Developing More Diverse Leadership Must Start with L&D

The best way to develop more diverse leaders in your organization is to lead with deliberate, goal-oriented L&D.

According to a study by the Alliance for Board Diversity and Deloitte, white women only represent a fifth of all board seats on Fortune 100 and 500 companies, while Black, Hispanic, and Asian women represent the smallest slice of boardrooms in Fortune 100 (7%) and Fortune 500 (6%) companies. Meanwhile, more than half of the directors newly appointed to these companies in the last year were men.

What’s the hold up?

Fostering true diversity isn’t just something you can make happen overnight. Even the most well-intentioned companies have found that creating truly diverse leadership requires more than simple encouragement: It requires a commitment to fundamentally relearning what leadership can look like and how to develop it effectively. That’s exactly why this is a job for the pros in learning and development.

 

Let’s explore why learning and development (L&D) professionals are your best hope for fostering true diversity in your business leadership, and how you can make sure they have what they need to do it.

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Why should L&D take charge of creating more diverse leaders?

Developing diverse leadership means more than putting different people in charge. It means fundamentally reprogramming your entire organization’s understanding of what effective leadership looks like.

Let’s look at a few reasons why L&D professionals are uniquely well-equipped to do that, and how they can make it happen:

Championing inclusivity can and should be taught

A significant part of the reason why leadership isn’t more diverse is because much of the workforce isn’t ready for it to be. Generations of entrenched systemic inequality have hardwired workers to subconsciously see business hierarchies and even professional competencies in rigid and inaccurately limited terms.

 

As Stacey Gordon explains in her course on Unconscious Bias, we all have biases to some degree. Unlearning these biases is hard work, but it’s both possible and worth it — not only because it’s the obvious right thing to do, but also because it will create a more harmonious, equitable, and effective workplace.

 

L&D is the perfect way to help your workplace confront and overcome these kinds of biases, precisely because L&D pros can explicitly teach workers to unlearn them as explicit, structured workplace training.

 

LinkedIn Learning provides several great examples. We offer both full, multi-course “Learning Paths” that walk learners through understanding and embracing diversity as well as specialized courses on how to confront biases and become a better ally and more inclusive co-worker.

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For more advice and resources on creating a DEI program in your organization, see Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Training: Tips and Best Practices.

L&D is uniquely equipped to guide cultural change

In the Workplace Learning Report, 72% of L&D professionals served a more strategic function than in previous years. Eighty-seven percent of these professionals said they had either some or a great deal of involvement in helping their organization adapt to ongoing changes, and 62% agreed that their programs had become focused on rebuilding or reshaping their organization.

 

A focused leadership development program is your best tool for doing just that. What you teach will become what your organization is about. There’s a reason why 55% of L&D professionals say their department owns or shares responsibility for company-wide DEI strategy already — and why “opportunities to learn and grow” are cited as the No. 1 driver of positive work culture.

 

By embedding principles of diversity and inclusivity, you’re not just equipping your employees to recognize and promote it. You’re empowering them to take charge and drive that culture organically.

 

 

Want to learn more about how you and your L&D team can create a positive and inclusive work culture? Try these courses:

 

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L&D can make creating diverse leadership a measurable business goal

L&D professionals defined their top three focus areas as:

 

  • Leadership and management training (49%)

     

  • Upskilling and reskilling employees (46%)

     

  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion (26%)

 

Meanwhile, 74% agreed that L&D has become more cross-functional, pursuing each of these three main focuses across departments and at all levels. As L&D creates programs designed to benefit one of these three focus areas, therefore, they are increasingly addressing all three.

 

When it comes to developing leadership skills at work, the best way to train today’s leaders and managers is to train diverse leaders and managers.

 

There’s another advantage to building diversity considerations into your workplace training, too: it becomes measurable. Half of today’s L&D pros use employee engagement survey scores to assess the impact of skill-building programs, and more and more are learning to use online learning platforms to track and measure engagement and performance via real-time data.

 

By prioritizing diverse leadership in your L&D programs, you can ensure your progress is visible, measurable, and legitimately impactful throughout your organization. Or, if it’s falling behind, you can take steps to address shortcomings and ensure you stay on track.

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“Diversity and inclusion is the fundamental foundation of psychological safety. But it helps to pitch it as a path to higher performance. People are not interested in remedial action that’s going to shame them, but they are interested in opportunities to become better and more successful.”

Crystal Lim-Lange
CEO, Forest Wolf

Crystal Lim-Lange

L&D can motivate diverse audiences to engage with leadership training

Ultimately, the only way to develop more diverse leadership in your organization is to actually get more diverse representation in those roles. To do so, everyone needs to see the value of leadership training and it needs to be easily accessible to them.

 

Modern L&D pros have gained an excellent grasp on what motivates learners. It primarily comes down to personalizing around their needs, goals, and aspirations.

 

 

For example:

 

  • More than three out of four (78%) of learners expressed the need for workplace training that’s based on their specific skill gaps.

     

  • Nearly as many (73%) said they would spend more time learning if it helped them perform better in their current role.

     

  • Another 78% of employees say they’d remain with their employers longer if they saw stronger career paths forward, while employees who feel they can’t achieve their career goals with their employers are 12x more likely to consider leaving.

 

By designing customized learning paths forward for each would-be leader, L&D professionals can uniquely provide both a career goal and the resources necessary to achieve it while lessening some of the barriers that have historically stymied leadership diversity.

 

Want more help designing customized development programs for your employees? Check out our resources on How to Encourage Career Growth of Employee Retention and Success, and Essential Features of Employee Development Programs.

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Start developing more diverse leadership today

Investing in L&D is the best route your organization can take to developing diverse leadership to shape greater success in the future. Put LinkedIn Learning at the center of this investment.

 

Our platform has the tools, resources, and data to help your L&D team define your goal for more diverse leadership in no certain terms and pull it off as effectively as possible. Together, we can start training tomorrow’s greatest business leaders today.

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