Strategic Leadership in Learning and Development

Mostafa Sayyadi, Author, Leading Between the Lines

Strategic Leadership in Learning and Development

This article presents executives with a set of principles that can be implemented to improve learning, enhance customer and employee satisfaction while still keeping the shareholder or public sector performance. Executives can do this by using what is known in the practical realm as Strategic Leadership in Learning and Development. Executives solve problems and people across industries members frequently solve technical problems and share their ideas and knowledge together---especially when it comes to charitable and disaster-type events. This frequent contact and keenness to share existing practice and knowledge in solving daily technical problems can in turn enhance a shared understanding among organizations that make up certain industries and it does not even matter if they are in the same industry. Sharing best practices and experiences is highly relevant to both paradigms of shared understanding about problems and trust-based relationships among employees. Trust-based relationships and social networks can positively contribute to knowledge, and subsequently facilitate learning within companies. Executives have embraced strategic leadership in learning and development to instill major changes at the organizational level through changing attitudes and assumptions at the individual level. A strategic leadership in learning and development highlights the importance of employees’ attitudes and values in achieving organizational goals and features effective organizational change as a product of developing relationships with subordinates. Executives willing to succeed in the knowledge-based economy will need to consider such strategic leadership in order to enhance learning in their organizations. With this view, executives can include various organizational factors to serve the customer needs and become more profitable. Thus, executives are able to achieve a higher degree of competitive advantage.

Executives as strategic leaders enhance innovation and new idea generation. For instance, executives play a critical role in developing new ideas is essential in strategic development and formulation. Executives, in fact, act as social architects who instill trust in organizations through clarifying not only their own roles and communicate them effectively but also the employees’ roles too. This way executives can enhance knowledge acquisition and transfer. Similarly, executives can facilitate the process of knowledge acquisition from external sources. This is known as compiling data from rivals and comparing ROI and other pertinent information and then disseminating this information to employees. Executives that embrace strategic leadership in learning and development enhance knowledge acquisition and facilitate knowledge transfer and simultaneously explore more innovative solutions for organizational problems.

Executives that use strategic leadership in learning and development have found that it improves knowledge integration through facilitating knowledge sharing throughout all levels of the organization. Executives also enhance the dynamic relationships among employees and departments, but most importantly, through satisfying customer needs and adding to financial success. Executives develop trust and form the capacity among employees to develop higher functioning relationships not at the higher echelons of the organization but between the lines of the organizational chart. Each level of the organization has the tools and techniques necessary to manage knowledge as it constantly changes and executives incorporate this knowledge into communication and change instantaneously.

In summary, this article points out that strategic leadership in learning and development improves networking with external sources and focuses on developing relationships and leads between the lines of the organizational chart to better meet the needs of shareholders. Furthermore, executives inspire organizational members to network with more successful competitors to share successes and build alliances and not only enhance competition but communicate best practices as a way of keeping the highest standard of operation in the industry and being the go-to organization for successful modeling of profitability, customer service, and employee satisfaction. In doing this, executives create an inspiring view of future and motivate employees to develop relationships with external environments to identify new opportunities that occur in an ever-changing hypercompetitive marketplace.