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Challenges for Global Organizations – How to develop leadership skills while working virtually

January 30, 2016

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There are two challenges facing today’s global organizations.

Challenge #1: how to reinforce the investment of time and money spent on leadership training.  Organizations want to eliminate the ‘flaming re-entry and burnout’ syndrome.  This happens when participants leave the development session all fired up to practice their new skills, only to see these changes quickly fall away as they become immersed in day-to-day challenges.

Challenge #2: Globally dispersed team are the new normal.  We know that even the best virtual teams need to occasionally tune up or build new skills for managing change,  resolving conflicts or making tough decisions.

We know that Action Learning can be one strategy that can address both of these challenges by providing a safe yet challenging environment for participants to develop practical solutions  they can implement to address real work issues.  And yet, team leaders and their HR partners will sometimes tell us that they don’t have two important resources–time and money–to conduct face-to-face action learning sessions—especially when teams are globally dispersed.

Based on recent experiences, we believe that action learning can be conducted virtually, eliminating the travel costs, and run in short sessions that minimize the time away from other tasks.

We invite you to join us for a free webinar where we will discuss some of the best practices for virtual action learning, based on recent successful client projects.

In this webinar, some of the questions we’ll explore together are:

  • What’s necessary to launch virtual action learning?
  • What do we need to consider if the group is made up of strangers versus people who work together in the same team?
  • What are special needs for multi-problem versus single problem/project virtual AL groups?
  • What are the additional skills needed by the participants, team leader and action learning coach?
  • How can the organization and the team address technology and logistical enablers and disablers?
  • What benefits does the organization gain?  What benefits do the individual participants gain?

 

We invite you to join us to share your own experiences.  Through our dialogue, we can build our understanding of the processes, tools and behaviors essential for successful action learning in a virtual environment.

Carole Lyles Shaw, MBA, CALC

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Learn how to plan and manage complex Action Learning projects

January 30, 2016

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It is one thing to master the requisite skill set for effectively coaching an Action Learning team. It is quite another to master and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to plan, implement, and manage a project involving a number of Action Learning teams.

 Consider how large Action Learning projects are conceived. Very often, some executive or senior human resource manager reads an article or attends an introductory presentation on Action Learning. They are intrigued by the possibility that this process may help them and their organization to resolve some of their unprecedented problematic situations or conditions. Some of these persons may attend a two-day Foundations of Action Learning workshop (sponsored by WIAL-USA). Having experienced what it is like to participate in an Action Learning team process – as a problem presenter, coach, and team member – they understand when and how Action Learning can help to solve urgent organizational problems while enabling team members to learn about themselves, teamwork, and organizations. 

 Some of these people decide they want to become certified Action Learning coaches. Some of them want to learn only what they need to know to start and champion or sponsor some Action Learning teams within their organizations. These people hire qualified and WIAL-USA-certified Action Learning coaches to work as consultants to their organizations. After a while, the organizations leaders realize there is a great demand for Action Learning and that it is more cost-efficient to develop their own internal Action Learning coaches than to continue to pay expensive external resources. So, the external Action Learning coaches are hired to train and otherwise develop a cadre of qualified internal Action Learning coaches. 

The organizations must develop their internal capacity for planning, implementing, and managing their own Action Learning projects. And, the external Action Learning experts need to know what is needed to help organizations to create and manage the infrastructure they need to support large-scale Action Learning projects.

You can learn the critical skills necessary for planning and managing Action Learning programs by attending a two-day workshop that I am leading October 23rd and 24th in Washington, DC aims to provide the knowledge needed to plan, implement, and manage large-scale Action Learning projects comprised of four or more teams. You can get registration details at the following link and can contact me at arthurf796@aol.com or 202.466.3921 if you have any questions about this exciting program.

Arthur Freedman, MBA, PhD
Master Action Learning Coach

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