Training Industry Magazine - November/December 2019 - 48

along with their thoughts on why their
department is an ideal place to work.

to highlight the skills and competencies
the challenge will hone so employees
link it to their development.

* Encourage participation in open
challenges: Employees can hone
technical skills such as programming
and coding, as well as soft skills
like creative problem-solving and
communications, through hackathons,
innovation challenges and other
crowdsourced opportunities available
online. Sites such as Challenge.gov
regularly cater to a range of interests
and skills through a wide variety of
challenges, many of which include
sizeable monetary prizes.

From a competition for the White
House's architectural design in the
1790s and Toyota's logo contest in 1936
to the launch of Wikipedia in 2001,
crowdsourcing was a phenomenon
long before Wired magazine officially
coined the term in 2006. As technology
continues to evolve, it's likely to become
even more ubiquitous in business. If
your talent development efforts haven't
kept pace, take advantage of these
opportunities to follow the crowd.

* Create challenges of your own: Use
internal platforms to issue a business or
innovation challenge to employees, or
work with an external firm to create more
formal challenges using their secure
platforms. Should you choose to offer
prize money or corporate swag, be sure

Marcelle Fowler is president of Job
Mixology, LLC, a coaching and consulting
firm specializing in helping leaders and
their teams think more creatively and
strategically about on-the-job development
to ensure lasting growth for individuals
and organizations. Email Marcelle.

As technology
continues
to evolve,
crowdsourcing is
likely to become
even more
ubiquitous
in business.

PUT TI N G TH E O N G O I N G " SOU RCE " I N CROW DSOU RC E
As with any new approach in the talent developer's
toolkit, crowdsourcing efforts can quickly suffer the
dreaded flavor-of-the-month fate without an effort to
cultivate an ongoing practice. You can help maintain
the vitality of your crowdsourced initiatives by ensuring
employees at all levels play a role:
Formally incorporate your development planning
process into crowdsourcing: Take development
planning beyond a two-person conversation by adding
an official crowdsourcing step before employees create
their action plans. During the crowdsourcing step,
managers should encourage employees to share their
goals with a variety of colleagues to gather development
ideas. It shouldn't be difficult to obtain five to seven
suggestions as they tap teammates, peers and other
leaders within and outside of their departments, mentors
and coaches, and their social networks.
While managers may suggest sources for ideas, the onus
should be on the employee to take responsibility for his or
her development goals and gather ideas. This approach
helps broaden the thinking of the employees, who may
be hyper-focused on promotion or stretch assignments
as their only means of development. It also ensures that
employees take ownership of their development rather
than expecting their managers to tell them what they

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should do. Armed with ideas, employees are ready to
meet with their manager to discuss and prioritize actions
that will become part of their development action plan.
Engage leaders and key influencers in your organization:
* LinkedIn has a feature where self-identified experts in
their fields can provide career advice to other LinkedIn
members. When someone poses a question that may be
within the expert's field, the expert receives a notification
in his or her LinkedIn feed. If your organization has a
mentor-matching system, consider how you might
leverage it to crowdsource "spot mentoring."
* For influencers who are particularly strong in certain
disciplines or skills - particularly those that didn't
exist just years ago - encourage them to support
spot mentoring by offering suggestions on upskilling,
gaining industry insights and general development.
* Because development opportunities are evolving
rapidly alongside delivery modes, senior leaders'
suggestions for development may not be as timely
as those from more junior, emerging leaders.
Encourage this population to enhance their ability to
develop others by offering spot mentoring on new
best practices.

http://www.Challenge.gov https://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/e-learning/online-communities-of-practice-support-social-learning-among-knowledge-workers/ https://www.trainingindustry.com/articles/e-learning/online-communities-of-practice-support-social-learning-among-knowledge-workers/

Training Industry Magazine - November/December 2019

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