The concept of continuous training is a critical asset both in order to face and tackle the constant and quick changes in the economy and market. Also to allow people to grow professionally in a proactive and fruitful way, continious training has been reinforced in coroporate culture since a long time. Such growth is starting to have more and more influence both on a personal and on a business level.
The identity of new leadership and development
On the other hand, there is a more recent concept: shared training with special regards to leadership, which permeates the company on all levels and allows one to devise new strategies and create new identities.
An important and in-depth research carried out in 2015 by Top Employers Institute on a sample of 600 companies with more than 3000 employees all over the world analysed the evolution of the leadership model into detail, thus identifying new trends and outlining the new leadership’s identity, which will become increasingly cooperative, empathetic, technological.
The idea of leader as a single apex figure being definitively put aside, more space will be guaranteed to shared leadership, where the leader shares responsibilities and experiences with the colleagues and where technological innovation will receive top priority, especially as far as training and virtual simulations supporting development programmes will be concerned.
Tomorrow’s leaders
Therefore, tomorrow’s leaders will have to reinvent themselves and develop new identities by working in new roles with previously unknown modalities. Not only will the new leader need to have a clear vision of the path to walk and the means to be adopted, he will also have to possess a deep empathy allowing him/her to motivate and stimulate his/her collaborators, as well as the ability to communicate and cooperate with the different corporate environments by coming into contact with different habits and cultures in case of foreign business departments. What is more, he/she will be required to be flexible in implementing his/her vision and to face the possible challenges with a balanced attitude.
Getting out of the “comfort zone”
The leader will also have to expand his/her horizons, to acquire higher and different skills by reaching out of his/her own “comfort zone” and by facing new and stimulating challenges both within and without the company. For this reason, a critical need in the immediate future will be that of using leadership programmes to help all employees to acquire new behaviours, abilities, visions and perspectives.
Well-defined strategies and policies
In confirmation of the strategic importance of a solid Leadership Development programme, the Top Employers Institute research data found out that 83% of companies have well-defined and structured corporate plans on Leadership and Development Strategies and Policies, 67% of companies use the so-called KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to evaluate and direct the Leadership Development processes and 45% of companies assess the effectiveness of their Leadership Development strategies by analysing and comparing them with Business results.
Technological innovation for training and simulations
Technological innovation plays a primary role and determines the majority of changes. Just to make a few examples, processes such as online coaching and mentoring, e-learning, virtual cooperations and social networking are the proof of how technology led and still contributes to the growth of innovations and changes. The research results of Top Employers Institute indicate that virtual cooperation instruments for the support of Leadership Development programmes are habitually adopted by 62% of companies on a global scale (45% in Italy), the simulation and virtual case ones are used by 48% of companies worldwide (32% in Italy) and those related to training and online tutoring for the support of leadership development programmes are utilized in a constant and continuing way by 35% of companies on a global level and by 29% of firms in our country.
