RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – While there are few panaceas in the business world, an executive can never go wrong with championing learning and development. This is true whether it is specifically for the leader and their team or an organization across the board. These programs expand knowledge, create unity among colleagues, provide training on work-essential skills, and play a critical role in building or strengthening workplace culture in an era where consensus can be in short supply.
At the beginning of the year, for example, I wrote about my own commitment to competitive learning: participating in learning as if it were a sport and consistently pushing myself toward my personal best. I model this behavior for members of our leadership team. In turn, they engage with their colleagues in a way that sets the tone for how I would like everyone at The Diversity Movement to approach the challenges we help our clients address.
My impression that training and education are the answers to many C-suite leaders’ most pressing challenges is validated by reading between the lines in PwC’s recent Pulse Survey of 2022. Executive respondents pointed to talent acquisition and retention (38%), political polarization (24%) and societal unrest (17%) as challenges they considered a “serious risk.” It is no wonder, then, that 63% identify addressing labor shortages as a critical focus for the next 12 months and 65% are developing or refining their trust strategy.
Inside the C-Suite: Become a better executive through inclusive leadership
Taken as a whole, these indicators all center on building or strengthening workplace excellence based on transforming culture (with trust at its core). In other words, a universal solution to combat talent challenges, societal disruption and other potential threats is by creating, implementing or strengthening your organization’s commitment to education and learning. This is especially important now, when people’s personal and professional values have merged and are being lived out at the workplace.
Reimagining the status quo
According to PwC, over the next year an overwhelming majority of C-Suite leaders (83%) will focus their business strategy on growth, despite the many macro- and micro-level challenges they face. The optimism is refreshing, but the effort will fall on its face if employees and managers across the organization aren’t committed to the same objective. You can’t build a strategy from the top down without a strong foundation.
Let’s look at it this way – a CEO can focus on a macro strategy, like growth, but continually be undercut by micro challenges, like employee attrition, unfilled positions, disgruntled workers or people who don’t feel they belong or get the respect they deserve. The organizational objective may be noteworthy, but the everyday difficulties make it feel like continually taking one step forward and two steps back.
To overcome this disconnect, leaders need to level-set via education and training programs that get people centralized around the organization’s goals and objectives, while also bringing them up to speed on ideas that cut down on division and discord.
“A good employee experience has value. It contributes to an organization’s financial results, and it helps attract and retain talent,” says PwC people and organization expert Bastiaan Starink. “A poor employee experience is a risk that destroys the (stock) market value. Apart from that: it’s in the interest of society that employees can reach their retirement age in a good and healthy way and in balance with their private life.”
Redefining education and training
Organizations need to consider how to train and educate for employee experience, whether that means more meaningful collaboration among virtual teams or creating inclusive leaders throughout the entire company.
One of the disconnects I am hearing from leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles is that their education path is basically uncharted. They have transformational goals and are feeling great pressure to succeed, but they haven’t been given a framework for success. Often, they search for external DEI coursework because that seems to be a well-worn path, but these programs are frequently full of theory, with little in the way of practice.
To overcome the disconnect between application and theory, we created The Diversity Leader’s Intensive, a skills-based certificate program that provides the tools DEI leaders need to accomplish near- and long-term accomplishments. The bias toward practical solutions to an emerging or new leader’s most pressing challenges differentiates this kind of program from past corporate learning efforts, which often focused on overcoming possible legal issues or checking the box on a compliance form. Instead, the Intensive will give leaders immediate tools for success.
“Working alongside clients each day, I see a common roadblock between setting DEI goals and accomplishing them,” explains Susie Silver, senior consultant and innovation strategist at The Diversity Movement. “Folks understand why DEI is important and can pinpoint areas for growth, but they don’t know how to put together an action plan or measure success. They need training and education that provides practical guidance and tactics that bring DEI initiatives to life.”
Benefits of employee experience initiatives
“The Benefits of Investing in People” details the return on investment (ROI) organizations can achieve through building strong employee experience programs. Across 11 categories ranging from “Autonomy” to “Well-Being,” the global consulting firm notes that organizations can achieve “savings of up to 12.6% of their revenue by creating positive employee experiences,” and shows “a positive employee experience increases the productivity of organizations and reduces absenteeism and turnover. The latter are major costs for employers.”
For corporate training, the emphasis on hands-on learning creates a positive loop that gives the manager better tools to lead, which in turn gives employees a stronger sense that the organization cares about its people. All roads point to a transformational culture that values workplace excellence.
The training effort, though, needs to link directly to the manager or executive’s daily work. “We noticed that nothing exists to teach an organization’s chief diversity officer or primary diversity leader how to do the day-to-day work of DEI transformation,” says Kaela Sosa, curriculum and programming manager at The Diversity Movement. “To overcome this challenge, we have created a holistic, comprehensive program that goes beyond ‘what’ DEI is, to teach practitioners the ‘how’ of applicable management.”
According to Sosa, “We want diversity leaders to be able to answer difficult questions and have the tools to deal with the many stakeholders that will ultimately determine their success or failure. This training program empowers DEI practitioners to lead successful, sustainable DEI programs for today and into the future.”
The future of workplace excellence is the employee experience. As the PwC report shows and from what I’ve heard from C-suite leaders, organizations that use education and learning to build and strengthen the skills and abilities of its executives, managers and frontline employees will win in the marketplace by driving the right culture and outcomes.
About the Author
Donald Thompson is CEO and co-founder of The Diversity Movement which has created an employee-experience product suite that personalizes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through data, technology, and expert-curated content. Their microlearning platform, Microvideos by The Diversity Movement, was recently named one of Fast Company’s “2022 World Changing Ideas.” With two decades of experience growing and leading firms, Donald is a thought leader on goal achievement, influencing company culture and driving exponential growth. An entrepreneur, public speaker, author, podcaster, Certified Diversity Executive (CDE) and executive coach, Donald also serves as a board member for several organizations in marketing, healthcare, banking, technology and sports. His leadership memoir, Underestimated: A CEO’s Unlikely Path to Success, is available for pre-order. Connect with or follow him on Linkedin to learn more.
