Our world is defined by the “next big thing.” Every year brings changes to daily life – driving, communication, parenting, or work – and most changes are led by technology. Training innovations, especially in the workplace, can be intimidating: moving too fast can lose customers or employees, but adapting too slowly or too little can leave you with performance gaps and business challenges.
Leadership training doesn’t escape consideration when it comes to innovation and improvement. Choosing the right tools to augment training can increase work efficiency, productivity, and future-proof your business. Scalable training technology addresses many of the problems around ever-changing industries and their corporate training.
The Need for Innovation
Mobile phones are a great example to illustrate this innovation dilemma. Motorola had long held the place as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. In the early 2000s, they held almost a fourth of the market share in mobile phones. But by 2009 their share had plummeted to only 6%. And today, Motorola only holds about 1% of the global market share [1].
What happened? Motorola leadership had the opportunity to pivot toward the changing market, but they doubled-down to focus on their core business of mobile phone hardware [2]. By the mid-2000s, software took over as the driving factor in mobile phone business. While other companies capitalized on software, Motorola leadership failed to recover. Today, the business holds only 1% of the global market share.
So, what does this mean for leadership training?
The training industry has its own history of innovations. Leadership training often seesaws between its focus on culture vs. systems. When new research focuses on people and soft skills, leadership training is more company culture focused, but when innovations lead to improving internal systems in a company, leadership training prioritizes those areas instead. However, traditional leadership training implementation often falls short of personalization needed to affect lasting behavior change on an individual level.
Moreover, changing the direction of your training strategy is no easy task. The question then becomes: “How can a company anticipate performance gaps and train leaders effectively to meet those gaps?”
Scalable Technology Could Be the Answer
When leadership training combines with the right tools, a company can anticipate and redirect with flexibility and speed. And scalable technology is one of the best ways to accomplish this.
Scalability is a system, network, or company’s ability to expand to meet demand. Some common examples are:
- finding new markets to distribute a service or good
- onboarding new employees
- improving the productivity of your current employees
- offsetting costs to facilitate growth
Scalable business models mean a company can easily evolve as productivity, new trends, or an industry’s changing needs are introduced as opposed to being stuck in a fixed, outdated, and inefficient system.
The ability of leaders to implement change – and, consequently, leadership training – is closely tied to scalability. How training is implemented can have just as big an impact on a company’s ability to adapt and innovate as the training content itself. So, building scalable training and training platforms will help prepare your company for the future.
Siteline: A Scalable Resource for Leadership Training
Siteline is a scalable training and performance support platform that fits the bill. It simplifies content management, training delivery, and reporting.
In practical terms, the benefits of Siteline are clear. After implementation, 86% of operators reported that Siteline allowed them to perform jobs faster and with fewer errors. Siteline users were 75% more likely to refer to work instructions than those without Siteline, ensuring that work was performed correctly and any questions were answered with proper documentation instead of best guesses.
The benefits of Siteline extend to leadership training as well. The personalization engine supporting the platform can target specific leaders with subjects and content more relevant to them. For example, if a leader has more trouble with time management, conflict resolution, or delegation of training content, then Siteline can prioritize and push relevant content for that specific leader.
Since Siteline is a mobile platform accessed through users’ devices, it means leaders can have a library of information available in seconds. For example, voice search features could allow quick access to supporting documents right before an important meeting. Leaders can access documents tied to specific locations, too. The reporting features found in Siteline’s intelligent dashboard allow management access to vast amounts of data collected in real-time across the system. This data can be used for reviewing employees’ progress, setting goals for individual employees or teams, and anticipating areas for greater focus and training.
Preparing for the Future
No number of digital tools or technical wizardry can magically make the decisions to guide your company’s future. But rather than building from the ground up every time a company shifts focus, find training technology that allows leadership training the flexibility to expand and evolve with the company. As your company embraces scalable tools, your leadership training should be better equipped to adapt in the future, whatever it holds.
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