Like any other skill, leadership is something that can be learned. Although there have been designed various leadership development programs, it seems that the key element for learning leadership lies in people’s motivation.
Conservatively, $15 billion dollars is spent annually on leadership development in the United States alone. – Clomedia
Creating Interest with eLearning
Many business owners often face difficulties when getting their managers to attend leadership training. Their efforts to sustain organization’s growth, turn out as if they’re forcing workers to attend heavily formalized development programs. Especially if they lack the motivation to become leaders, workers will be reluctant to take time away from the office.
There is no super formula that can solve all of these problems at once, but there are some effective strategies and one of them is eLearning or more precisely, its entertaining dimension.
Wisely applied along with other tools, entertainment can spark employee’s interest in learning and adoption of new skills.
The Role of Entertainment in eLearning
Simply put, being entertained while learning is an effective method in training. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about entertaining your learners for entertainment’s sake here but rather as a way to enhance their training and development experience.
You can create an entertaining learning environment by applying gaming elements to your leadership development course.
Gamification is a more challenging approach to eLearning that encourages learners to focus more on a goal realization (developing and applying skills), rather than the goal itself (plain knowledge accumulation).
Just like the challenge and achievement in every gaming software – with every mastered bit, the player (learner) becomes more challenged and along the way builds his skills.
And just like in games, learners are focused on short-term feasible goals, working to the next level. Furthermore with every achievement or failure, learners are provided with instant feedback. In leadership development training, attendees are encouraged to implement organization’s core values to those challenging situations as well as to devise and create original solutions to existing problems.
Leadership Experience
Merely learning and accumulating leadership knowledge can never turn someone into a top leader. The theory remains theory while real leadership is crafted in practice. And that’s exactly what eLearning does, it takes learners out of the traditional classroom environment and puts them into the saddle.
To start applying this strategy, you have to resolve which are the core skills your leaders have to master to perform their tasks most efficiently. However, besides being provided with valuable information that are vital for his/hers organization, every leader needs a personalized goal strategy. This is where eLearning comes into play by allowing you to modify your learning content and create your own batch of rewards and motivation drivers.
Allowing Self-determination through eLearning
In most cases, the hierarchical level of employee’s role dictates the level of their independence to instruct others, make key business moves and manage their own time. Having said that, eLearning content should be delivered in a way that allows learners to manipulate how and when they will accomplish their training.
Dividing course into smaller and more engaging segments allows managers to easily align training around their daily work.
Self-paced learning also provokes self-reflection and self-organization skills and encourage the explorative behavior.
Gamification Tools Development
Since now there’s an awareness that gamified eLearning can offer much more than the usual click and read through assets, eLearning teams are now more and more turning to creative graphic designers and animators to help them implement interactive design features. There’s no doubt about growing development of technologies and tools that support gamification-based platforms, but until they reach their full potential you can build gamified eLearning with available eLearning authoring tools.
Gamify the Way to Success
By evoking friendly competition mood and achievement atmosphere, gamification in eLearning drives motivation, adaptability, action, innovation, organizational and communication skills and thus influences and changes behavior. This way learners are actually perceiving leadership way of thinking by experiencing leading. And that’s the true value eLearning and gamification add to your leadership training.