As the bedrock of your organization’s success, managers and leaders require a set of carefully-crafted skills, behaviors, and competencies to steer your organization forward.
To develop these skills, you must nurture intentional behavior changes with targeted training and help leaders retain and apply that knowledge.
Bridge Journeys equips managers and leaders with the tools needed to build a strong workplace culture, identify and apply their unique strengths, and foster a commitment to ongoing learning.
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What Is Bridge Journeys?
Bridge Journeys is a powerfully simple tool that enables the delivery of complex learning and development paths with minimal manual input.
By weaving together learning and performance elements, scheduling and automating content, and breaking training into manageable chunks, you create an engaging learning environment that leads to greater knowledge retention.
Using Journeys to craft pathways of self-paced content is the ideal way to keep your learners progressing toward their goals over time. Automated, time-released workflows can include programs, live training, action-based tasks, and skills feedback, giving your people the knowledge and experience to practice, develop, and grow.
Here are five ways Bridge Journeys can enhance manager and leadership development programs.
1) Encourage Continuous Learning and Development
Developing leadership skills and capabilities is an ongoing journey. The skills and behaviors that those at the highest levels of your organization rely on every day must be learned, refined, and improved continuously. Without a strictly defined endpoint, you can pace journeys and regularly add updates and content improvements as required.
The power to oversee each step within a learning journey means admins can define who sees what and when they see it, making course updates, additions, and notifications as targeted or as all-encompassing as needed. This caters to learners with different technical abilities and learning styles. It’s a convenient and low-touch way to bring leaders together across your organization and account for their different needs.
Simply group learners based on criteria such as title, department, or length of service. Once assigned to groups and enrolled within a pathway, they’ll have access to content that’s relevant to their needs.
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2) Create Pathways for Leadership Succession
The choice to lead is born from a sense of connection to organizational purpose, mission, and goals. Journeys is an effective way to upskill aspiring managers and leaders for vertical movement by introducing them to the situations they’re likely to encounter, building organizational knowledge, and strengthening their interpersonal skills.
Admins can use analytics within Journeys to find employees with the aspirations and potential to advance into senior positions based on the completion of relevant soft skills training and courses aligned with company values. When combined with career conversations and employee goals, you can identify suitable employees and enroll them in journeys relevant to their career aspirations. This will then strengthen the pipeline of talent within your organization.
Journeys can be assigned in a linear, step-by-step sequence, giving aspiring leaders plenty of time and space to learn, reflect, and discuss their performance with their manager or a mentor before they progress. This approach helps you measure learner progress, their mastery of skills based on practice and feedback, and makes it easier to discuss areas where individual support is needed.
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3) Enable Social Learning Opportunities With Cohorts
For leaders to be successful, they need the chance to fine-tune their soft skills through intentional behavior changes over time.
Empower development by incorporating peer learning and knowledge sharing within journeys and create group-based learning experiences. By adding social elements to training, your people can strengthen their communication skills while participating and working together on projects and tasks, undertaking stretch assignments, and feeding into other learners’ development with valuable feedback.
This cohort-style learning environment boosts motivation and deepens connections, inspiring people to learn from each other and grow together. With a group all advancing and working toward the same goal, they’re ideally placed to share unique perspectives that spark insight, inspire discussion, and create a safe space to put skills to the test.
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4) Use a Blended Learning Approach to Increase Retention of Knowledge and Skills
It’s one thing to learn a concept in the classroom, but for leaders to enrich their understanding and apply learning to their role, they need practical experience. Enact meaningful change with formal and informal training over time, giving people a chance to learn, try, and apply their knowledge and skills.
Bridge Journeys gives you the tools and resources to develop and nurture behaviors through a combination of formats and styles. These include employee-led training to teach basic principles and best practices, group and instructor-led activities that foster connections, and experiential learning to develop skills through practical application.
To increase knowledge retention and create an engaging learning experience, break training programs into pieces, using expected leadership skills as checkpoints. With this approach, your people have plenty of time to learn, share ideas, and practice. Using multiple touchpoints over time, you can teach and reinforce essential behaviors and soft skills such as building trust, navigating change, and strengthening relationships through small chunks of training that fit into busy schedules.
During each step of the journey, communicate and reinforce leadership behaviors and provide practical activities and training to illustrate how to use transferable skills in the real world. Then schedule assignments and use live training to expand on the topics discussed in the programs, create connections, and enable them to learn from peers and mentors.
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5) Incorporate Feedback and One-on-Ones
Your leaders all possess unique strengths and, equally, areas for improvement. As managers and leaders progress along pathways and develop skills and competencies, Journeys can help identify and close gaps in knowledge or skills.
Feedback plays a vital role in employee development, and Journeys seamlessly integrates skills into the learning journey, helping your people to develop and grow. The addition of well-placed performance actions opens up more comprehensive development opportunities for learners that meet individual needs.
In addition to learning items, a Journey can include the following:
- One-on-ones
- Skills feedback
- Stop-start-continue feedback
Integrating skills feedback and performance conversations into the journey allows for a more accurately targeted learning experience. Observing learners as they practice and apply skills on-the-job means that peers, coaches, and mentors can provide relevant, timely feedback that inspires change.
In addition to skills-based feedback, ongoing conversations are a great way to track performance goals and measure the impact of development programs. Course evaluations and assessment scores based on real-life scenarios can also clarify development areas. Managers and learners should refocus, adjust, and refine performance goals and assign training during regular one-on-ones.
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See Bridge Journeys for Yourself
Journeys can eliminate overwhelming and manual processes that bury teams in tracking and completing assigned courses and tasks. Set up pathways that will automatically enroll learners in the right step at the right time. Many Bridge customers are successfully using Journeys today for onboarding, compliance and leadership development.
To learn more about Journeys, get in touch with your Customer Success Manager. New to Bridge? Fill out this form and we’ll show you more!
