought they were going to a program to learn how to get their people to do their jobs better come out of it having become more self-aware, with a better understanding of their own leadership opportunities for development and better equipped to lead. Another important impact is the connections leaders make with each other because of BCE, and their willingness to support and coach each other long after leaving the classroom.”

By the Numbers

Meaningful Impact

The VP reports that she and her team hear of leaders who are going back to their teams and asking for a reset on how they’ve been leading.

“One of my favorite stories is of a direct report who did not know that their leader was going to the BCE training. That leader came back and began to implement the learnings by truly listening and asking powerful questions. The direct report could not figure out what had happened to change this leader’s communication style. So the direct report resorted to checking the leader’s calendar to try to figure out what could possibly have happened to instigate this big of a change. It’s stories like this that make me feel so grateful that a meaningful shift is happening — one person at a time,” reported the VP.

To help the development stick, the credit union intends to make BCE mandatory for all newly hired or promoted leaders. The credit union also plans to include CCL Passport content in their leadership onboarding program and include BCE communication competencies in job descriptions. The credit union is currently exploring delivering digital Passport content to support the development of all 8,000+ employees.

“CCL has been a consistent support system for our small team. From the beginning, CCL has been careful to truly understand the needs of the organization as well as the goals of leadership development. They’ve been very responsive and supportive for the entire time we have worked together, always providing timely updates to content and suggestions that expand our mindset of what is possible. CCL Passport has equipped us to scale true impact very quickly. We would not be where we are today without CCL,” concluded the VP.

Participants Say

The post How a Regional Credit Union Scaled Leadership Development to Thousands With a Team of 2 appeared first on CCL.

In the current era of perpetual crisis and disruption, organizations must stay competitive so their leaders are able to navigate change and execute new strategies. At the same time, employees are eager to find meaning in their work and advance in their careers. Organizations with cultures that support growth and learning are the ones best positioned to be agile and innovative, with high levels of employee engagement and retention.

So how can your organization create a culture that puts learning at the forefront — in a way that’s practical, behavioral, and scalable? It starts with planting seeds for a learning culture to thrive.

What Is a Learning Culture?

A learning culture is an environment that demonstrates and encourages learning at both the individual and organizational levels, where sharing and gaining knowledge is prioritized, valued, and rewarded. A learning culture happens when learning becomes part of the ecosystem of the organization.

While it’s no small feat, there are 4 important components that can help transform your organization’s current culture into a learning culture.

4 Steps to Cultivate a Learning Culture at Your Organization

1. Attract and develop agile learners.

If you’re looking to upskill your workforce or perhaps reskill yourself, learning agility is one of the most critical skillsets to develop. Our research has long shown that the most successful leaders with the longest careers have the key leadership trait of learning agility.

Learning-agile leaders exemplify a growth mindset by learning from experience, challenging perspectives, remaining curious, and seeking new experiences. (This is why research suggests that great leaders are great learners.)

Because employees with learning agility continue to grow their skills and capabilities regardless of their current job, these individuals are in demand in the quest for talent. The workplace of yesterday no longer exists, and organizations need agile learners who understand how to transfer their current skillset to solve new problems and build capabilities for tomorrow.

• When hiring new talent: Seek out team members who learn from experience and challenge perspectives. Look for the critical skill of learning agility by asking interviewees how they’ve approached difficult situations in the past, how they’ve learned from mistakes, and how they prepare themselves for new challenges. Inquire about how they’ve applied their learnings to their next opportunity.
• For your current team members: Encourage people to remain curious and open. Provide ample opportunities for on-the-job learning and stretch assignments, along with support in the form of tools, mentoring, and coaching. Provide access to development opportunities for employees across your organization — don’t just limit skill-building to a small subset deemed “high potentials.”

Building a learning culture that democratizes leadership development and values a growth mindset will help you attract and retain a workforce that truly wants to learn, and help others learn as well.

2. Create a psychologically safe environment.

Looking at the teams and groups in your organization, are you fostering the trust and collaboration needed to sustain a strong learning culture? By creating safe spaces to be open and take interpersonal risks, you can build a foundation of psychological safety at work and encourage the learning that contributes to innovation and productivity.

Psychological safety is about promoting risk-taking and candor in a group, to create a secure environment for optimal learning. It’s the belief that candor is welcome, that employees can ask questions often and early, and that people can freely admit mistakes without fear of retribution.

Encourage team members (especially senior leaders) to admit mistakes openly and share stories of “failing forward.” Also, make sure executives know how to encourage innovation, not unintentionally sabotage and undermine it.

Ensuring leaders can create psychological safety for their teams allows team members to learn collectively and leads to a strong learning culture in your organization, where groups are willing to find lessons in setbacks and hardships, listen to one another, and invite differing opinions and candid conversations.

Remember, it’s not about being polite, but rather about being open. The openness to take interpersonal risks and glean lessons from mistakes to achieve something greater signifies a culture where growth is valued, which leads to a stronger organization that puts learning in the forefront.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Promote risk-taking and transparency within your organization.
• Encourage team members to ask questions often and early.
• Welcome candor and encourage employees, as well as the senior leadership team, to admit mistakes and share lessons learned, without fear of consequence.

3. Encourage conversations and feedback throughout the organization.

When determining how to cultivate learning culture, remember that effective communication and feedback should be woven throughout the organization and be encouraged and expected as a part of the norm. When feedback becomes a part of regular conversations, employees are aware of their personal developmental areas, resulting in continuous gains and fewer surprises at end-of-year reviews.

Giving feedback routinely and well often dramatically improves your talent development — but requires a particular skillset, which can fortunately be developed.

Encourage employees to give, and seek, both positive and developmental feedback. Positive feedback can help them leverage what’s working well already, and developmental feedback allows them to see what can be improved upon or done differently to have greater impact.

Because a conversation, by definition, involves 2 or more people, the collective communication competency of an organization is greatly enhanced when all employees are knowledgeable and skilled at holding high-quality conversations. Put simply, better culture starts with better conversations.

And that’s why our clients who have partnered with us to scale our conversational skills training program across their organizations have seen such positive results: When a critical mass of people shares a common understanding around what constitutes an effective conversation, it allows new skills to be applied to everyday work, and to spread organically through the organization. Widely applied, improved conversational skills benefit the organization by creating more robust, innovative, stress-tested solutions and a more dynamic and psychologically safe, learning culture.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Improve conversational skills across your entire organization with scalable training to build a common leadership language.
• Participate in meaningful conversations and provide valuable, actionable, and constructive feedback.
• Encourage everyone in your organization to truly listen to one another and seek feedback.

4. Make learning an explicit organizational priority.

If you want to show that learning is a real priority within your organization, send clear signals to your workforce that you’re all in.

Examine your policies, rewards systems, and opportunities to establish and reinforce a learning culture. Consider making these types of scheduled events a common practice at your organization:

• Lunch-and-learns, where senior leaders are storytellers who share their experiences and what they’ve learned recently and throughout their career journeys.
• After-action reviews, where teams regularly take a few minutes to share what they learned from a project or experience.
• Learning communities, where individuals can share what they’ve learned with similarly situated peers, and they can discuss together how they’re applying these learnings in their everyday work.
• Designated development days, where team- or company-wide sharing of lessons learned is expected and honored.

To show that your organization believes that learning is for everyone, make development opportunities inclusive and accessible across the entire organization. The practice of scaling learning will be unique for every organization, but be sure to provide an array of opportunities for “soft skill development” in a wide array of delivery formats to meet learner needs and abilities, including options that are asynchronous, in-person, self-paced, and virtual. (We’ve found that there are many unexpected benefits of using online learning for leadership development.)

Also, to ensure that you’re building a true learning culture, provide organizational support for learning not only in the form of tools and resources, but also by providing the necessary time and space for growth. Encourage leaders to allocate time for themselves and to set aside time for their teams to absorb and practice new skills.

When every employee sees that the organization values both individual and collective growth, you’ll strengthen your learning culture and gain commitment from your team members.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Create a strong learning culture by naming it as an explicit organizational priority.
• Examine company policies, rewards systems, and career development opportunities — what’s missing and what can be improved?
• Make it a common practice to share insights with others by hosting events such as lunch-and-learns, after-action reviews, and designated development days.

Build a Learning Culture That’s Tailored to Your Organization

To tailor your learning strategy to your organization, make sure to align your business strategy and leadership development opportunities, as well as your organization’s broader values, language, and brand. Examine the capabilities needed both today and into the future, and ask employees what type of development would be most valuable for them, as well as how they prefer to learn.

It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone is in a place to jump in right away. Keep in mind that behavior change is difficult. Meet people where they are, encouraging small steps, risk-taking, and sharing through peer support. Use metrics to keep a pulse on what’s resonating and having an impact so that you can adapt as needed and evolve your learning culture strategy as you grow.

Every organization is different, so the path to truly creating a culture of learning that will become a part of the ecosystem will be different as well. But with an intentional focus and commitment from the leadership team, you can plant the seeds today that allow a learning culture to flourish at your organization — resulting in a more agile work environment that’s prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build a learning culture in your organization by providing ample access to growth and development opportunities. Take advantage of our leadership development subscription, CCL Passport for unlimited access to our world-renowned training content and our most comprehensive package of proven, transformative leadership solutions. If you license our content, you can bring our proven research, programs, and tools in-house to leaders at all levels of your organization.

Frequently Asked Questions About a Learning Culture

More questions? Our experts are here to help. Let’s have a conversation!

The post Cultivate a Learning Culture Within Your Organization appeared first on CCL.

“We want to be ready for the future, but don’t know how to prepare for what we can’t predict.”

As outlined in our new Talent Development Challenge Report, this is one of the quotes we hear most often from our clients. If your organization is like most, you’re keeping an eye on the headlines and thinking about the future, but preparing for the unknown feels impossible. You know bigger challenges are coming, and leaders and teams need to work together differently, but future-ready skills are difficult to identify — and harder still to develop.

Senior executives tell us they feel their leadership pipelines aren’t equipped to accomplish today’s priorities — much less tomorrow’s. The shortfall between current capabilities and forecasted leadership needs is called the leadership gap, and in today’s climate of instability and multiple interconnected crises, addressing it is more critical than ever. Steering the business through uncertainty requires not just leadership skills, but also building greater leadership capability — more sophisticated ways of thinking, increased perspective-taking, and leadership wisdom.

While you can’t prepare everyone for every scenario, you can help your leaders learn to think in bigger new ways. You need a protective scaffolding of development to elevate leaders across the board and secure your organization’s future. Join us to learn how building competencies and capabilities in a pipeline of adaptable leaders at every level is more straightforward than you might think — and more important now than ever.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to identify gaps in your organization’s leadership pipeline
• Why vertical development is important for building leadership capability
• How a strong pipeline of leaders leads to organizational success

The post Building Leadership Capability: Overcoming Talent Development Challenges appeared first on CCL.

Talent development is more critical than ever in today’s landscape of economic and geopolitical instability, generational shifts, industry disruptions, and hybrid workplaces.

But creating greater collective capability in this unpredictable context isn’t easy.

Forecasting which skills your workforce will need most in the future can feel difficult, and planning talent development is especially challenging in times of increased uncertainty.

But one thing is clear: Organizations that invest in talent now will be much better positioned to succeed when things stabilize and outlooks improve.

Research consistently shows the benefits of leader development, which enables individuals to become more agile, resilient, effective, and future-oriented. At scale, talent development ensures that the entire organization itself becomes more agile, resilient, effective and future-oriented, too. Layering development across all levels and functions creates a protective scaffolding for the organization.

The Top Challenges of Talent Development

Our report reveals the 6 biggest talent development challenges that we hear most often from clients and offers reflection questions and actionable recommendations to address each:

1. Pipeline: Addressing talent gaps to strengthen the leadership pipeline
2. Focus: Prioritizing the development of what’s most important
3. Overload: Breaking through despite competing demands and distractions
4. Adaptability: Navigating uncertainty and orienting to the future
5. Conversations: Strengthening and deepening foundational communication
6. Scale: Expanding development efforts across the entire organization

This guide will help you recognize your talent development challenges and build confidence and clarity in your approach to overcoming them — starting with understanding where your organization is now, and where it needs to go.

Start From Where You Are

Beyond time and budget constraints, readiness also plays a critical role in the success of any development efforts, especially at scale. Understanding your individual, organizational, and L&D readiness levels is crucial for planning and supporting effective talent development.

Whether your next step is assessing your organization’s current state and building a foundation for development, expanding your existing efforts, or elevating talent development to take it to the next level, at scale — we can help, and meet you where you are.

Download Report

The post Talent Development Challenges for HR and L&D Leaders appeared first on CCL.

HR, Talent, and L&D teams are expected to provide meaningful, accessible development to their organizations, but that can be challenging in today’s ever-shifting landscape. Mergers and acquisitions lead to new, flatter org charts and expectations of doing more with less. Global supply chain issues, geopolitical instability, rising energy costs, a tight labor market, and hybrid work all mean that organizations need flexible, agile leaders.

These changes all call for increased collaboration, connection, and coordination, and there’s never been a greater need for effective leadership at scale.

The optimal way to achieve these critical outcomes and widespread alignment across the enterprise is by scaling leadership development opportunities across the entire organization.

But how do you support developing leadership at scale, when your workforce is huge, staff levels are constantly shifting, resources are limited, and people are struggling to keep up with day-to-day challenges? HR and L&D professionals need tools for scaling leadership, along with strategic recommendations to help them deliver evidence-based training content and transformational development experiences across the enterprise.

Leadership Development at Scale: 3 Keys

As our white paper outlines, when organizations are looking to scale leadership development as widely but effectively as possible, it’s essential to focus on these 3 principles.

1. Plan your leadership strategy.

Devise a leadership approach at the outset. Organizations don’t go to market without a sales or operations strategy. Likewise, there should be hesitance about going to market without a leadership strategy.

Think through how different levels of your organization are affected by culture shifts that require new goals and strategies, and view leadership as a lever to execute the business strategy and drive organizational performance. Organizations that are most effective at creating new leadership capabilities focus on linking talent development to business results.

2. Provide access to relevant content.

Align the training content you offer to support the overall leadership development process. Simply providing access to hours of content, especially if that content isn’t closely aligned with your organizational priorities, won’t be very beneficial to your employees. Scaling leadership development requires a significant commitment across the organization. It’s not a program, but rather a sweeping initiative that requires a whole-systems view.

Large-scale change requires that you create the right architecture to support your learning and development objectives for leaders at every level. To maximize success, focus on the skills, behaviors, and practices needed by individual leaders and on the organizational leadership capabilities needed to support the business strategy.

3. Leverage internal and external talent.

Consider whether, and how, your internal team could use the support of an external partner. Scaling leadership development effectively requires readiness, in terms of capacity and capability, and many in-house HR and L&D teams aren’t equipped to develop hundreds or even thousands of leaders at once. You may not have access to the tools or infrastructure required to provide meaningful leadership development that’s scalable (to provide access to all talent) and customizable (to align development with your KPIs).

At the same time, HR and talent leaders have an increasingly important role in partnering with their C-suites on organizational strategy and advocating for employee needs. Partnering with an external provider allows internal teams to focus on providing high-value enterprise support.

When internal capability doesn’t align with delivery need, or when your in-house team needs to place its focus elsewhere, combine insourcing with outsourcing strategically. Integrate your business leaders and internal facilitators to champion the initiatives, increase alignment, and generate buy-in, and lean on trusted external providers for proven training content and solutions.

Scaling Leadership Development Enables Collective Potential

Imagine the impact that will result in your organization if there is shared leadership vision, language, and behaviors — all linked directly to critical business needs.

Scaling leadership development is the optimal way to create new capabilities across the enterprise, and to communicate to every member of your organization that they are valued and supported.

Flexible development options can help you broaden access to learning for every member of your organization, across leader levels, and through every stage of their career journeys. And with the right partner and solution, you can meet the increased demand for training and development, regardless of the bandwidth of your L&D or HR team.

The 3 steps for scaling leadership development that are outlined in this paper will help you to more quickly achieve concrete business results, improve retention and engagement, and drive an organizational culture of learning and growth.

Download White Paper

The post Future-Proof Your Organization by Scaling Leadership Development appeared first on CCL.