With talent scarce and the cost of attracting and retaining the best of the best sky-high, now perhaps more than ever before, businesses have begun looking internally to develop their high-potential individual contributors into the next generation of company leaders.

Reports estimate corporate spending on leadership development to be as high as $50 billion a year, with the majority of businesses spending up to $4,000 a year per employee.

It’s a big investment with a potentially bigger payoff — if you get it right.

Unfortunately, though, most businesses don’t yet believe they’re getting it right. According to a recent survey, Harvard Business Review estimates that only 7 percent of businesses feel their leadership development programs are delivering the impact they need to be successful. Furthermore, nearly 75 percent of those businesses believe they need to be more innovative with their leadership development techniques.

Scaling Leadership Development Strategies That Work

Traditionally, most leadership development has been done via high touch, face-to-face interactions. That’s in large part because, when compared with job-specific hard skills or required compliance knowledge, teaching leadership skills requires more nuance and context. In-person instruction has been seen as both necessary and effective.

Which means leadership training often suffers from the same problem as any other high touch employee training initiative: it’s incredibly difficult (and even more expensive) to scale.

There’s a good reason why so many continue to lean on in-person training for their most valued development activities — human beings really do learn best from an instructor. So rather than do away with in-person instruction for something as important as leadership development, today’s top learning organizations are finding new ways to combine instructional approaches in order to get best of both worlds, and in the process, innovating the way they deliver high touch training to maximize the effectiveness of their leadership development programs.

Of course, every organization approaches leadership training uniquely, in accordance with their own internal cultures. But more often than not, there’s one consistent supporting element: video.

Video enables L&D teams to scale instructor-led training to more employees, better assess development for more individuals in less time, and to provide detailed feedback and coaching — all without requiring everyone to be in the same room at the same time.

So just how are other organizations using video to support and scale their leadership development programs? We’ve gathered a few of the top trends and methodologies below, which you can use to build out your own leadership training initiatives.

7 Ideas For Using Video In Your Leadership Development Program

1. Make fundamental leadership skills training universally available.

Potential leaders can be anywhere in your company. What better way to find them than to see who engages with your leadership training videos?

Whether your trainers record live instructor-led sessions or they create stand-alone e-learning courses, making your “Leadership Skills 101” training available to your employees as on-demand videos can enable you to efficiently and consistently deliver fundamental training activities at scale across your entire organization, while also giving you a simple way to identify those who are looking to contribute more.

Related Reading: How a Video CMS Solves the Challenges of Training with Video

 

2. Capture leadership training events in their entirety for leaders to use as a resource later.

Many intensive leadership training events last an entire day or more, meaning your trainees will be drinking from the firehose. The problem is, they’re likely to forget nearly 90% of what they’ve learned within a week.

Overcome the forgetting curve by recording your leadership training events and making them available to watch on-demand. And be sure your people can search inside the videos for specific topics that were covered so they don’t have to hunt and peck through hours of video to find the information they’re looking for. Your leaders will be better equipped to act according to your policies and culture when they can revisit those important training materials and quickly find relevant information right when they need to put it to use.

3. Provide structured check-ins after training events at scale.

Whether it’s due to a lack of resources or a lack of willpower, many leadership training programs fail to provide the necessary ongoing instruction to make sure training sticks. The reality is, it’s hard to get busy employees back into a room for regular check-in on a recent training.

Video can add more flexibility to this important step, enabling your trainers to record follow-up videos designed to support retention of new concepts. Your instructors can even add in-video quizzes to further improve recall and retention. And of course, with video analytics, you can see which members of your team watched which videos, and whether or not they watched the entire recording all the way through to the end.

4. Deliver ongoing coaching through video.

In an era where employees are more pressed for time than ever before, many organizations are finding that video can help ensure budding leaders get the thorough coaching they need to help them refine their new skills.

With video, new leaders can record interactions and conversations with their peers or direct reports, and submit to coaches who can then provide feedback on those detailed interactions. It’s a process that’s just as valuable for self-assessment as it is for getting feedback from mentors — new leaders can watch their own recordings for an unbiased review of their body language and tone of voice, giving themselves a chance to find new ways to improve and apply the leadership skills they’re learning.

5. Role play with video.

Ultimately, much of an organization’s success lies simply in the way leaders direct, correct, and motivate the people they manage. And truth be told, the only real way to refine these interpersonal leadership skills is to practice.

Video makes practicing new skills through role play more flexible. Coaches and mentors can give the trainee a scenario and have them record themselves delivering their response in a video, to which the coach can provide feedback either in writing, as comments in the video, or with another video. Alternatively, leadership development trainers can record live in-person role play simulations, which both coaches and trainees can use as an objective record that can be critiqued and referenced again later to reflect on improvement.

6. Improve leadership training content with insights from video engagement.

Leveraging video-based training opens up the opportunity for your team to learn a lot more about what parts of your leadership development courses really connect, and which might need some improving.

With detailed video analytics, trainers can see the parts of training videos that get viewed the most, and they can see where people aren’t spending their time. And aggregate data on collections of videos or your entire training video library can help L&D leaders quantify how frequently employees are engaging with your leadership training resources.

7. Leverage the knowledge of mature leaders within your organization.

“Grooming” is a common metaphor for traditional leadership training for a reason — often the best way to maintain an organization’s leadership culture is for senior leaders to become directly involved with developing new leaders.

With video, you can expand opportunities for social learning between mature leaders and those who are still growing into their leadership roles. With video, senior leaders can capture and share any valuable insights they’d like to pass on to the next generation, resting assured that their video will consistently share their thoughts time and again for everyone to benefit from. This, in turn, gives leaders on-deck more detailed information about your company’s history that they can use to build more successful strategies for the future.

And whereas it’s often a challenge to schedule meetings or coaching sessions between two or more important people, video takes the need to sync schedules out of the equation. Leaders can exchange ideas whenever and where ever they have time, and even use the technology to help mentor new leaders in other offices halfway around the world.

Looking To Modernize Your Employee Training With Video?

In our white paper guide, 14 Ways to Use Video for Formal and Informal Learning, we help L&D practitioners make the business case for doing more with video. In it you’ll learn:

• 5 benefits that help convince your decision makers to use video in more ways for L&D
• 14 ideas for supporting and scaling formal and informal learning with video
• 1 technology — the video platform — that simplifies the use of video for L&D

Today’s learning and development professionals already understand the potential that video technology offers. Make sure your organization isn’t missing out!

Download your free copy today!