MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Attending ASTD 2009? So are we!

MindLeaders (and I!) will be at the ASTD 2009 International Conference and Expo in Washington, DC on May 31 - June 3. Our booth number is #2233. Please stop by and say hello, or send me a comment/email if you'd like to meet any other time.

If you're fairly new to conventions like this, or would just like some new ideas, check out my post last year about Tips for getting the most out of your ASTD (or any trade show!) experience.

Maximize your leadership development and succession planning efforts

Are you happy with your leadership pipeline? Do you have a succession plan that will cover the changing needs of your business? Are you ready for the wave of retirements that's coming?

If you answered no to any of those questions, chances are your leadership development and succession planning programs aren’t providing the value they could. Properly trained leaders are more likely to make tactical decisions that will increase the value of the business and ensure ongoing success. Effective leadership development reduces attrition of outstanding performers and raises the capabilities of everyone in the talent pool.

Our new white paper “Leadership in Crisis: How to Maximize Leadership Development and Succession Planning” will help you capitalize on your leadership development and succession planning efforts by examining the following questions:

• How are poor leadership development practices costing your company?
• What makes an effective leadership development program?
• Are star performers the best place to look for future leaders?
• What do you need to teach your talent pool to ensure a robust leadership pipeline and succession plan?

Download Leadership in Crisis: How to Maximize Leadership Development and Succession Planning and let us know what you think!

PILAR Award open for nominations

The 2009 MindLeaders Performance Improvement and Learning Achievement Recognition (PILAR) awards are open for nominations - have you submitted your company for recognition?

Award submissions - any award submissions, although I have a personal particular love for this one - are a great way to take stock of learning programs and how they're doing at achieving their goals. Of course, they do this while also offering a chance for some useful recognition of yourself and your work.

Nominations are open until August 31, and will be awarded at another great Award Dinner event.

The award categories are:

• Best First Year Program
• Best Marketing Program
• Best ‘Blended Learning’ Solution
• Most Innovative Channel Partner
• Best Measured Results or Impact on an Organization
• Founders Award for Overall Program Excellence

Hope you'll think about applying; the 2009 PILAR PDF will give you all the information about the award and the application process.

Changing from learning controllers to learning facilitators

Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, Twitter, social networking, etc.) and the learning tools it gives us are bright, shiny new toys. They're easy to think of as fads or things that only the youngest generation or biggest techies are using. But these tools are having a deeper effect on all of us that's subtle but powerfully important to us as trainers and organizational leaders.

We no longer control information. This applies across every industry.

• The movie and music industries are desperately trying to keep control of their content and are losing their battles.
• News organizations are doing their best to embrace this change: almost every newspaper and TV news web site now devotes tons of space to allowing everyone to post their own news and comment on stories.
• Most major online retailers now allow people to post reviews of products, even when those reviews are unflattering.

For us as training professionals, more learning is happening outside of classrooms than ever. Anyone can Google just about any question from whatever coffee shop work is taking place in. Hallway conversations and cubicle visits are the predominant learning system in almost every workplace. Our work is shifting from being the primary provider of knowledge to facilitating its spread and use.

The truly successful training professional/manager/department of tomorrow will be able to:

• Make information available to people in the organization at any time, from any location where they're working at the moment.
• Provide answers to questions with as little interruption to workflow as possible.
• Capture the information that people accumulate and share in ways that make it easier for everyone to handle ad hoc questions and information needs.

We're never going to lose the need for in-depth classroom training for learning new skills. But that has always been balanced against the learning that goes on everywhere else, and it's becoming more and more critical as our population gets more and more attuned to immediate access and interaction with the information they need.

What do you think - what are some helpful ways we as learning professionals can facilitate needed information "going viral" in our organizations?