Even though 58% of Leaders As Teachers (LAT) are effective, most companies that use this powerful model are not profiting as they should from the time and effort leaders invest in teaching, according to 2015 research from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) & i4cp. As learning professionals expand training and development opportunities and engage organizational leaders to share expertise, can we reimagine LAT programs by creating faster, cheaper high-quality curated solutions with online courses from top universities like Northwestern and Johns Hopkins?

Key research findings include:

• Effectiveness in leveraging LAT is tied to better market and learning performance. However, only one in five respondents rated their LAT effectiveness highly.
• LAT efforts are twice as likely to happen on an informal basis and high-performance organizations strive to formalize them. 39% of survey respondents said leaders act as teachers informally, whereas 17% had formal, structured programs.
• About half of respondents (52%) said LAT programs reside with the talent development function, and nearly that many said that all employees are the primary audience for leaders who teach.
• Leader-teachers represent all organizational management levels, but are usually those on the front lines or at the senior manager rank.
• When leaders serve as teachers, perceived benefits are wide-ranging & support better performance.
• Leaders’ teaching roles most often involve speaking about their personal experiences and are least likely to center on experiential learning.

To help guide the roundtable discussion, our facilitator will focus this interactive discussion on some or all the following discussion points:

• What are some of the benefits of a LAT approach in your development programs? (for example, for leaders - helps with their development and gain visibility to talented employees)
• What are some best practices you have used at your organizations to develop an effective LAT?
• What are some key lessons learned you could share with the group about things you would do differently with LAT? Why are 80% of LAT not effectiveness highly?
• Identify some of the latest innovations you are using with LAT (e.g., curating customized learning experiences with internal senior leadership & cost-effective online course from top universities).
• How do you describe the role of a Leader as teacher? How do you gain acceptance and buy-in from leaders?
• How do you best prepare Leaders to be most effective as teachers? As a part of the approach, how do stories fit in and how do you prepare leaders to be excellent story tellers?
• How have you leveraged the LAT model to support a 70/20/10 model & cohorts for development?