Last week  I presented a session titled Leadership Development in a Learning 2.0 World at the CSTD 2010 National Symposium. Here is the description of the session from the conference program:

Leadership Development in a Learning 2.0 World

Developing effective leaders and managers is an increasingly important task for the learning function. Leadership development has been slow to adopt eLearning strategies but recent developments in web 2.0 technologies, along with changing perspectives on workplace learning are changing that. The social learning drivers behind learning 2.0 are a natural fit for the learning needs of managers and leaders and provide the learning function with an opportunity for real innovation in leadership development practices. This session will provide an overview of the key concepts, strategies and tools to help transform leadership development practices for the emerging learning 2.0 world.
Learning Outcomes:
  • Contrast current leadership development practices with learning 2.0 driven practices
  • Describe benefits of learning 2.0 for transforming leadership and management development
  • Describe a model of leadership development driven by learning 2.0 principles
  • Envision a future Leadership Development program for your organization on a by a learning 2.0 foundation
  • Define strategies for integrating learning 2.0 concepts into current leadership development programs

I promised the participants in my session that I would post the slides  on this blog.  Thank you all for attending!  You were a great audience.  Please leave a comment to say hello or post any thoughts you had on the session.

You can view the presentation below or download it directly by clicking this  link:  Leadership Development in Learning 2.0 World

[slideshare id=4357649&doc=cstdcalgarysymposium-100530202934-phpapp02]

Dan Pontefract was originally scheduled to present with me but he was not able to make it.   For those of you interested in in Dan’s very active and always interesting blog Training Wreck you can find it here.

Conference attendees braved the snow (yes, snow!) in Calgary to participate in some very interesting sessions.   As always, it was a pleasure to connect with old colleagues and meet many new people with interesting perspectives on the profession.  Thanks to the CSTD organizing team!

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11 Responses
  1. Karen Binks

    Tom – great session at the CSTD symposium last week. Your thoughts on learning as you work really ring true with my own thoughts on how far any learning program can prepare someone to perform a job. I am new to the formal training world – my background is in IT – and as an instrcutional designer one thing I struggle with is the expectation that after someone goes to training they can perform a job. If they could then doctors wouldn’t have to spend years as interns! I think the recent trend towards informal learning and OJT is a move in the right direction. It may have gotten legs because of the recession but in the end I believe it will result in better learning.

    You showed a community of practice web site during the presentation but I didn’t catch what product had been used to develop it – was it Get Going? If you could let me know what that was I would appreciate it.

    Karen

    1. Karen, yes I think the time has come for informal learning, although as I said in the presentation, it has always been there. And I agree about the unrealistic expectation to produce performance from a single training program. We seem to have lost the “development” in learning and development.

      The site you saw was built on a platform called Going On.

  2. I found this presentation to be very well done. It identified and integrated a lot of very important ingredients of learning in the workplace. I am curious how you understand leadership. What was implied appeared to equate leadership function as commensurate with management functions, which is commonplace. But what is offered in terms of learning 2.0 reflects an emerging conception and practice of leadership as relational, distributed and a network phenomenon. And when organizations are oriented toward developing a more complex paradigm of leadership, then learning 2.0 is really the only way to go. For more on complexity leadership check out the work at the Center for Innovative Leadership at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: http://leadership.unl.edu

    1. Thanks Ken,
      For the purposes of the presentation “leadership development” was defined as you say–the development of company management roles. That is because the focus was on the development of a management community of practice which requires some shared responsibility or tasks.

      I do agree though, that leadership can also be considered a cross role competency and web 2.0 tools, maybe more outside of the community of practice context, are an excellent vehicle for developing understanding, sharing experiences and building a network so important for leading from the inside.

      In both cases, working with the “natural experience” of the individual in a persistent environment (web 2.0) rather than event based artificial experience is the way to go.

  3. […] The learning assets can and should be used independently to solve the business challenges, but doing so exclusively misses the benefits of social learning.  We’ve learned that small teams of managers working together (face to face or virtually) to solve business challenges is a key success factor in management development.  Action learning has refined a robust approach to small group learning that incorporate the best of informal learning.  Other problem-based and case-based learning models also offer springboards to build management learning teams.  See the links here for a few examples).  I offered an approach using management communities of practice here. […]

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