The Quantified Communications Blog

Last week, Katie Kuehner-Hebert of Chief Executive published an article outlining what makes JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the leader of the US financial pack. She gave an overview of Dimon’s career and leadership experience, but celebrated his candor as one of his chief assets, citing his top spot in Quantified’s 2017 CEO Authenticity Index as evidence.

Online learning often gets a bad rap. As we’ve written before, the remote, automated nature of these programs can make them feel too low-touch to provide the same quality learning experience students can receive in the classroom. And often, that’s the case. When each student is simply clicking through a standardized lesson and answering a few multiple choice questions at the end, it’s no wonder the learning feels superficial.

At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business Leadership Communication Council last month, the headline was this: “Social media, digital communication and technology-enabled connection have created an era of radical—sometimes painful—transparency for businesses,” and “…the best means to communicate successfully given the disruptive state of constant transparency is to align communication with action.”

Do you remember a time, as a kid, when you wanted to ask your parents for something—a new toy, a raise in your allowance, a dog? How did you go about it? Did you just come right out and ask, or did you spend time preparing your arguments, collecting your reasoning, and maybe even making a visual presentation? Did you debate with yourself whether to ask your parents together or individually? Who did you ask first? 

There’s a problem plaguing corporate learning and development leaders: to put it simply, they can’t get trainings to “stick” in employees’ brains, so they struggle to achieve significant returns on investments—not to mention increases in productivity and engagement.

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, 89 percent of employers are planning to increase the number of MBA graduates they hire, and they expect to offer those MBA grads a median starting salary of $110,000 compared to $60,000 for those with only a bachelor’s. So what’s setting those MBA grads ahead of the pack? According to the vast majority of survey respondents, communication and teamwork. 

We often talk about leaders as particularly great communicators, able to share information, persuade doubters, and inspire employees with ease and finesse. (Or if they’re not there yet, they’re at least working on it.)

But what happens if your boss is a not-so-great communicator?

If there’s one thing our professors, mentors, and advisors drilled into us as we prepared to finish school it’s that networking, and building a robust group of professional contacts, is foundational to a successful career. But for many of us, the traditional idea of networking— waltzing into a room full of strangers and yukking it up while trying to balance a drink, a tiny hors d’oeuvres plate, and endless handshakes—sounds like nothing short of torture.

Unfortunately, all those people who preach networking are right.

Fortunately, there’s more than one way to go about it.

The Austin chapter of the Association for Talent Development is hosting the 2018 Applied Learning Summit next month, bringing together talent development professionals across a range of industries to swap stories and share experiences. The theme for this year’s summit— Anticipate, Apply, Adapt—recognizes the rapid rate of change and the variety of innovations in the talent development industry.

Recently, higher education institutions have found themselves under pressure to show evidence of student learning. In a recent article in the Hechinger Report, University of Bloomington professor and head of the National Survey of Student Engagement Alexander McCormick theorized that this has to do with the continually rising costs of these programs. Given the size of their investments, consumers and policymakers are eager to see an ROI on ungrad and graduate studies.