Training Industry Quarterly - Summer 2012 - (Page 7)

At the eDItor’s Desk | derek Cunard strengthen leadership capability, accelerate progress while creating an even more compelling place to work recipe For leadership development success I ’ve always believed that understanding your organization’s workforce strategy and the mission-critical ingredients of the “recipe for success” are the first steps in the process of developing and delivering effective leadership training. When I joined the American Heart Association (AHA) in 2007 to build their new corporate university, the executive leadership cabinet had already made the decision to move in a new strategic direction and appoint a taskforce that would fully assess and re-establish its management practices to better attract and retain top talent. It was the pre-mixing of all the right components including the new American Heart University that would impact our ability to strengthen leadership capability, accelerate progress while creating an even more compelling place to work. Let’s take a look at the simple ingredients. develop Your workforce Strategy The foundational ingredient of this recipe for leadership development begins with the identification of your workforce strategy. This strategy not only guides the design and execution of our initiatives, but creates the future recipes for interaction with your workforce. We identified several “pillars” including leadership, employee accountability and workforce change as the result of many discussions surrounding the organizations culture, mission and goals. These pillars were necessary to understand exactly what capability was needed in order to change our strategic direction. With this fresh recipe identified, it was time to sift the ingredients together with a primary focus on leadership development. align the Strategy to Leadership development AHA’s human resource leadership team agreed that in order to truly accelerate talent development, the American Heart University (AHU) would be a key pillar supporting our overall workforce strategy. We quickly discovered that the university has indeed become foundational to our workplace strategy — not just leadership development for the sake of leadership development, but creating a one-stop place to access an array of online courses, face-to-face workshops, best-selling books, executive quick talks and other important learning assets tied directly to strengthening our leadership capabilities. Implement Leadership development Training The last ingredient in this recipe is the implementation of an updated, creatively blended, high-impact leadership training program. It’s important to be diligent in connecting the dots from This Issue’s Guest Editor Derek Cunard is dean of the awardwinning American heart university at the American heart Association. the Dallas-based association is the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke. Derek Cunard, a sought after public speaker has demonstrated professional excellence and unbridled passion in the field of corporate education, leadership development and increasing workforce engagement. email Derek. Know someone who’d make an outstanding guest editor? Interested in becoming one yourself? Contact us at editor@trainingindustry.com. mission to workforce strategy to training so that everyone is clear that the measure of training success is tied directly to the organization’s outcomes. Simply put, a great training recipe should be easy to market and implement, yet avoid the typical strategy disconnect — especially when making decisions regarding the actual content of the leadership training program. In our case, we worked with key stakeholders and HR leadership from across the organization to ensure the ingredients in the required “Heart-Based Leadership” program were kept simple and neatly connected to existing talent development gaps. The content was extracted by subject matter experts from the latest research available including collaboration and trust, understanding your unique leadership “role,” growing and sustaining dynamic virtual teams, coaching generations for performance success and the importance of creating your leadership legacy. Creatively utilizing a blended approach expands the training over several months and requires a pre-workshop assessment, a 1.5 day face-to-face workshop taught by local leadership and several months of targeted post learning that includes collaboration with other program graduates within the “School of Leadership.” Is this recipe for developing leaders really ‘easy as pie’? Well in my opinion, if you invest in all the right ingredients, it’s probably simpler. But have you ever tried to make a pecan pie? It can get soupy! 7 Training Industry Quarterly, Summer 2012 / A Training Industry, Inc. ezine / www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ http://www.trainingindustry.com/TIQ

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Quarterly - Summer 2012

Training Industry Quarterly - Summer 2012
From Where I Sit: The Leadership Perspective
Table of Contents
Ad Index
Guest Editor: Recipe for Leadership Development Success
The Real Power of e-Learning is Social
Too Big to Know … Too Much to Train?
Where Are You on Your Leadership Journey?
Ideal Behaviors for Building Innovation
Going Local: Six Ways to Keep Leadership Development Alive
Building Your Leadership Brand
How Simulations Develop Leaders
Organizational Burnout: How Training Can Help
Increasing Leadership Performance with Emotional Intelligence
Casebook: General Mills: Leaders Teaching Leaders
Tracking Trends: First Step in Leadership Development Training
Tweet Suite
Company News
Closing Arguments: Nature versus Nurture

Training Industry Quarterly - Summer 2012