Just-in-Time Leadership Support for Managers at a Large IT Organization

Leadership development has a timing problem that nobody in the room ever mentions. The program runs in March. The difficult conversation happens in September. By then the manager remembers that there was a model with four quadrants, cannot recall which quadrant applies, and handles the conversation the way they would have handled it anyway.

This case study covers how a large IT organization built a leadership series designed around that gap, and why the format decisions mattered more than the curriculum.

The background

The organization understood that good leadership had a direct effect on its growth, and wanted to equip leaders through a comprehensive series of programs that would help them develop both themselves and their teams.

The requirement attached to that ambition is the interesting part. The training had to support leaders during their moments of need, with the right resource available at the point the situation arose. That is a different specification from a leadership curriculum. It asks for something a manager can reach into rather than something they complete.

The design problem

Leadership material is unusually easy to deliver badly, because it has no natural unit of delivery. A curriculum can be carved into modules of any length, and the default is to make each one long enough to feel substantial. That produces a program a manager has to schedule, which means it competes with everything else on their calendar and generally loses.

The just-in-time requirement made the problem sharper. Something reached for in a moment of need has to be findable in under a minute and usable in under five. Content that satisfies those constraints looks nothing like a leadership module, and content that satisfies a completion report looks nothing like a resource.

There is also the credibility question. Leaders are experienced people who have watched several leadership initiatives arrive and fade. Generic material gets recognized as generic immediately and discounted from that point on.

How our team approached the solution

Microlearning as the primary approach

Analysis of the requirement led our team to microlearning as the primary approach for delivering just-in-time learning. Short units solve both halves of the problem at once. They fit into a day without being scheduled, and they are small enough that a leader looking for one specific thing can find that thing rather than a module containing it.

Matching each content type to the right format

Rather than converting the whole series into one format, our team curated it carefully, mapping each content type in the leadership series to the format that suited it. Some material became video, some became practice scenarios, and some became interactive elements.

This sounds procedural and it is the decision that carried the program. A concept a leader needs to understand belongs in a short video. A judgment they need to develop belongs in a scenario. Forcing both into the same treatment, which is what most leadership programs do, means one of them is being delivered in the wrong shape.

Practice scenarios leaders recognized

The practice scenarios were built to be relatable, set in situations these leaders would recognize from their own weeks rather than in illustrative generalities. Recognition is what buys credibility with an experienced audience, and the impact feedback singles these scenarios out as the element leaders found most useful.

Downloadable performance support tools

A wide range of downloadable performance support tools was designed using our learning and performance ecosystem approach, so leaders could take them on the go and use them at the moment they mattered most. Templates to organize thinking before a conversation, prompts to work through afterwards, material that lives outside the course and gets used during the working day.

For a just-in-time brief these tools are not supplementary. They are the part of the program that actually operates in the moment of need, while the modules are what makes them make sense.

Design-rich and mobile

The training was design-rich and accessible on mobile devices, giving leaders a flexible experience they could pick up between meetings rather than only at a desk.

The impact

• Participating leaders responded with considerable appreciation for the just-in-time learning support.
• Leaders found the learning especially useful because of the relatable practice scenarios.
• Employee satisfaction surveys following the training recorded increased performance efficiency among leaders.
• Completion rates were higher as a result of the microlearning approach.

The last two are worth reading together. Higher completion is a format result and tells you the program was easy to take. The performance finding is what the program was for, and the fact that both moved suggests the short format did not come at the cost of substance, which is the usual objection to microlearning for leadership content.

What this case study shows

Designing for the moment of need changes what a leadership program is. It stops being a curriculum that managers work through and becomes a set of resources they reach into, which is closer to how anyone experienced actually learns their job.

The format mapping deserves more attention than it usually gets. Deciding, content type by content type, whether something should be a video, a scenario, or a tool is unglamorous work that happens before any building starts, and it is the difference between a program leaders use and one they complete.

If your leadership programs are completed and then forgotten by the time they are needed, Liberate can help you rebuild them as support your managers reach for during the week.

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