Playbook: How to use social learning to make leadership development stick

Step 2: How can we make learning part of the work?

One thing I've learned from designing leadership programs is that what happens between sessions can be just as important as what happens during them.

For example, rather than asking participants to complete another module, why not ask them to try something different with their teams and share what happened? What worked? What didn’t? What surprised them? Why?

I like to think about the experience before, during, and after each session. Give people a reason to arrive with a real-world challenge, from their own day-to-day at work. Let them collaborate and work through it together. Then, create or identify a simple opportunity, a small next step, to try something different, and come back to discuss it:

• A short cohort discussion about a situation leaders are facing right now
• One small experiment in their regular work before the next session
• A quick reflection on what happened, including what did not go as planned
• A manager check-in or peer conversation to help them follow through

Tools like Howspace can be particularly useful here, because they allow those conversations to continue organically between sessions. Participants can share experiences, respond to each other's challenges, and learn from what's happening in their actual workplace or teams.

But remember, no technology can create learning on its own. We still need to give people a reason to participate, and make sure the experience is worth their time.

Try this: Keep the between-session task to one conversation, one experiment, or one reflection. If your gut tells you that it feels like additional homework, make it even simpler.

Step 3: How can we give people a chance to learn with and from each other?

Imagine making a beautiful, scrumptious cake. I often compare learning content to your cake’s ingredients, and social learning to the oven. You can have the best ingredients in the world, but without the oven, you're not going to get very far.

Think about the last time you learned something really useful at work. What made it memorable? Was it because you watched a video or completed a course? Or was it because you had a conversation with someone who challenged your thinking, shared an experience, or helped you see something differently?

For me, that's one of the most valuable things about social learning.

But we need to be intentional about creating the conditions for those conversations. People aren't all of a sudden going to share their challenges or admit they don't know something just because we put them into breakout rooms.

They need to feel comfortable doing so. And that takes time, trust, and a facilitator who knows when to step in and when to get out of the way.

Here’s what I usually do: Start with small peer groups. Establish clear expectations about confidentiality, and encourage talking about real leadership dilemmas that people can discuss without putting anyone on the spot. Importantly: bring the same people together more than once. Trust rarely appears in a single session.

Try this: In groups of three, have one person share a real challenge, one ask questions, and one observe and reflect back what they heard. Rotate the roles. The point is to help people think, not to rush to solve the problem.

Step 4: How do we know if anything actually changed?

Measurement is one of those areas where I think we, as learning professionals, sometimes make life unnecessarily difficult for ourselves.

We spend a lot of time tracking participation, completion rates, and satisfaction scores. And there's nothing wrong with those metrics. They tell us something useful about the experience. But they don't tell us whether someone has become a better leader. That's where I think we have an opportunity to look a little further.

For example, if we designed a program to help managers delegate more effectively, what could we look for afterward? Are managers having different conversations with their teams? Are employees taking on more responsibility? Are leaders spending less time making decisions that their teams could make themselves?

We may not always be able to attribute every business improvement to one learning program - especially when it comes to leadership development. But we can definitely collect meaningful evidence, look for patterns, and build a much more credible picture of what's changing. Think about it… isn’t that a much more interesting conversation to have with business leaders, compared to just showing them another completion dashboard.

Try this: Decide what you want to see change before the program starts. Gather a few examples from participants, managers, and peers during and after the experience. Look for patterns, but be careful about claiming more impact than the evidence supports.

A few things I’d watch out for…

• Adding social activities on top of an already full program, or during a very busy time in the business lifecycle. If it feels like extra work, trust me, people will disengage - or not even engage.

• Assuming that active discussion means people will behave differently afterward. Ask what they tried and what happened, instead, over a period of repeated instances.

• Overproducing every interaction. Some of the most useful conversations need room to be candid, messy, and imperfect.

• Expecting trust to develop immediately. Repeated contact, clear boundaries, and good facilitation make a big difference.

A quick implementation checklist:

• Identify the real business or leadership challenge

• Agree on the behavior you want to see change

• Bring together leaders facing similar situations

• Build in discussion, application, and follow-up over time

• Give peers a useful role in the learning

• Involve managers without turning the experience into an assessment

• Use a shared space, such as Howspace, where it adds value
• Collect examples of what people actually did differently

That was a lot! Here’s a quick final thought 🙂

If there's one thing I'd encourage learning professionals to think about, it's how much of the learning experience we're designing around content, and how much we're designing around people.

Content matters, there’s no doubt about that. It matters a lot. But some of the most valuable learning happens when people share experiences, challenge each other's assumptions, and realize they're not alone in struggling with something.

I am a big believer that if we create more opportunities for that to happen, we're already making leadership development a lot more real, memorable, and useful.

Note: AI helped with a little editorial sparkle. The thinking, experience, and occasional strong opinions are entirely human. 😎

Want to go deeper?

For more on trust, peer learning, behavior change, and making the case for collaborative leadership development, listen to Episode 8 of the L&D Leaders Podcast, "Social learning as your ultimate trust builder" with Sotos Poulimenos.

This article was written by Sotos Poulimenos and includes key points from our members session in L&D Leaders Community on August 19th.

Sotos is a global learning and talent development advisor and professional coach with experience across organizations including Dynatrace, Sun Life, and Deloitte Consulting. His work focuses on helping professionals and organizations build the skills, capabilities, and mindsets needed to adapt and grow as the world of work changes. With a background in organizational psychology, leadership development, and workforce transformation, Sotos is particularly interested in how people learn from one another, how technology can improve the learning experience, and how organizations can turn learning into meaningful business results.