28 May
While we have always prided ourselves on doing things differently, we owe a lot of credit to customers who have taken a leap of faith with us, trusted our innovative methodologies, & our futuristic lens on development journeys.
It is a joy to partner with companies that believe in learners “owning” their learning, as was the case with this multinational conglomerate. With a varied workforce in all over the world, their business intent was to provide learning opportunities to employees, and aid a learning culture in the organization. We worked closely to have simple, engaging learning interventions, that would allow learning anytime & anywhere and encourage habit formation and behavior change.
I proudly present an interview with the client partner, and one of the reasons our project relationship thrived
Q1) What were the key competencies that you were looking to develop?
The focus was on Execution Excellence, Problem Solving, Communication Skills, Persuading and Influencing & Strategic Thinking
Q2) What was the format of your previous Leadership Development initiatives? What have been some challenges that you faced?
We run long duration programs combined with e-learning programs. One of the challenges was to cover the large and diverse number of employees.
Q3) What was your experience of running development journeys at your organization so far? What were some of the participant (learner) responses?
I found the concept of behavior change & habit formation that Jombay introduced really simple yet powerful! Jombay’s interventions were really able to aid and reinforce the learning culture.
Some of the key observations:
- Content was relevant, useful, practical and engaging
- The different learning interventions including peer learning (through WhatsApp) were very effective & the practice coach was able to segment & personalize ways of connecting with the cohort.
- Positive word of mouth publicity across the business
- The activities were a great opportunity to demonstrate understanding of concepts
- The leaderboards were exciting!
Q4) What made a noticeable difference to the participation levels?
We realized that to ensure buy-in from the learners, it was important for the organisation to do a good job at introducing the program. A HUGE push was also given by the Jombay team at the beginning to build confidence and create buzz.
The practice coaches created WhatsApp communities & built rapport to understand the learners. The learners were segmented and a personalized approach was adopted for the early movers, the fence sitters and the skeptics. There was periodic encouragement with leaderboards, hand holding and gentle nudging so that learners tried new things. We also organized monthly calls to do a quick recap of their learning and to understand how we can make the journey more relevant to them. This made a huge difference in participation levels and in maximizing learning moments!
Q5) What were some of your key learnings for implementing a successful and scalable leadership development exercise?
- Let the learners OWN their learning, by proactively choosing to be part of the experience and take ownership of the experience
- Practice coaches engaging the learners on WhatsApp & emails let learners practice a bit, and boosted their confidence. Segmentation of learners and customization of the nudging was essential to maximizing learning moments for the cohort.
- Monthly calls with participants were essential to do a stock check
Q6) How will you evaluate the success of this initiative?
This learning initiative has worked very well for our business. We took feedback internally & were able to record a behavior change, an ability to remember & apply concepts. We would even hear acronyms and discussions on the learnings in office! We ran an internal NPS for the iDev intervention at this organization. 67% were promoters, 33% were neutral, and there were no detractors.
