Developing talent in a voluntary organisation

 

 

Introduction

I was invited to join the facilitation team for a talent programme called i.MOVEit, run by the Scouts last weekend.  As the programme’s title suggests, its purpose is to encourage participants to make change happen.  In the case of i.MOVEit, the change emerges from the ideas conceived by young adult leaders, aged 18-25, and is part of a broader national strategy for growth influenced and shaped by young people.   

i.MOVEit started about 7 years ago and is run by regionally-based teams in response to their local plans to develop younger adults into leadership roles earlier than might be expected.  

The programme is in three parts:

1.  A weekend event during which participants are introduced to the basics of leadership and management and begin to identify a change management project to work on over the following 6 months. 
2. Project work for 6 months supported by an experienced adult. 
3. One day follow up workshop to hear back on progress and to continue learning.

Reflections on the weekend event

 

A quality product

What impressed me most of all about this event was its quality.  I have been involved in corporate leadership development for over 25 years and the attention to detail was as good as anything I have experienced – and all run by volunteers to boot.

Networking

Just like any other management development event, the taught content probably plays second-fiddle to the networks being facilitated.  The 26 participants, drawn from Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, were able to mix and learn from each other along with some excellent guest speakers in influential leadership roles in the national Scouting organisation.  

‘Give us a break’

How many programmes have you ever attended that allow participants time-off to play or chill-out within the core time of the programme?     

On i.MOVEit, there were two one hour breaks in the agenda, on the first full day, to allow participants time away from the taught sessions.  There was a choice of archery or air-rifle shooting for those who wanted something structured or there was the option to simply take time out, chat with other participants, or go for a walk in the woodland location of the event.  The point is that there was no training or formal learning taking place; it created a space to recharge, which felt to me very important.

The medium is sometimes to message.  Several speakers talked about the importance, especially in a volunteer role, to look after yourself.  ‘Give us a break’. QED.

Who has potential?

Each of the programme participants had been nominated by a local line manager.  However, unlike some corporate talent programmes, talent was not being defined using any kind of matrix of potential.  Nominating managers will have used some kind of sub-conscious metrics, but certainly nothing formal. 

At the end of the programme, the facilitators reviewed the contribution made by each participant. Given the programme inputs, who, in our view, was taking an active interest in helping the organisation to grow its youth-shaped vision?  Our discussion was informal and supportive. We wanted to be able to give feedback to the nominating managers about how their participants had responded to the programme and where further support might be of most benefit.  We certainly won’t have got all of our judgements right.  However, focusing on who was taking an interest in making change happen seemed a sensible way of thinking about talent. It also connects with the purpose of the Scouts, which empowers young people to make a positive contribution to society.  

Shaped by young people – do we yet believe it?

As I mentioned earlier in this post, The Scout Association's 2018-2023 vision is to be more inclusive and to be shaped by young people.  There are plenty of signs of progress being made in this area: from the appointment of Youth Commissioners (aged between 18-25) to facilitate the youth-shaped programme, to a shift, albeit gradually, towards younger adults being appointed into significant leadership roles.  

However, whatever structural changes are being made, the test is in what younger people are feeling about their ability to influence.  With Baby Boomers still occupying many of the key decision-making roles in Scout Groups, or in the structures that support them, the actual balance of power is skewed.  

Notwithstanding the excellent example of i.MOVEit, I noticed that, for some of the participants, there was a difference, not at all surprisingly, between the espoused vision and their everyday lived-experience.  The doubts expressed were concerned with their ability to influence older people, and/or that older people perceived them as ‘not yet ready’.  The Scout Association is in the midst of an ambitious change agenda, which will, quite naturally, take some time to acheive.  There will need to be plenty more encouragement of younger adults, via i.MOVEit and more, as well as feedback to older leaders where their unconscious biases hold back the emergence and acceptance of new ideas. 

Conclusion

I am a volunteer with the Scouts and I have a consultative role in Northamptonshire to help shape and influence talent management practices.  Attending i.MOVEit gave me direct access to a critical mass of younger leaders who are the target audience for my work.  It was a source of great encouragement.  There is a strong pool of young talent coming through who are keen and capable to effect change.  

In fact, programmes like i.MOVEit demonstrate how seriously The Scout Association is about effecting the desired shift.  But changing a culture from one that's been hierarchical and elder-led, to one that's open to new ideas, from wherever they emerge, represents a signficant and continuing challenge.  My role is to use talent management as a symbol and signal of the desired change.   

4 ways to reframe leadership development

I'm interested to find use cases of online approaches to leadership development but meaningful examples seem to be thin on the ground.  

My interest is in collaborating with people who either are or would like to take a wholehearted approach to using online methods to teach leadership and management.  And by wholehearted, I mean placing online learning upfront as the primary source of teaching.  Not a blend with the classroom, but the primary content resource. 

Learning that has required mandatory oversight, for example regulatory topics like safeguarding, and GDPR, or training to support the implementation of new systems or induction, have made the switch to online learning much faster.  Some of what has driven this has to do with the need to produce evidence to regulators.  And this ticking the box rationale has created an image problem when applying online approaches to higher order social and emotional topics.

The best that can be said of online learning for leadership development is that it is now not uncommon to find programmes that blend synchronous classroom sessions with a-synchronous e-learning.   But, in my experience at least, the classroom session remains the primary teaching method and the online material is treated as something like homework to be done pre or post workshop by the super-committed.    

Online content to teach leadership and management practices is now widely available and much of it is of a very high quality - licenced off-the-shelf content from CrossKnowledge, SkillSoft, Cegos and others to the free to use resources like TED videos, podcasts, books, etc.    

Reframing leadership development

Whilst there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach, I do think there is a significant opportunity to apply online learning to leadership development.  Doing so would be strongly learner-centric, would produce deep learning and consistent quality every time as well as delivering the tried and tested cost benefits of e-learning.

To move in the direction in which I'm interested would require leadership development to be reframed.   

Self directed development

Mainstream practice in leadership development is typically a classroom event of some kind, mirroring our early experiences in education. 

In a corporate setting, I have long been uncomfortable with the ways in which classroom courses spoon-feed learners.  Self-directed learning is not what is done.  Instead, everything about the learning is directed by the trainer: the learning need, objectives, content, the sequencing and so on will have been defined by somebody other than the learners themselves.  The provision of 'take-outs' that summarise the 'top 10' things that need attention make it too easy for the student and remove any challenge.   

I'm curious as to why everybody involved - from the sponsors to learning and development departments - default to acting as gatekeepers of the learning process rather than enablers of self-directed learning.  I think it's because the status quo exerts such a vice-like grip on practice that we take for granted what's in plain sight.  And training and coaching suppliers have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo too.

However, if we create the conditions in which we enable and truly challenge and expect learners to take responsibility to self-direct their learning they will do so.  All the time we make decisions for them we are lessening the impact.  Which is a paradox of course since the purpose of every management training event, whether explicit or tacit, is, to some degree or other, to enable personal behavioural change. 

The enablers of a self-directed approach follow below. 

1. Creating a space to learn...mastery generates confidence

People like to feel competent and, in my experience, the drive to challenge oneself and really being able to master something creates deep learning and confidence.  But this can only occur if the learner is expected and allowed to follow their interests.  

This might seem like common sense, but it's more subtle than we might think.  Our interests, our hopes, our dreams are quite ephemeral.  They can appear briefly before disappearing just as quickly as we meet others' expectations.  If we treat these interests as being something like waiting in a hide to see a wild animal, we can get a sense of how patient we have to be to allow these interests time to surface and to be worked on.  The pressures on training programmes to produce quick fixes are enormous and work against providing an open space to learn, but it's really important if we want to produce deep-seated, long lasting behavioural change.

2. Enabling workers to forge their own path and make their own choices

However tempting it is to define and prescribe what others need to do to develop social skills like leadership and management, doing so is the wrong way of approaching things.  Management competences are difficult to develop because they are nebulous and messy and are essentially acquired through experience.  

When it comes to leading and managing others, learners aren't empty vessels waiting to be filled.  They come with their own experiences of life and the learning should release what's already inside of them.  Context is everything and it's the learners who are best placed to know what they need.  

And if it sounds like I am making a tacit case for coaching to feature more strongly, I'm not.  I know coaching is popular and is often included as an element of post-course support to help make learning stick, but it's an example of another prescribed approach by L&D.  At face value, the offer of coaching support seems helpful but its prescription in the design assumes that the learner either can't or won't make a behavioural change without professional intervention.  This needs to be challenged. What might be the alternatives?   

Learners are resourceful and if we structure a programme or course to encourage self-directed learning, which might for example include problem solving challenges linked to a learner's context, then we are more likely to help the learner help themselves to find their own path.       

 

3. Create a framework or scaffolding   

Some level of structure is important to provide purpose, direction and motivation.   Things like start and end dates for the programme of learning, an assessment process - I like and use end-of-programme presentations - and some level of completion reward, like a certificate, are important.

As noted above, at a deeper level, the framework should create a philosophical 'space to learn'.  Something that genuinely and patiently enables people to confront uncertainty and ambiguity.  To be able to allow them to surface the questions and issues that come from their lived-experience, rather than a generic set of needs arrived at from aggregating the training needs of a larger target group.    

4. Content - curation not dictation

Since there is already a large base of licensed off-the-shelf courses and free resources, the most helpful task that we can do is to curate those materials that are likely to be useful.  There may well be some courses or resources that should be treated as mandatory but the balance should favour the elective elements chosen by the learner.   There should also be the scope for the learner to find and use their own resources.  For example, well curated resources can often open up pathways to other content and learners should be encouraged to follow their interests.

Conclusion

At the heart of my interests in management and leadership development is to develop approaches that enable self-directed learning.  Online learning isn't the only means to this end, but in the corporate context it has a great deal to offer in terms of  quality, time and cost.  Displacing mainstream practice and replacing it with online approaches won't be for all but I know it works - if you are interested, please follow these links [Online leadership -does it work?] and [Do we need management courses? - revisited 3 years on...] to my own use case which relate to a consultancy assignment I did with a global mining company. 

An area that I am exploring further is how Learning Experience Platforms might help to enhance a self-directed learning culture.  For example, peer-to-peer learning and semantic analysis of natural language processing look like fruitful ways to engage learners and produce deep learning. This excellent white paper by Ben Betts, HT2 Labs guide to Learning Experience Platforms is well worth a read.

I'd welcome comments and if you would like to make contact, please email me.  See my profile for details.

Photo by Oli Gibbs on Unsplash