In our last post we suggested that certain “soft skills” be incorporated into all your upskilling matrices in order to better appeal to learners’ aspirations. Our thinking is guided by the results of a SHRM survey which identified the soft skills your workforce learners are most eager to develop. To see the complete list, please review that post. Here we will focus on the most-requested soft skill: leadership.
So how to do this? First, find a well-researched list of important leadership skills. We like the findings of the International Institute for Management Development.
Here’s their list:
- Relationship building
- Agility and adaptability
- Innovation and creativity
- Employee motivation
- Decision-making
- Conflict management
- Negotiation
- Critical thinking
With a solid list of skills, now find courses and activities that you can use to weave these soft skills into your occupational skills training. Let’s look at each but note that our recommendations assume you have an LMS with adaptive learning capabilities.
Relationship-building
The ability to build positive relationships is a challenging skill to develop. Some argue that people either have these skills or not, that they can’t be developed. But of course they can be improved, whatever the starting point.
The most powerful method relationship-building skills would be through classroom team-building courses. But if that is not feasible, you can incorporate team exercises into your online matrix. In choosing what to offer, a key goal should be to enable participants to demonstrate to their peers mutual respect, authenticity, and commitment to shared goals.
Agility and adaptability; Decision-making; Critical thinking
Training for agility and adaptability, decision-making and critical thinking in the context of an occupational skill training program is fairly straightforward since most hard skills involve choices among activities and behaviors. There are usually multiple techniques and approaches available in almost every scenario. The trick in the design is to create paths that give you visibility into learner choices.
First, generate micro learning courses for each option. Then, set adaptive learning paths within an overarching challenge. Enable learners to choose a preferred solution. Present supporting content for the chosen approach but then introduce a problem that would best be handled with a different solution orientation. Set up as many of these options as there are approaches for solving the given scenario. Here it is important to enable learners to choose both optimal and suboptimal methods so as to measure relative ability.
Innovation and creativity; Employee motivation; Conflict management; Negotiation
There are very many courses available on these subjects. We suggest offering a collection in each category but with ample options so that you may gather data on which selections are chosen. To capture learners’ understanding of these skills relative to the particular occupational skill program, include a survey “essay” assessment for each category.
Then, to assess leadership, present learner essay responses back to the cohort and ask each to choose which essay they think the group will vote as the best. This approach tests learner sensitivity to the skills taught and empathy with the values of their peers.
In your essay selection instructions, make it clear that the assessment will be made based on selecting the essay that most others also select. If users select their own and so does everyone else, great, but if they choose their own and no one else does… not a good look. Leaders should know when to subordinate their own needs to the needs of the team.
When you present your course matrix, be sure to highlight that it is a leadership development track embedded in the particular occupational skill. Also, note the career path the skill supports.