How Tech Helps Train Future Leaders
A shortage of qualified IT pros puts training under a very bright, hot spotlight. Still, businesses struggle to develop efficient training protocols. Tech tools may be the answer. |
Preeminent leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith posits that e-learning programs offer cost and customization advantages over traditional, in-class learning methods.
Sure, those will seem like obvious points to anyone who deals with the business of technology, but he's right on. But how deeply are companies using technology to train future leaders?
Goldsmith's article is timely, particularly for the IT arena. Businesses struggle with finding effective, reusable ways to groom the next generation of executives. For IT folks, it's harder, given an unproven education track and the varying ways IT pros rise up the ranks. And as IT staffing expert and CIO Insight contributor Gary Perman finds, companies face all kinds of downsides by doing it wrong.
Still, Goldsmith warns, like almost everything having to do with technology, there's a downside:
One problem with new technology is that it can easily be misused. Corporations already are paying for thousands of wasted hours that employees are spending online--hours that do absolutely nothing for the company. E-learning has the potential to degenerate into entertainment instead of education and end up doing as much harm as it does good.
But e-learning can help companies cull insights from experts around the world, at a lower cost than traditional programs, and even customize them to fit their needs. So the plusses could easily outweigh the negatives.
(Sidenote: Harvard CIO guru Rob Austin takes a different approach in his book due out early next year.)
What methods is your company using to educate and train future leaders?
Comments (1)
My organization has a Leadership Development Institute, a program that was put in to train potential leaders according to the organizational need. Unfortunately, this program was only put in to satisfy the succession-planning requirement to be in compliance with the larger organizational goal without much local leadership support.
Once the training is over, there is no follow-up program to assist the employee to attain the next level of success. It is a waste of employee effort and organizational resources. Personally, anyone would attain much more knowledge in an MBA program as compared with an internally developed program such as ours.
Posted by Rob L. | September 8, 2008 10:55 AM