Leadership Development: Learning from Other Leaders

Feeling stuck on your next leadership development initiative? Between working with stakeholders, delegating to team members, and trying to uncover your organization’s most important learner needs within the budget you have (…among all of your other daily tasks), there’s a lot do! And there isn’t a lot of time to do it. 

Sometimes, it can help to learn from others who have been in a similar position. See what they did to overcome the challenges they faced, or hear advice about what they would have done differently had they known what they do now. 

To help you find your next step, we’ve compiled some of our favorite quotes from the learning leaders featured in our Learner Experience Evolution podcast series. Our hope is that at least one will give you that idea you’ve been looking for to overcome your roadblocks, transform your approach, and articulate the value of your ideas in the right way, at the right time, to get the buy in you need to move forward. 

Like a quote and want to hear more? Check out the full podcast episode for free to follow along with the discussion about change management and the future of leadership development.

Jen Fox 
Executive Coach and Corporate Learning Facilitator 

“I think the trend in leadership development is going to be all about real-time, experiential learning. It’s how do we help to simulate, how do we help to coach, how do we help to provide that real-time learning? And then when we get it wrong, we clean it up. We learn from it and then we move on, and we apply that to the next setting. 

“… The leaders that I admire the most, they are not the perfect leaders in any way. They’re the ones that had the courage to stand up in front of the room on the stage and say, ‘I got this wrong. I made the wrong decision. I’ve learned from it. Here’s what we’re going to do different.’  

“… That’s going to bring a lot of pressure on leaders to really be intentional about what they say they’re about and how they’re actually showing up each and every day.” 

“Where are those … go-to behaviors that don’t necessarily lead you to the results that you want to have? What are those little questions, practices, [and] checkpoints that you can have to keep you honest about changing the behaviors?” 

Listen to more on Episode 10: The Future of Leadership Development

Amy Trueblood 
Senior Director of Leadership Development for the American Organization for Nursing Leadership

“It’s really helpful to have a mentor … We offer the content with the on-demand in cohort facilitated learning, […which is] the ultimate way to help to engage our leaders and get them this content that they need so desperately.” 

“You don’t need to be the expert in everything. … There are teams of people … experts [in] collaboration and partnership in all areas. I used to think if I asked, if I didn’t know it, then somebody was going to think I wasn’t a good leader or whatnot.  

“And I’ve found the more that I share what I don’t know, the better people think I am as a leader. … [Continue] to ask, [be] vulnerable to let people know when you don’t know, and [find] those partners that are going to cheer you on.” 

Listen to more on Episode 11: Revolutionizing Nursing Leadership Development

Brian Kay
Global Director of Operations Training at ADM

“The more you can connect [information] to real things—and that sometimes means other engaging environments, where you can go out in the field and do something, put your hands on equipment, talk to people, and see how things are done, actually fill out the permit that you need to fill out, not just see it on some slides—that’s much more meaningful and successful.” 

Listen to more on Episode 8: Effective Change Management Strategies 

Michael Rochelle 
Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst for the Brandon Hall Group 

“By getting those quick wins, you build that momentum. You get people more excited, candidly more courageous, more brave about taking on more daunting change. But if you don’t get any quick wins and you go for the brass rank, most likely that change will fail due to fatigue because people are waiting for something to happen. … That change initiative collapses under its own weight.” 

Listen to more on Episode 6: Readiness for the Future of L&D 

Shana Storey 
Learning and HR Leader for Progyny 

“Understanding business as a whole is a gap that a lot of L&D teams don’t dig into. It’s really important because that helps build empathy for what the business is looking for. It also teaches you to think about how to work strategically, how to champion the things that you think are going to be needed in a year or two years from now, and helps you start to build and plant seeds with people around how you can make those changes come to life, how it will benefit the operation, or how it will benefit the leaders of the organization.” 

Listen to more on Episode 2: Making the Case for Change in L&D 

Becky Muller
General Manager of Learning Experience for Delta Reservations

“Just start doing it. Even if it’s just a survey to your learners to say, hey, what do you think? Just figure out a way to start measuring it and measure worth. You get so much more acceptance from your executive team if you can go in and you can speak in those terms. … If you make this one change, and you’re able to show that you’ve moved that mark and that that specialist or that employee is performing better than others who maybe didn’t go through that type of training, … you’re heading in the right direction.” 

Listen to more on Episode 4: Successfully Navigating Change 

Will Thalheimer 
PhD, MBA, author of “The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work” and consultant, speaker, and researcher at Work-Learning Research 

“To be really good innovators, you have to understand the fundamentals of your craft. … You’ve got to try stuff out and you have to get … valid feedback on how well you’re doing.” 

“When we’re asking folks for input, we have to do that in a way that guides them to the deeper wisdom, the salient things that are really making a difference. … To do a really good deep analysis, you really gotta push them, you have to understand a little bit about what [someone’s] situation is and then push them to really get to the heart of the matter.” 

Listen to more on Episode 3: From Research to Practice 

Jack Reid 
Leadership Development Partner at Pure Storage  

“Perfect doesn’t exist. … We were striving for perfect, and we were pretty darn close too. But then something fundamental would change and … we [needed] to go back to the drawing board. … The lesson learned for me was definitely, okay, what is good enough? How do we keep that as the immediate goal? And then we could strive for better and better over time.” 

Listen to more on Episode 7: Innovating Learning Solutions 

John Nelson
President of the USA Clay Target League  

“We looked at [how to] climb over that next hurdle versus climbing the mountain in a single bound. … We relied on experts to guide us on what we had to do next when we faced these challenges. [They] showed us the way, told us what to do, and we listened to them. They were … key to our success.” 

Listen to more on Episode 5: Good Training Builds Brand Credibility 

Ron Zamir
CEO of AllenComm  

“My concern with trying to create a revolution is we end up accepting a new technology, a new LMS, we get sold a whole bunch of new features, and we’re implementing these features out of a drive to do it differently and not out of an understanding of where our learners are at now and what we can do to help them along the way.” 

Listen to more on Episode 1: Intro To The Learner Experience Evolution