Custom Leadership Training for Pharma Company Executives

The Challenge: In-depth leadership training for senior management

The client recognized that members of its leadership team were so focused on daily tasks that they didn’t take the proper time to reflect upon and improve their own leadership styles and techniques. To build an environment of continual learning, the client wanted to provide its leaders with training to improve their ability to lead their respective teams. The goal was to maximize the potential of senior management and increase their effectiveness and impact on the business.

The Solution: A strategic vision and blended learning solution

The client engaged Judge Learning Solutions (JLS) to design a custom, blended learning solution to further analyze and develop key leadership strategies. The program would help learners develop new leadership strategies that they could then effectively apply on the job.

The client initially chose an eLearning delivery platform. JLS interviewed key stakeholders to determine the learning objectives. With those learning objectives in mind, JLS designed and developed an Inkling microlearning course that introduced foundational concepts, including emotional intelligence, leadership styles, and the client’s own framework for high-performing teams. The course included a combination of videos, infographics, articles, interactions, and reflection points, all designed to provide an engaging and meaningful learning experience.

Recognizing that building leadership skills required a live classroom environment with other learners, the client looked to JLS to also create a 2-hour, instructor-led course, that reinforced and expanded upon the concepts introduced in the eLearning course. During this course, learners engaged in a combination of self-reflection, role play, action planning, and other activities, which helped learners evaluate the effectiveness of their current leadership strategies. They also helped learners develop more effective approaches to building their own high-performing teams.

The Result: Tools to support continual leadership development

This custom, blended learning solution enabled the client’s busy executives to learn fundamental leadership concepts at their own convenience, and then make the best use of their classroom time to focus on how to apply those new concepts and skills.

The course provided learners with strategies to transfer knowledge and skills to the workplace, including:

• Completing an accountability plan, which asked learners to identify leadership skills they wanted to improve, the strategies they were going to use to improve them, a target date, and who they were asking to hold them accountable.
• Having the learners, who were leaders in the organization, ask their teams back in their workplace to complete a team diagnostic questionnaire. This was to establish a baseline for the team’s alignment with business goals, clarity of purpose, and level of trust. Results of the questionnaire were visible corporatewide.
• Administering the questionnaire again after six months, to determine how well leaders were improving their ability to lead their teams.

The leaders were able to practice and receive feedback on their performance in a safe environment before using these new strategies on the job. Through the combination of eLearning, instructor-led training, and an ongoing accountability plan, learners developed better leadership strategies to positively impact the performance of their teams.