The role of managers in modern businesses has changed, making them more important than ever. They’re not only expected to lead their teams but to lead up, down, and across the organization. Like mini-CEOs, modern managers are charged with driving business success, engaging teams, and rallying cross-functional employees.
For these busy frontline leaders, self-paced learning isn’t enough to meet their needs for skills development. With the emergence of hybrid and remote work, it can be difficult or impossible to gather learners together in one room. Additionally, specialized university programs that exist outside your organization’s learning ecosystem can be costly while offering mixed effectiveness. How can you effectively meet the learning needs of your frontline managers? The answer is facilitated learning.
How managers can get to the next level with facilitated learning
Facilitated learning offers a more effective way to train your managers by combining self-paced learning with live group facilitation sessions that reinforce competencies and help managers apply new skills on the job. These facilitated group sessions maximize the effectiveness of the self-directed portions, letting managers master new business skills with their cohorts. It also allows for consistent application across the organization.
But the benefits of facilitated learning for managers are far greater than just its effectiveness.
- It’s collaborative – the cohort experience helps managers build connections with each other. By forming these connections with one another, managers will be more engaged with their roles and better prepared to lead across the organization. The importance of these connections is one of the major drivers of the need to develop cross-functional collaboration skills. Additionally, learning in groups can help your organization align practices across the company while also creating a cohesive corporate culture.
- Facilitated learning helps add context to the learning. An expert facilitator can guide managers and help them understand how to apply new skills, saving time and increasing the impact of learning.
- Facilitated learning is time efficient. The self-directed portions of the program make the live portions a more impactful and powerful use of in-office work time.
- It fills the gaps in managers’ knowledge. As gaps in their learning become obvious, facilitated learning helps managers quickly fill-in those gaps. Working on their own, managers can learn a new skill in as little as an hour supported by facilitators who can help them apply that skill immediately.
In Conclusion
New ways of working demand new ways of learning and developing frontline managers. As digital transformation transitions into a more human-centric business revolution, managers are more important than ever. Considering the deep impact that they have on organizational culture and business performance, facilitated learning is a powerful and impactful way to give your managers the collaborative and business skills they need to excel in their jobs.
Empower your key talent with the right capabilities to navigate today’s business challenges.
With our new 4-week outcome-designed programs, you help unlock great leadership, creativity, and team connectivity within your organization.
Why trust CrossKnowledge for your facilitated learning needs?
With our many years of experience at the very forefront of digital learning practice, CrossKnowledge offers a blended learning experience that is unparalleled. It combines both self-directed and live facilitated group sessions, building a collaborative and accountable environment that improves engagement, creates human connections, and enables long-term behavioral change. With CrossKnowledge and facilitated learning, your frontline leaders will have all the tools they need to succeed.