There’s no magic bullet to ensure that people apply what they learn. But there are steps you can take to create leadership programs, experiences, and support mechanisms that improve learning transfer and support lasting growth and behavior change. Over time, new skills, perspectives, or behaviors can be reinforced, until they become unconsciously and competently put to use.

As a professional interested in learning and development, you may be in a position to acknowledge and help overcome the challenges of learning in your organizations. You are likely in a position to influence supervisors and executives, as well as potential participants, in leadership development efforts. You may also have a role in creating and supporting a learning environment.

The Challenges of Improving Learning Transfer

Individuals — and organizations — face significant challenges in their efforts to apply and integrate learning and develop the leadership capacity they need. These challenges include the following:

• Formal training is just one aspect of learning.
• Leadership — and its development — is always dependent on the people involved and the context.
• Leaders are already overloaded.
• Learning isn’t always aligned with what matters most.
• The learning culture clashes with the operational culture.

Given these realities, though, you can still begin to help leaders and your organization overcome challenges to learning transfer — and earn greater benefit from leadership development investments.

In the face of unrelenting disruption, effective leadership is what’s needed most. Download our new Talent Development report to learn how investing in talent development today will position your organization to succeed tomorrow.

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How to Improve Learning Transfer for Leadership Training

Learning is a process and works best when it’s viewed as more than merely a program. Leadership development can include formal or classroom-based training — but it’s just one piece of the learning puzzle that must have corresponding pieces back on the job.

Research supports the value of extending learning into the workplace and connecting the workplace into formal learning. Most executives cite on-the-job experiences as the key events that shaped them as leaders and taught them important skills, behaviors, or mindsets. In fact, research shows that senior executives distribute their sources of key developmental experiences as 70% on-the-job challenges, 20% other people, and 10% formal coursework and training. At CCL, we use the 70-20-10 “rule” as a guideline rather than a formula for creating learning experiences. Yet, we know that experiences that focus on creating learning in all 3 categories can boost learning transfer and accelerate development.

Learning transfer is also a social process. Learning — and the desired performance that comes from learning — doesn’t take place in isolation. The work context, including the level of support from role models, mentors, peers, coaches, and bosses, has a powerful impact on turning lessons learned into leadership in action.

Drawing on our understanding of and experience with adult learners, we produced a white paper on making learning stick and explaining our 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer. This framework informs our leadership development work — and can be applied to development programs or initiatives within your organization.

Our 3 x 3 x 3 Model for Learning Transfer Helps Make Learning Stick in Development Initiatives

Our 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer and making leadership learning stick is:

• Think in 3 Phases: Learning isn’t a one-time event, but rather it occurs over time, as explained more below.
  • Prepare
  • Engage, and
  • Apply.
• Use 3 Strategies: Use at least 3 different approaches to provide a chance to deepen and reinforce learning.
  • A key leadership challenge,
  • In-class accountability partners, and
  • At-work learning partners.
• Involve 3 Partners: They each have to take responsibility to ensure learning happens and isn’t a passive activity.
  • The learner or participant,
  • The organization, and
  • The training provider.

This 3 x 3 x 3 model for learning transfer helps organizations that need to look at organizational change and leadership development in large-scale and deeply-personalized ways. It also outlines the critical steps that are required of the leadership development sponsor in the organization.

Improve Learning Transfer by Designing Development in 3 Phases: Prepare, Engage & Apply

For making learning stick, what happens before and after the formal part of a program or development effort is just as important as the program content and delivery. This is true whether the initiative is long or short, in-person or virtual, ongoing or one-time.

At CCL, we design leadership development keeping the 3 phases of “Prepare, Engage, and Apply” in mind, to help both individual leaders and organizations get the most out of their investment in leadership development.

The Prepare Phase

As soon as a person is tapped for or has chosen to participate in a formal leadership training effort, the development process begins. Consider:

• How might you help participants start learning right away?
• How do you get them thinking about their leadership experiences, challenges, and needs?
• How do you help them connect to the purpose, content, and value of their development experience?

This is a time when boss support is crucial. The Prepare phase involves good communication about logistics and expectations — but also begins to build an emotional connection to personalize the learning experience. It’s a chance to engage and excite the learner — rather than approaching the process as another item on their to-do list. Research shows that participants begin to engage in a development experience when they’re able to make plans with a boss, mentor, or coach and discuss the support they’ll need and understand how the program will benefit them.

At CCL, we carefully prepare participants for their learning experiences in our leadership programs by providing guidelines for selecting raters and completing 360 leadership assessments, interviewing key stakeholders, selecting real-life challenges they’re facing to apply to course learning, and asking the learners and their colleagues to complete self-assessments and reflections on their leadership style and skills. Other activities during the Prepare phase could include asking participants to read material ahead of time or watch welcome videos from course faculty.

The Engage Phase

The content of a learning experience is important, but so is the way it’s presented. Listening to speakers and reading information is a passive learning process — and information is less likely to stick than processes that connect and engage each person through applied practice. So when designing leadership development initiatives, we always consider how we might create opportunities for guided practice and skill development throughout the program to help improve learning transfer.

At CCL, we ensure our learning experiences include a variety of ways to keep learners engaged, whether in a live, in-person setting or a virtual leadership program. We use a mix of activities such as skill-building, action learning, reflection, simulations, experiential activities, goal-setting, and coaching.

The Apply Phase

Reinforcement and support at work — away from the learning environment and over time — is also essential for learning transfer. How might you create opportunities for the participants to use and continue new learning at work and beyond? Most people need structures that foster the application of new concepts and practice of new skills to achieve lasting behavior change. To improve learning transfer, participants need support and encouragement to get past the initial awkward phase that accompanies the application of new skills.

At CCL, we often use tools such as action-learning projects tied to real work issues; conversations to help connect new learning to an existing business challenge; follow-up lessons through reading, discussion, toolkits, and job aids; and executive coaching focused on making progress on goals.

A Closing Word on Making Learning Stick

We know that leadership development can create competitive advantage, but organizations rightfully want to ensure that their investments pay off through sustained behavior change. With a better understanding of the 3x3x3 model for learning transfer, you can help your organization improve learning transfer and realize multiple benefits, including a greater impact from investments in development, more effective leaders, and a stronger organizational culture.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

We can help you make learning stick and improve learning transfer. Get our latest leadership research, tips, and insights by signing up for our newsletters.

The post Make Learning Stick: Improve Learning Transfer to Get the Most Out of Leadership Development appeared first on CCL.

These are the timeless, fundamental skills that are needed by leaders throughout every organization — and they’re important regardless of role, industry, or location.

But the way you address each core leadership skill, and what you need to learn or emphasize around it, will shift and change as you move into higher levels in the organizational hierarchy and encounter new leadership challenges.

So what exactly are these foundational leadership skills? While there may not be a single definitive list of core leadership skills, at CCL, we call the core leadership skills needed in every role and career “The Fundamental 4.”

In the face of unrelenting disruption, effective leadership is what’s needed most. Download our new Talent Development report to learn how investing in talent development today will position your organization to succeed tomorrow.

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The Fundamental Leadership Skills Needed in Every Career

The “Fundamental 4” Leadership Skills

At CCL, we see the 4 core leadership skills as:

1. Self-Awareness
2. Communication
3. Influence
4. Learning Agility

1. Self-Awareness.

Simply put, knowing and leading yourself is key to becoming as effective as possible at leading others. But gaining greater self-awareness is anything but simple. It takes intentional effort to assess your natural abilities and development opportunities; determine how to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses; and recognize your own values, biases, and perspectives.

Taking the time to reflect on these things and consider how you’ve been shaped by your background and social identity builds greater self-awareness. And ultimately, greater awareness about yourself as a person will make you a better leader. If you’re not sure where to start, here are 4 sure-fire ways to boost your self-awareness.

2. Communication.

Communication is one of the most basic, across-the-board leadership skills that all of us need to develop and refine during our careers. “Communicating information and ideas” is consistently rated among the most important leadership competencies for leaders to be successful. Communication is also embedded in a number of other core leadership skills, including “leading employees,” “participative management,” and “building and mending relationships.”

Writing clearly, speaking with clarity, and active listening skills are all part of the core leader competencies related to effective communication. And as you move up the career ladder, communication in leadership roles expands to behaviors such as encouraging discussion, building trust, conveying vision and strategic intent, and pulling people along with you. At every leader level, communication is a critically important skill.

3. Influence.

Developing your influencing and leadership skills helps you to communicate your vision and goals, align the efforts of others, and build commitment from people at all levels.  

Influence can vary greatly at different levels in the organization. Knowing your stakeholders, or audience, is key. Do you need to influence your boss? Your peers? Direct reports? Customers? Each stakeholder has special concerns and issues, so consider the most appropriate ways of influencing others for your particular situation.

Early in your career, or in individual contributor roles, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires being able to present logical and compelling arguments and engaging in give-and-take. Later on, or in more senior-level or executive roles, influential leadership skills are focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation. But throughout your career, influence remains a core leadership skill. Ultimately, influence allows you to get to the business of getting things done and achieving desirable outcomes.

4. Learning Agility.

To develop as leaders and as people, we need to be active, agile learners. Leaders need to be in a mode of constant learning, valuing and seeking out experiences to fuel leadership development, and recognizing when new behaviors, leadership skills, or attitudes are required — and accepting responsibility for developing those.

Learning agility is critical for career longevity, and it involves learning from mistakes, asking insightful questions, and being open to feedback. It also includes learning new skills quickly, being open to learning from hardships and taking advantage of opportunities to learn from heat experiences, and responding well to new situations.

For senior leaders, learning agility is also about inspiring learning in others and creating a learning culture throughout the organization.

Set your development as a leader on the right track by learning and practicing core leader competencies and the 4 foundational leadership skills of self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility.

How to Grow the Core Leadership Skills

Developing Foundational Leadership Skills to Prepare for Every Role

If you’re thinking about adding the Fundamental 4 to your leadership skills list, keep in mind that each skill should be continuously improved, or “built on as you go.” To be effective, you must continue to develop, adapt, and strengthen these core leadership skills throughout your career — because the learning never ends. As you gain leadership skills in one area, you’ll find there’s even more to learn and practice in taking on new challenges and larger roles.

And if you think you’ve “skipped over” any of the Fundamental 4 core leadership skills during your career, you won’t be as effective, or fully develop your leadership potential. The good news is that, with concerted effort, you can still develop any skills you missed out on; it’s never too late for soft skill development!

If you can identify any leadership gaps or weaknesses in your leadership journey, you have the potential to learn, grow, and change. With the foundational leadership competencies of self-awareness, communication, influence, and learning agility as the core of your leadership skills development, you can be confident that you’re building capacity for new opportunities and the next level of responsibility — because these 4 are core leadership skills needed for everyone, and every career stage.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Partner with us to help your organization develop the4  fundamental leadership skills. Our leadership fundamentals course: Lead 4 Success®, helps grow core leader competencies for foundational leadership skills development.

The post The Core Leadership Skills You Need in Every Role appeared first on CCL.

Not only did the pandemic upend our relationship to work — most notably, where we work and how we work — but it also caused us to examine why we work, and the impact work has on our health and wellbeing. Now, 4 years later, employees are continuing to reshape their relationship with work and are increasingly prioritizing agency, a sense of purpose, and opportunities for growth and development, and considering how culture and wellbeing are connected.

The business case for prioritizing workplace wellbeing and employee growth cannot be overstated, as the cost of unwell workers is staggering, with an approximate $800 billion a year spent in the US alone. Yet investments in wellness programs and L&D are not yielding their intended ROI.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss a different approach that involves helping leaders create environments where everyone can grow and thrive. We will share research-based insights about how leaders have the power and responsibility to foster and cultivate workplace environments that increase employee engagement, performance, and retention. We’ll also take a closer look at learning and wellbeing, examine the key elements of a learning culture, and highlight the critical role that managers and leaders play in supporting employee development.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Research- and experience-based insights about the impact of leadership on learning and wellbeing
• The 5 critical elements of a learning culture
• Actionable strategies and tools to support employee growth, learning, and wellbeing

The post How Leaders Can Foster a Culture of Learning & Wellbeing appeared first on CCL.

In times of change, leaders need to be more agile than ever. Adapting to new business strategies, working across cultures, dealing with virtual teams, and taking on new assignments all demand that leaders be flexible and agile.

The willingness and ability to continue learning throughout your career is more important now than ever, as the workplace has been upended, business models are changing, and technology and industries shift.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

To be a high-performer and increase your long-term potential, you need a way to deal with the unknown — and fast.

We all need to learn to adapt and thrive in ambiguous or new situations, and as noted in Learning Agility: Unlock the Lessons of Experience, when you don’t know what to do, learning agility is the key.

The ability to learn from experience is also a critical predictor of success as a leader, according to decades of our research. (Learn more about how to gauge if you’re an agile learner likely to have a long career.)

Learning agility is about knowing how to learn — knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. It’s about learning from experience and applying it in new ways, adapting to new circumstances and opportunities.

It’s never too soon (or too late) to increase your learning agility.

So, if you want to increase your performance — and your long-term potential — you can boost your learning agility in several ways.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Build Learning Agility

Follow These 4 Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility

With improved learning agility, you’re able to make the most out of your experiences. As you build the habits that help you figure things out as you go, you’ll improve how you navigate new and difficult situations and increase your contribution to your organization.

To excel at learning from experience and to succeed in changing times, follow our 4 tips for learning agility:

1. Be a Seeker.

Seek out new and diverse experiences. Memorable experiences impact the way in which you lead and manage, so seek out more and different experiences. Immerse yourself in situations that broaden your skills and perspective. Explore new pathways.

• Embrace the challenge of the unfamiliar; don’t just go through the motions. If you react to the new learning opportunity by staying close to your comfort zone, you minimize struggle and discomfort — and you also miss out on the corresponding rebound in growth and performance. The end result is that you’re pretty much the way you were before, and the full power of the new experience is lost.
• Take on a new challenge that scares you. Find something that is meaningful, but not so important that failure will have serious personal consequences. Most importantly, tell others what you’re doing, and ask for their help and support. Taking on new challenges allows you to develop new skills and perspectives that may become an important part of your repertoire in the future.
• Don’t get stuck on first solutions. We often choose the first solution to come to mind, rather than taking time to consider whether it’s truly the optimal course over the long term. By trying out new approaches, you can uncover ways of doing things that could save time and energy and surface new learning that may otherwise haven’t been considered. Look beyond the obvious or the easy. Bring in other points of view. Find another way to understand the problem. Approach it from a different angle. If you’re typically data-driven, seek out stories or go get some hands-on, action-driven insight. For each problem you face, challenge yourself to come up with new solutions, even if seemingly tried and trusted ones exist.
• Make it a habit to push for new ideas — the less traditional, the better. When faced with a challenge, ask yourself 2 questions: What’s holding me back from trying something new and different? If these constraints weren’t in place, how would I approach this situation differently?

2. Hone Your Sense-Making.

In today’s high-stakes, complex, ambiguous, and fast-moving situations, you don’t have the luxury of time. You need to dive in and start making things happen. This means you need to take an active approach to making sense of the new challenges you face. Be curious and willing to experiment. Ask “Why?” “How? and “Why not?”

• Really actively listen to understand what others are saying, and trust that you’ll have a response when they’ve finished talking.
• When you find yourself feeling stressed, pause. Don’t just say or do the first thing that comes to your head — when facing leadership stress, take a moment to consider what’s really required.
• Find another way to understand a problem. Utilize multiple techniques, engage different senses, and tap into your emotions to wrest understanding, insight, and meaning from the experience. Elevated sense-making is an essential skill to develop for high-potential leaders.

3. Internalize Experiences and Lessons Learned.

This process is needed to solidify insights and lessons learned for recall and application later. If you don’t process the learning, you may miss important clues to next steps. Lean on others for this if you need to. Learning-agile people recognize that others are essential to their learning and performance. They build ties and relationships that increase their access to people who can provide new experiences and opportunities to learn; they can collaborate across boundaries.

• Ask for feedback and be open to criticism. Find someone who you trust to give you open and honest feedback. Show that you’re open to the process by only asking clarifying questions. Take time to think about what happened and what you’re learning. View feedback as a gift that someone’s giving you. You may not like it, and it may be uncomfortable, but there’s value in it nonetheless. Regardless of the other party’s motivations for giving you feedback, there’s always the opportunity to learn something about yourself.
• Don’t defend. Resist the temptation to explain your actions or make excuses. When you enter a mode of self-preservation and try to defend what is, you close yourself off to what could be. To practice non-defensiveness, always try to thank the other person. Consider the feedback carefully so you can see patterns (and changes) over time.
• Reflect, both alone and with others. Learning occurs when you take the time to reflect, to shift your thinking beyond merely what happened to ask why things happened the way they did. Reflection helps to surface the intuitive and lock it in for future reference. So step back from the busyness and figure out what you’re learning from a project, from an interaction, from a new experience. Talk about what’s currently working well and what isn’t — or debrief what’s already happened. Conduct after-action reviews where you, and relevant others, reflect by asking questions: What happened? Why did it happen that way? What should we stop/start/continue doing in order to ensure success in the future? What changes in knowledge, skill level, attitudes, behavior, or values resulted from the experience?

4. Adapt and Apply.

Through your experiences, you’ve had the opportunity for development and learning things. Over time, you get even better at applying those learnings to navigate new and challenging situations.

• Learn to rely on your intuition. Concentrate on principles and rules of thumb. People who rate high on learning agility tell us they operate largely on feel and flexibility. When faced with something new, look for similarities between the situation and things you’ve done in the past. Draw on these similarities to frame the new challenges.
• Don’t overthink. Under pressure, you probably feel the urge to get things done quickly. Ironically, consciously searching your mind for ideas and solutions closes us off to both the wisdom of others and our own experience. Inspiration often comes from the unconscious; being open to this can spark new ideas and strengthen performance. Be a flexible leader and don’t shy away from experimentation as you venture into new territory.

Our research has found that learning-agile superstars engage in these 4 behaviors at a significantly higher level of skill and commitment than everyone else — and get great results over and over again. (That’s why it’s often said that great leaders are great learners.)

Ultimately, your ability to continuously learn and adapt will determine the extent to which you thrive in today’s turbulent times — and succeed in the future.

If you follow our tips to improve your learning agility, you’ll make the most of your experiences. By seeking, sense-making, internalizing, and applying, you’ll do more, learn more, and have a more satisfying career.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Share these tips for improving your learning agility with other leaders at your organization, and upskill your team with a customized learning journey for your leaders using our research-backed modules. Available leadership topics include Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Learning Agility, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, and more.

The post Tips for Improving Your Learning Agility appeared first on CCL.

Charitable giving soared to a record-breaking $471 billion in 2020, according to Giving USA. Following this spike, many predicted philanthropic activity would return to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, yet charitable giving remained heightened in 2022, though donor retention and dollars given are on the decline in 2023.

For nonprofit executives and fundraising professionals, this shifting landscape offers both opportunity and challenge. The polarities of increased interest in philanthropy, combined with evolving donor values and pressures on internal nonprofit resources, has left many of us wondering where best to focus our time and energy.

Yes, Fundraisers Are Leaders

Before we continue, it is important to note that as a fundraising professional, you are a leader.

You have chosen a career dedicated to raising money to further a mission or cause. You do a job that many people profess to dread because you care deeply about bringing people together to solve critical social issues.

And while this work brings you into contact with many community leaders and donors, that does not preclude your own leadership. In fact, it requires it.

At CCL, our research has consistently revealed that leadership is both a lever for increasing community impact and a framework for navigating emerging environments. In this article, we will explore how the core leadership skills of communication, influence, learning agility, and self-awareness can help those in nonprofit fundraising leadership roles create greater impact.

Fundraising Leadership Success Starts With 4 Skills

1. Communication: Listen Well.

No doubt you have read more than one fundraising guide that urges you to listen. It’s one of the top skills fundraisers depend on to help align donor goals with the nonprofit mission. Our own research shows that when leaders use active listening skills, we establish trust, demonstrate empathy, and help create psychological safety. But how do you know what to listen for?

Focus your listening by looking for facts, feelings, and values:

• Facts are what people say – things you can validate or prove. When we listen for facts, we understand what subjects matter to our donor.
• Feelings are the how of the conversation. What nonverbal cues are you picking up? These tell you how those subjects made someone feel or what sentiments they invoked.
• Values are the why. Why is this topic important to this donor? What does it mean to them and how does it impact how they show up in the world and in their philanthropy?

When fundraising leaders listen for all 3 elements of the conversation, we are better prepared to understand our donors and meet their needs. We gain not only insight into their philanthropy, but also additional opportunities to show that we value them and their philanthropic goals.

TIP: At your next meeting, write FACTS, FEELINGS, and VALUES at the top of your notes. As you listen to the other person speaking, pay attention for each, and record important points in the conversation, drawing arrows back to each word at the top to make connections. What do you notice matters most to this donor?

2. Influence: Honor Differences.

Fundraising leaders may wrestle with the idea of influence. We know we need to leverage it to build resources for our mission, but discussing tactics to influence others may make us feel uncomfortable. Instead, focus on how and what donors want to keep their needs at the center.

Like communication, influence is less about you, and more about the other person. Everyone has preferred ways to receive information, so when you use the right method for the person, you honor those differences and celebrate unique perspectives. At CCL, we call this using the head, heart, or hands to influence:

• Head: Logical arguments appeal to people who are moved by facts, figures, and intellectual discourse.
• Heart: Emotional appeals and stories that illustrate your mission inspire people who lead with values.
• Hands: Collaborate with these individuals, either through conversation or active volunteerism, and help them get involved directly.

So, to succeed in a nonprofit fundraising leadership role, consider what matters most to your donor: statistics and facts about your programs, or stories of impact? Or perhaps they get the most joy through hands-on volunteer work? Effective influencing is really just understanding what matters most to the listener, so you can honor their preferences.

TIP: Don’t know your donor’s preferred style? Deliberately include examples of all 3 tactics in your next conversation, and watch for where you donor engages most.

3. Learning Agility: Learning from Experience.

Agility is the ability to change course. Being nimble enables us to respond to shifting community needs, a new generation of donors, or an evolving nonprofit mission. Change is inevitable; it’s what you do after it that’s most important.

When we have learning agility, we don’t go from success to success. How often have you heard that fundraisers hear No more than Yes? While we know this rationally, we often forget when faced with rejection. But it is impossible to grow without it.

You can’t learn more, do more, and help more if you keep being successful. It sounds counterintuitive, but we learn more from our failures than our successes. Capturing and applying those learnings is crucial to your fundraising and, in turn, supporting your nonprofit mission.

TIP: Take time at meetings to celebrate not just wins, but also what you learned when you were not successful. It’s only a failure if you don’t learn from it. Celebrate learnings as much as success and use experience to fuel your own leadership development.

4. Self-Awareness: It Starts With You.

So far, our fundamental 4 leadership skills have focused on others — we listen, influence, and learn from our experiences and those around us. And it is in our nature to focus on our clients, donors, and community; that is, after all, why we do what do.

So why is self-awareness also an essential skill for fundraising leader success?

“Be the change you wish to see in the world” is a quote that nonprofit leaders take to heart. Not only is this statement directly applicable to social sector work, but it is also a key to how we relate to the people we seek to inspire.

To effectively persuade others, we must first know ourselves and how we like to communicate, influence, and learn. If you are a person who talks more about facts, you might approach a donor that way. If you are someone who wants to get involved in volunteer work, you might tend to offer those same opportunities. Self-awareness helps you know your natural preferences, so you can better understand and adjust to those of others.

Self-awareness can be the most challenging skill to develop, but it can also serve as a foundation for strengthening all your other leadership skills.

TIP: Ask others what they notice about your communication, learning agility, and influence styles and preferences. Then reflect – how do you see yourself? Work to boost your self-awareness if needed.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

If you’re seeking fundraising leadership training, we’re here to help. As a nonprofit ourselves, we’re guided by purpose and fueled by passion. We can provide leadership training for fundraisers as part of our portfolio of offerings for nonprofit leadership development to equip your executives, staff, and fundraising leadership team with fundamental leadership skills training that helps them unlock their potential and better support and advance your mission.

The post 4 Skills That Increase Nonprofit Fundraising Leadership Impact appeared first on CCL.

Charitable giving has reached an all-time high and shows no signs of slowing. For fundraising professionals, this offers both an opportunity and a challenge. An increased interest in philanthropy means more needs met, but also puts pressure on already resource-strapped nonprofits. Leaders are left wondering how to focus their time and energy for maximum impact.

Our research has consistently revealed that leadership development is both a lever for increasing community impact and a framework for navigating emerging environments. Join us for this webinar as we discuss how CCL’s 4 fundamental skills of leadership – communication, influence, learning agility, and self-awareness – can help create more impact and fundraising success. Together, we will discuss how fundraisers can further their mission and bring people together to solve critical social issues through effective leadership.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to practice authentic communication and listen for facts, feelings, and values
• Tips to develop a range of more effective influencing skills
• Tactics to maximize learning from on-the-job experiences (both good and bad)
• How to increase self-awareness and become a better leader

The post Fundraising Leadership: 4 Fundamentals for Success appeared first on CCL.

Many companies and teams have been affected in some way by what’s been deemed the “Great Resignation.” Whether you’ve personally made a career shift, have scaled back work to care for loved ones during the pandemic, have stepped in to cover your departing colleagues’ responsibilities, or are charged with retaining employees in your organization, we’ve all felt the impact of the staggering statistics of employees resigning.

Many employees are eager to find more meaning or growth in their jobs and are searching for a better place to work, and at the same time, organizations are feeling pressed to find and keep the best talent for the future. To stay competitive in this work environment, organizations must intentionally create cultures that attract, develop, and retain talent so they can successfully execute new strategies for the changing world.

How can your organization create a culture that puts learning at the forefront — in a way that’s practical, behavioral, and scalable — in order to have the greatest impact on employee engagement? It starts with planting seeds for a learning culture to thrive.

What Is a Learning Culture?

A learning culture is an environment that demonstrates and encourages individual and organizational learning, and where both gaining and sharing knowledge is prioritized, valued, and rewarded. It becomes part of the ecosystem of the organization.

While it’s no small feat, there are 4 important components that can help transform your organization’s current culture into a learning culture.

How to Cultivate a Learning Culture at Your Organization

4 Components to Building a Learning Culture

1. Attract and develop agile learners.

If you’re looking to upskill your workforce or perhaps reskill yourself, learning agility is one of the most critical skillsets to develop. Our research at CCL has long shown that the most successful leaders with the longest careers have the key leadership trait of learning agility.

Learning-agile leaders exemplify a growth mindset by learning from experience, challenging perspectives, remaining curious, and seeking new experiences. (Not sure if that’s you? Here’s how to become a more agile learner.)

Because employees with learning agility continue to grow their skills and capabilities regardless of their current job, these individuals are in demand in the quest for talent. The workplace of yesterday no longer exists, and organizations need agile learners who understand how to transfer their current skillset to solve new problems and build capabilities for tomorrow.

• When hiring new talent: Seek out team members who learn from experience and challenge perspectives. Look for the critical skill of learning agility by asking interviewees how they’ve approached difficult situations in the past, how they’ve learned from mistakes, and how they prepare themselves for new challenges. Inquire about how they’ve applied their learnings to their next opportunity.
• For your current team members: Encourage people to remain curious and open. Provide ample opportunities for on-the-job learning and stretch assignments, along with support in the form of tools, mentoring, and coaching. Provide access to development opportunities for employees across your organization — don’t just limit skill-building to a small subset deemed “high potentials.”

Building a learning culture that democratizes leadership development and values a growth mindset will help you attract and retain a workforce that truly wants to learn, and help others learn as well.

2. Create an environment that supports psychological safety.

Looking at the teams and groups in your organization, are you fostering the trust and collaboration needed to sustain a strong learning culture? By creating safe spaces to be open and take interpersonal risks, you can build a foundation of psychological safety at work and encourage the learning that contributes to innovation and productivity.

Psychological safety is about promoting risk-taking and candor in a group, to create a secure environment for optimal learning. It’s the belief that candor is welcome, that employees can ask questions often and early, and that people can freely admit mistakes without fear of retribution.

Encourage team members (especially senior leaders) to admit mistakes openly and share stories of “failing forward.” Also, make sure executives know how to encourage innovation, not unintentionally sabotage and undermine it.

Ensuring leaders can create psychological safety for their teams allows team members to learn collectively and leads to a strong learning culture in your organization, where groups are willing to find lessons in setbacks and hardships, listen to one another, and invite differing opinions and candid conversations.

Remember, it’s not about being polite, but rather about being open. The openness to take interpersonal risks and glean lessons from mistakes to achieve something greater signifies a culture where growth is valued, which leads to a stronger organization that puts learning in the forefront.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Promote risk-taking and transparency within your organization.
• Encourage team members to ask questions often and early.
• Welcome candor and encourage employees, as well as the senior leadership team, to admit mistakes and share lessons learned, without fear of consequence.

3. Encourage better conversations and feedback throughout the organization.

When determining how to cultivate learning culture, remember that effective communication and feedback should be woven throughout the organization and be encouraged and expected as a part of the norm. When feedback becomes a part of regular conversations, employees are aware of their personal developmental areas, resulting in continuous gains and fewer surprises at end-of-year reviews.

Giving feedback routinely and well often dramatically improves your talent development — but requires a particular skillset, which can fortunately be developed.

Encourage employees to give, and seek, both positive and developmental feedback. Positive feedback can help them leverage what’s working well already, and developmental feedback allows them to see what can be improved upon or done differently to have greater impact.

Because a conversation, by definition, involves 2 or more people, the collective communication competency of an organization is greatly enhanced when all employees are knowledgeable and skilled at holding high-quality conversations. Put simply, better culture starts with better conversations.

And that’s why our clients who have partnered with us to scale our conversational skills training across their organizations have seen such positive results: When a critical mass of people shares a common understanding around what constitutes an effective conversation, it allows new skills to be applied to everyday work, and to spread organically through the organization. Widely applied, improved conversational skills benefit the organization by creating more robust, innovative, stress-tested solutions and a more dynamic and psychologically safe, learning culture.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Improve coaching and conversational skills across your entire organization with research-based, scalable training that helps build a common leadership language.
• Participate in meaningful conversations and provide valuable, actionable feedback.
• Encourage everyone in your organization to listen to one another and seek constructive feedback.

4. Make learning an explicit organizational priority.

If you want to show that learning is a real priority within your organization, send clear signals to your workforce that you’re all in.

Examine your policies, rewards systems, and opportunities to establish and reinforce a learning culture. Consider making these types of scheduled events a common practice at your organization:

• Lunch-and-learns, where senior leaders are storytellers who share their experiences and what they’ve learned recently and throughout their career journeys.
• After-action reviews, where teams regularly take a few minutes to share what they learned from a project or experience.
• Learning communities, where individuals can share what they’ve learned with similarly situated peers, and they can discuss together how they’re applying these learnings in their everyday work.
• Designated development days, where team- or company-wide sharing of lessons learned is expected and honored.

To show that your organization believes that learning is for everyone, make development opportunities inclusive and accessible across the entire organization. The practice of scaling learning will be unique for every organization, but be sure to provide an array of opportunities for “soft skill development” in a wide array of delivery formats to meet learner needs and abilities, including options that are asynchronous, in-person, self-paced, and virtual. (We’ve found that there are many unexpected benefits of using online learning for leadership development.)

Also, to ensure that you’re building a true learning culture, provide organizational support for learning not only in the form of tools and resources, but also by providing the necessary time and space for growth. Encourage leaders to allocate time for themselves and to set aside time for their teams to absorb and practice new skills.

When every employee sees that the organization values both individual and collective growth, you’ll strengthen your learning culture and gain commitment from your team members.

Key tips and takeaways: 

• Create a strong learning culture by making it an explicit organizational priority.
• Examine company policies, rewards systems, and career development opportunities — what’s missing and what can be improved?
• Consider making these types of scheduled events a common practice at your organization: lunch-and-learns, after-action reviews, learning communities, designated development days.

Build a Learning Culture That’s Tailored to Your Organization

To tailor your learning strategy to your organization, make sure to align your business strategy and leadership development opportunities, as well as your organization’s broader values, language, and brand. Examine the capabilities needed both today and into the future, and ask employees what type of development would be most valuable for them, as well as how they prefer to learn.

It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone is in a place to jump in right away. Keep in mind that behavior change is difficult. Meet people where they are, encouraging small steps, risk-taking, and sharing through peer support. Use metrics to keep a pulse on what’s resonating and having an impact so that you can adapt as needed and evolve your learning culture strategy as you grow.

Every organization is different, so the path to truly creating a culture of learning that will become a part of the ecosystem will be different as well. But with an intentional focus and commitment from the leadership team, you can plant the seeds today that allow a learning culture to flourish at your organization — resulting in a more agile work environment that’s prepared for the challenges of tomorrow.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Build a learning culture in your organization by democratizing access to development opportunities. Take advantage of CCL Passport, which gives you unlimited access to our world-renowned content and our most comprehensive package of proven, transformative leadership solutions. If you license our content, you can bring our proven research, programs, and tools in-house to leaders at all levels of your organization.

Frequently Asked Questions About a Learning Culture

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