How to help your leaders solve business problems faster

Your business’ competitive advantage is the quality of its leaders. Strong leaders ensure that your employees are performing well and they inspire teams to do their best work.

By far the most valuable asset leaders bring to your business is their ability to navigate through challenges.

But, what helps your leaders enhance their ability to solve problems?

Access to the information they need, at the time that they need it

Relevance and Timing are the two most important ingredients to make training content helpful to your leaders. You know that you are implementing programmes with the goal of developing future leadership capacity, but these programmes do not necessarily address the needs that your leaders are faced with right now.

When your leaders are faced with a problem, they need information which is directly relevant to the challenge that they are grappling with, and they need it now.

This can be difficult to get ahead of as an HR leader, because often training needs are brought to your attention once the need is already there. If you do not have existing, in-house training materials to address this challenge, you sit with the problem of trying to find relevant content externally.

This, on top of the fact that you are now working against time as the need already exists and the business is essentially waiting on your HR team to find a training solution to support them.

Being a member of a community of practice

A community of practice has been described as “a group of people who engage in collective learning in a common area of interest” (Wenger: 1998).

Essentially, this is a community of people who share their challenges and then spend time thinking through these challenges together by sharing their individual experiences and insights for the benefit of the wider group.

Whilst your leaders may be part of a network of leaders inside your company, what makes a community of practice even more powerful is when this community includes leaders from different companies across different industries.

When your leaders become part of an external community of practice it unlocks benefits for them such as being exposed to different ways of thinking, strategies and information.

It not only has the power to accelerate their own personal development but helps them solve problems faster as they are able to draw on the collective experience of the group.

So, what’s one action you can take this week to put this thinking into practice?

Find out what types of content your leaders need. Survey your leadership across all levels of the organization and ask them what challenges they are grappling with right now.

Make this process easy for them by pre-selecting ten challenges which you believe they may be faced with, so that they are able to simply indicate which of those challenges are applicable to them.

Provide a space where they can share challenges you may not have included on your pre-selected list of challenges, so that these are also able to be included in your analysis.

Once you have reviewed the submissions, come up with your top 5 topics that your leaders have indicated they need support with.

With this in mind, consider how you could get your leaders access to the content and community they need to help them work through these challenges fast.

In our corporate membership, The Leadership Masterclass Collection, we help you to effortlessly upskill your leaders by providing them with online masterclasses on relevant leadership topics, as well as access to weekly facilitated sessions with our network of member companies. To learn more go to, click here.