There are many reasons organizations decide to customize their leadership development content. While off-the-shelf content can have its place, content that’s highly specific to your company culture and learners' pain points and skills will always be more engaging and more impactful.
We speak to learning teams every day, and one thing we hear consistently is that they know leadership development is important, and that they want to customize their content in this area so that it feels fresh, specific, and tailored to their company and culture.
The problem? They’re not sure where to start. And they’re not sure whether they have the resources to customize.
If you’re in this boat, we’d like to share a few steps you can take to strategically customize your content—even if you’re unsure you actually have the resources to build something from the ground up!
Before we share our tips, for more insights about building leadership development programs, here are a few other resources you might find helpful:
- Our practice-forward guide to creating world-class leadership development programs (no matter your L&D budget)
- Our Emerging Leaders Program for upskill your early-career talent
- The recording of our webinar on fostering adaptability for L&D, HR, and people leaders
Now, let’s get started with three practical tips for customizing your leadership development content! 💪
Tip #1: Conduct Learner Interviews
We’ve all been there: working our way through a learning experience that just doesn’t feel relevant. Asking questions like when am I going to use this? Or, okay, how in the world does this apply to my work?
While some of the high-level principles of good leadership are fairly universal, what these principles look like in practice will be highly specific to your organization’s culture and context. Your organization is unique, and great leadership will look a little bit different there than it does anywhere else. Similarly, the voice that will speak to your employees and reflect your company culture is also unique. Your learning content should reflect this!
Interviews with target learners and other relevant stakeholders are one of the best ways to identify the skills gaps and struggles your learners face. These become some of the richest areas of focus for customization, and can transform into insights and stories you’ll use to create those customized pieces.
We suggest ensuring your questions cover these major categories:
- Success. How does your organization define success in leadership?
- Culture. What is your company culture like? How does this impact the role of leadership?
- Transformations. What’s changing at your organization? Which new skills are needed?
- Pain points. What are common challenges for learners in their day-to-day work?
The more you can encourage your interviewees to get specific, the easier it will be to customize your learning content with relatable examples and stories. You’ll also have a better understanding of which skill areas need the most attention, particularly in light of buckets three and four.
Tip #2: Leverage Customization Strategically through Stories
Stories are highly effective learning tools that will make your content easier for learners to grasp and remember. This makes them an excellent area for customization.
Even better, now that you’ve conducted your learner and stakeholder interviews, chances are you have plenty of stories sitting in your transcripts, waiting to be used!
Identify these stories by searching through your interview transcripts for pain points or unexpected outcomes. Typically, these challenges and surprises point to opportunities for learning and growth—i.e., places where learners can apply their leadership skills to capitalize on those opportunities in the future.
There are several ways you can leverage these stories across your content:
- Examples. A story can be a great way to illustrate a concept that could otherwise be a little vague. It’s one thing to talk about a skill like adaptability. It’s another to listen to a story of how one leader helped their team navigate a post-merger integration, or shift go-to-market strategy for a new product based on customer feedback.
- Case Studies. Case studies are excellent places to show skills and approaches in action while getting granular about challenges, actions taken, and results. Where examples are an opportunity to gesture at what something looks like in action, case studies take this a step further, offering more context, specific data, and thoughtful takeaways tied to your learning objective. If, in your interviews, you surface a story with lots of data and details, turn it into a case study to provide an in-depth look at a skill in practice, complete with outcomes and lessons learned.
- Discussion Prompts. Some of the most important learning will happen during peer-to-peer interactions in your learning cohorts. Turn customized stories into discussion prompts that drive interaction and engagement between your learners, ensuring the conversations are unique to your organization. These can accompany your examples or case studies and encourage your learners to explore the nuances of a situation in a way that will be resonant for your organization (even when the prompt doesn’t have one clear “answer”).
Of course, be sure to make any changes necessary to protect privacy or take other sensitivities into account. The idea is to make the learning relatable—not distracting!
Tip #3: Use Customization to Make Learning Actionable
One of the biggest differences between a just-average leadership development experience and one that will transform learners’ careers is the ability to move learning from the abstract to the concrete.
We constantly hear from our learners that they want digestible, actionable learning experiences. They’re hungry for strategies that they can implement immediately!
With this in mind, leaders and instructional designers can use customization to make learning vivid and specific.
What does this look like in action? Here’s a step-by-step example of how you might make an abstract concept more tangible so that learners can put it into practice.
- Define the Skill. What do you want learners to be able to do? Let’s take the example of active listening. In your content, it’s fine to use off-the-shelf content elements to introduce, define, and lay the foundation for this skill. As you move to the next steps, though, you’ll want to look for opportunities to customize so that this concept can transform into something doable.
- Break It into Actions. Now, break the skill up into actionable steps that are relevant to your learners’ job roles. What could the learner do tomorrow to start putting this into practice? In the case of active listening, this might be actions like paraphrasing what you hear in a meeting, or asking clarifying questions during a written or spoken conversation, such as “Could you elaborate on…” or “What do you mean by…”
- Get Specific. Finally, see how you can make this even more specific to your learners and organization. For example, if you’re hybrid or remote, you can rework the actions to apply to digital meetings. What does active listening look like on Zoom? This is also where you can start leveraging those stories to offer examples that show learners how others have put this into practice (or where they’ve struggled!). Remember—the more concrete the better, so don’t be afraid to include lots of detail.
Following this process makes something that can feel a little “squishy” into something that learners can relate to, remember, and use.
In Conclusion: Customize Learning Where it Counts
As a learning leader, it can be easy to feel like you and your team are spread thin. But if you approach content creation strategically, it doesn’t take a massive team to develop something special that will have a real impact for your organization.
Hopefully, these steps will help you use your resources wisely, identify the richest areas for customization, and ensure your leadership development is effective at preparing learners to thrive in your unique organizational culture—with content that helps them put skills into action right away!
Are you looking for ways to uplevel leadership development at your organization? Get your free copy of our practice-forward guide on how to create a great leadership development program, including strategies for customizing your content.
Want to learn more about Next Shift Learning’s Emerging Leaders Program? Get in touch here. We look forward to chatting!
