One of the most significant challenges facing leaders today is how to embrace and engage in the process of developing future leaders to be productive today and tomorrow.  In a business world that is both changing rapidly at the same time resources are being frozen or reduced, today’s leaders don’t have the willingness or time to nurture human capital development.  The pressure of living quarter-to-quarter and achieving ever-impossible-to-reach financial metrics is forcing leaders to push toward results regardless whether employees have the skill and / or the will to execute the strategies and decisions that will achieve those results.  In other words, too many leaders have unrealistic expectations that inexperienced employees and leaders can excel at their jobs by being experts in their work.

It’s time to acknowledge the reality; no matter how great and wonderful an expert is today, at one point that person was a novice without experience, grit, or the skills to be effective.  Think about it.  At many moments in time all the typical business heroes – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, etc.- were novices who were able to turn their environments and circumstances into unparalleled success.  Unfortunately, as corporate training budgets evolve and shift towards buying licenses of self-serve crappy eLearning, the reality gets even more troublesome as employees and managers are even less likely to receive that skills and tools they need to move from novices to experts.

Given that the momentum of the “evolution” in talent development isn’t going to change any time soon, here are five practical suggestions that can be accomplished to move the needle to help employees and leaders move from novices to experts:

Provide a big picture view

Experts see the big picture; they see the system of business and they understand the business ecosystems of their own company, customers, and competitors.  Experts use the knowledge of the ecosystems to accurately forecast the future based on analysis, facts, and skills.

Teach them the metrics and drivers of business performance

Once experts understand the big picture and the systems of business, they understand the key metrics of success and the drivers of business performance that the metrics are based on.  By knowing the drivers of their own company, customers, and competitors, they effortlessly make the best business decisions.

Do everything possible to enhance the technical skills of their roles

Assuming employees will have or will easily learn how to be expert at their jobs is a huge mistake.  It’s critical to do everything possible to provide the skills needed to enable employees to become technically exceptional at their jobs.  If someone is in sales, then they should be the best at sales; if they are in marketing, they should be the best in marketing, etc.

Provide an environment to develop behavioral skills

Experts understand that it’s not all about the technical or business acumen skills; they also understand that without the behavioral skills such as understanding personality styles, having hard conversations, providing coaching and feedback, having emotional intelligence and many other factors that enable the work to be done with and through other people.

Create an environment that rewards desire

Experts are hungry for success and accomplishments.  One of the most important things you can do is create an environment that drives people to become experts and use their desire as the fuel for success.

In summary, it is easy to forget that expertise is a concept that occurs only when the recipe includes training, development, resources, and patients.  Skills such as Business Acumen, Business Leadership, and Strategic Business Selling are the foundations for how to achieve success through expertise.

Summer weekends are the perfect time to catch up on reading and to think about things we often don’t have time to think about during the hustle and bustle of a “typical” business week.  This weekend I had the opportunity of reading an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review by Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli titled “There is No Such Thing as Big Data in HR.”  Peter is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and is world renown for his work in the area of Human Resources.  In the HBR article, Peter shares his insights that while the rest of the world is just leveraging the power of big data analytics and is on the cusp of introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the equation, even the largest business organizations on the planet only employ a couple of hundred thousand employees so by definition, it’s impossible to gain insights from “big data” because there simply isn’t enough big data to analyze.

Peter’s macro-perspectives are solid and provide strong logic for what some of the current data can be used for on a micro level and how straightforward database integrations of various HR sources can provide leaders with the data needed to make good business decisions.  For example, Peter shares ideas for basic analytics around employee engagement and the relationship between employee acquisition and business performance all which make a lot of good sense and are very valuable ideas.

While Peter’s perspective may sufficiently define the current state related to leveraging big data in HR, I am convinced the future state – especially in the part of HR that focuses on Learning and Development – will be different.  Learning and development is continuing to experience disruptive changes and the use of big data analytics in the near future could mean the difference between business success and failure.

During the past year, I designed, developed, and have delivered a “driverless” First-Line Leadership Business Simulation for new millennial leaders that is providing big data and intense analytics across the global spectrum of multiple companies.  This leadership business simulation presents participants with the opportunity of becoming a new leader in a simulated world of avatars with different personality styles and job descriptions.  Participants are required to lead a team and execute the strategy of the organization they work for by effectively running their department.  The new leaders participating in the simulation go through the experience in a “flipped-classroom” as there is no stand-up instruction or content; if participants want to explore a concept such as coaching, giving, feedback, understanding business strategy, or leading innovation, they click on a “Digging Deeper” in-the-moment micro-lesson that it embedded in the simulation, learn about the topic, discuss the topic with their cohort, and then apply it directly in the simulation. 

In one pivotal scenario of the simulation, Ellen Astor, a former peer who is a top performer but also very confrontational and short-tempered engages in a shouting match with Theo Harrington, a happy-go-lucky, pleasant contributor who likes to please other people in his company and on his team.  Ellen’s actions are egregious and some difficult feedback needs to be provided to Ellen. 

This is where I believe the future of data analytics will come in…

Today, based on just a few thousand data points, we can see that 88% of the millennial leaders in one type of company avoid providing Ellen with the hard feedback while 68% of millennial leaders in another company – that has provided their employees with intense training about coaching and feedback – choose the best practice path in terms of how they deal with Ellen.  The learning journey is continuous with months of new scenarios and additional practice around new leadership concepts and application.

In addition to the simulation work, we are also developing AI applications that will integrate with the big data.  These AI applications will be able to instantly analyze micro and macro trends and provide advice, coaching, and feedback.  For example, a participant from one of our business simulations will receive tailored feedback on which additional learning to pursue to close any talent gaps and will be able to access an AI SmartBot to listen to real-world conversations that the participant is engaged in and provide instant advice based on the best content and insight gained through the big data analytics.  The AI database will continue to grow with billions of data points, conversations, and analysis that will provide instant learning and development.

Yes, today big data in HR isn’t needed.  Tomorrow will be a different story…