We recently published an article about the key things to consider when rethinking how we develop our leaders. The core of the message is getting the results you really want from your leadership development investments requires a multifaceted approach that leverages technology, maximizes participant experiences, and includes one-on-one support throughout the full cycle of learning. 

Flexibility and agility in approach to easily adapt to changing circumstances are needed in a constantly changing business environment. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than flying 15 leaders into Toronto for in-person training every quarter, and everyone shows up every time. Our businesses change too fast and often, and if you take a rigid and old-school approach to learning and development, you will be disappointed. 

But, there is one element of organizational learning and development that is extremely important, and many people may view this as traditional. The critical element is that when an organization aims to maximize sticky adoption of newly learned leadership skills, we strongly recommend that learning be done in groups versus individually. This is particularly true if an organization has never done leadership development before, and one of your goals is to establish a “leadership baseline.” Below are the key benefits of implementing a group learning approach to leadership development. 

1. Collaboration—training participants collaborate, share ideas, practice, strategize, help each other, and support one another. Bringing together team members will always generate a better result. 
2. Relationship Building—it’s amazing how new work relationships can start to form and existing relationships strengthen. Fellow leaders who may work together and communicate with each other, on occasion, are now fully committed and engaged in a project. They become fully invested in helping each other succeed. 
3. The Business Benefits—building the leadership capabilities of each individual leader is extremely important, but when your leadership team is doing this together, the collective leadership skills of the team will improve significantly. This is a win-win. 
4. Measurable—as we alluded to earlier in this post, you are building a “leadership baseline” that allows any organization to measure the improvement of individual leaders and as a team. If you don’t identify the starting point, you have no idea where noticeable improvements are made and where gaps continue to exist. 
5. Business Benefits Surges—stronger leaders are positively correlated with more productive and engaged employees. Group learning moves the needle forward more quickly and will always generate positive results for employees. 

We know that there’s no one size fits all approach to doing anything in business. However, every organization needs to have an approach and philosophy that allows for flexibility and adaptability. Whatever approach an organization takes, it’s important to follow the simple recommendations outlined in this article. We have fantastic workplace technology solutions at our fingertips (e.g. Google Workplace) that help organizations achieve the goals of flexibility and adaptability—video, cloud, social collaboration, virtual whiteboard, video-based break-out groups, and the list goes on. 

Leadership development is a huge investment of time and resources, and to reap the benefits of what it has to offer, make sure you bring your leaders together to learn. Your organization, employees, customers, and financial performance will thank you for it.