In my work at Columbia University, I teach graduate students, coach senior executives, and speak globally about learning as a professional capacity. My conversations with business professionals, corporate executives, and academic leaders regularly address the need to augment learning capacity in order to expand employees' skills, increase the potential for individual career advancement, and improve overall corporate results.
Companies who adopt a culture of learning attract and retain top talent, make well‐informed business decisions, and ultimately increase profitability. Too often, corporate learning initiatives are relegated to a defined unit within an organization, such as skills training programs overseen by the human resources division. Such narrow initiatives have limited impact on employee development and ultimately fall short of their potential to improve overall corporate performance.
To maximize the impact of learning initiatives, leaders should establish an environment dedicated to teaching and learning at all levels. When all leaders – from top‐level CEOs to middle managers and situational leaders – engage in corporate learning initiatives, it sends a powerful message that learning is taken seriously throughout the organization.
As an educator and consultant, I witness, daily, the benefits that embracing a teaching mindset delivers in the corporate environment. The scholar‐practitioner model at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies offers a compelling example of how teaching by business leaders can accelerate learning, skill development, and business success. Our instructional model harnesses the teaching capacity of corporate leaders in the classroom. When scholarship informs teaching, teaching then enhances the practice of professions, which, in turn, reinforces scholarship – creating a virtuous circle that benefits students, faculty, scholars, and professions alike.
A teaching mindset also has application in interactions with external clients. The financial sector widely embraces education as a means of gaining clients and retaining them in the long term. For example, investment firms educate prospective customers by delivering information that is useful to them when making financial decisions. Consumer banks employ a teaching approach through the growing practice of providing analytics services to their customers. These personalized data points, based on an individual's banking transactions, provide customers with new insights into their financial health and likely contribute to brand loyalty.
In Make Yourself Clear, career experts Reshan Richards and Steve Valentine define teaching capacity and discuss its application in the business world. They harness their expertise to present techniques that skilled teachers use every day to build understanding in others. Their combined teaching experience – ranging from elementary through graduate school to corporate universities – provides them with unique insights into the ways educational strategies can be leveraged in a commercial environment.
Applying teaching methods in a corporate setting unleashes novel approaches to establishing and growing business relationships. When adopting a teaching mindset, sellers consider multiple approaches to listening; customer service agents consider an array of techniques to demonstrate understanding and empathy with their customers; trainers assess learning to promote knowledge and skill development, rather than simply conferring a certificate; and leaders communicate to be understood, changing their tactics to influence different learners.
Reshan and Steve describe the value of striving for authenticity, immediacy, and delight in the corporate landscape. Their approach highlights the importance of bidirectional communication with both internal and external constituents to create long‐term business results. Reshan and Steve provide a new context for what these terms mean in the technological age, converting authenticity, immediacy, and delight into a powerful heuristic for sales professionals, customer service agents, corporate trainers, and leaders at all levels.
– Jason Wingard, PhD
dean and professor
School of Professional Studies
Columbia University