Using learning maps to design better leadership development programmes

This article is for learning and development managers, and the senior leaders who sponsor their programmes. It introduces learning maps and explains how you can use them to design, or sanity-check, a leadership development programme in any kind of organisation.

A learning map also helps you build custom learning sessions around key organisational priorities. It helps ensure your programmes address the most important areas for each learner group.

Learning maps can be used to design any type of development programme, face-to-face or virtual, including:

• Induction programmes
• High-potential programmes
• Development centres
• Management development programmes
• Senior leader programmes

You can adapt the example learning map below as a template for an overarching design for your own programme.

See the end of this article for how to obtain an editable version of the learning map.

The four territories on a learning map

There are four key 'territories' on a learning map:

• Key behaviours, values, and conflicts
• Mission goals and core dilemmas
• Operational priorities (12-month horizon)
• Key skill areas

The figure below shows an example learning map for a major consulting organisation.

All four territories need to be covered in your programme if it is going to provide the learning your colleagues need. They do not all need covering at the same time. Too many leadership development programmes focus only on key skill areas and operational priorities, and leave out the organisational goals, behaviours, and values.

Key behaviours and values underpin everything on the learning map, whereas key skill areas support specific parts of it, such as the customer dimension.

Let's explore each learning map territory in more detail.

1. Key behaviours, values, and conflicts

These are the positive behaviours an organisation wants to see in every person who works there. They are usually highly specific to each organisation and typically cover five to eight behaviours. Your organisation has probably already defined them.

It is also important to identify potential conflicts between these values. Conflicts are an ongoing source of problems, and they should be addressed in development using appropriate scenarios. Values conflicts are often necessary in real life and cannot be avoided, but leaders need to develop the skills to manage them.

For example, when should 'working together' take precedence over 're-imagining the possible', and vice versa? In the first case, you avoid an overly siloed or 'solo run' approach to an opportunity. In the second, you avoid groupthink when addressing a challenging problem creatively.

To see why values conflicts are inevitable, reflect on Marianne, the motto of the French Republic, 'Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité', and all the possible conflicts between these three important values.

2. Mission goals and core dilemmas

Any commercial enterprise can define its mission goals in terms of just four dimensions:

• Commercials
• Customers
• Strategy
• Colleagues

Some commercial enterprises split customers into two dimensions, customers and stakeholders. Stakeholders cover important parties such as shareholders, regulators, the community, and the environment, and may merit their own category in regulated industries.

The customer and stakeholder split can also matter for non-commercial enterprises, who may rename the commercials dimension as operations to better reflect their core outputs.

Core dilemmas

Core dilemmas are a direct consequence of the mission goals. Managing them well is often the difference between success and failure for individuals in the organisation, yet they are often absent from organisational learning programmes.

If you have four dimensions, you have six core dilemmas (and if you have five dimensions, you have eight). Create a set of concrete examples of real core dilemmas as a source of rich learning scenarios. Here is a set of examples for the major consulting organisation:

Three important skills in managing core dilemmas are:

• Dilemma recognition If you don't recognise the dilemma, you are unlikely to address it successfully.
• Creative dilemma resolution This is where you design a solution that is more creative or co-inventive than the obvious compromise.

(from 'A Systematic Guide to Business Acumen and Leadership Using Dilemmas')

• Values debt management This is where you acknowledge when you have 'short-changed' one of your key values or mission goals, and make concrete plans to pay back the 'values debt' as quickly as possible.

Here is an example. Imagine a cruise ship. A common mission goal dilemma is between guest satisfaction and crew morale. Crew morale often gets sacrificed to address unexpected issues in guest satisfaction, so the leader accumulates a debt to crew morale. Good leaders repay these debts quickly. Weak leaders build up 'bad debts' in certain values, which eventually come back in a way that can no longer be ignored and can have serious consequences. You can explore this tension first-hand in the Cruise simulation.

Some core dilemmas can also turn into 'tri-lemmas', such as colleagues, customers, and commercials, which makes them even harder to navigate.

This is why the ability to deal with values conflicts and core dilemmas is critical to the success of leaders and managers in any organisation, and why these tensions need to be addressed explicitly in leadership development. The Dilemma simulation gives participants a safe place to practise exactly this.

3. Operational priorities (12-month horizon)

These are the operational or organisational urgencies being addressed in the current fiscal year, which may have implications for staff development.

4. Key skill areas

Key skill areas are derived by identifying which skills need to be developed to support the other three territories:

• Key behaviours, values, and conflicts
• Mission goals and core dilemmas
• Operational priorities (12-month horizon)

Create your own organisational learning maps

You can create a unique set of learning maps for your organisation by following the five steps below:

• Step 1: Review Review and edit the four territories and four dimensions of the learning map to reflect your own organisation.
• Step 2: Identify Identify the different learning groups or communities in your organisation and their skill needs. For example, team leadership means different things for a junior project manager and for a senior manager whose team members may all be leaders of teams themselves. Each learning group needs its own version of the learning map, at least for the key skill areas.
• Step 3: Prioritise Prioritise and phase how you will package the different learning components for each learning group. You cannot deliver them all in one go, so decide which to address first.
• Step 4: Summarise Prepare a one-page map for each learning group. Each group's map may have different priorities and phasing, plus different content levels for key skill areas.
• Step 5: Plan and design Plan and design the delivery modes, mechanisms, and methods. This depends on factors such as the size of each group, their work patterns, and their roles. You will also need to choose the most appropriate modes (individual, group, or team), mechanisms (classroom, e-learning, or simulation), and methods (self-directed or facilitated) for each learning group.

Sanity-check an existing programme

If you already run a leadership development programme, hold it up against the map and ask:

• Does it address all four territories, or only skills and priorities?
• Are the organisation's real values conflicts and core dilemmas practised anywhere?
• Is each learning group served by its own version of the map?
• Is the programme phased, rather than trying to cover everything at once?

The benefits of learning maps

Learning maps are a fast and effective way to design new programmes and to check existing programmes for gaps. They are also useful for fast-tracking the design of specific programme elements using scenario-based learning, such as configurable business simulations.

Counterintuitively, the conflicts between key behaviours and values, and between mission goals, often provide the richest learning scenarios and the most valuable development opportunities in an organisation.

Where to go next

Once your map shows where the gaps are, the right next step depends on what the gap is:

• If the gap is in decision-making and priorities, see how we strengthen strategic thinking
• If the gap is in behaviours, trust, and alignment, see how we build high-performing teams
• If your map is specific to your own organisation, we can turn it into a tailor-made simulation that uses your values, dilemmas, and terminology

If you would like an editable version of the example learning map in this article, just get in touch.