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Welcome to today's Five-Minute Leader. Today, I want to talk about the difference between making things mandatory versus making things optional while communicating value.
I have this CHRO group that I run called Future of Work Leaders. If you're curious, you can learn more at FutureOfWorkLeaders.com. We just hosted an event in Dallas at the end of January, where we brought together some CHROs. During a casual, ad hoc conversation, the theme of leadership training and development came up.
One of the CHROs shared a story about introducing leadership training and development programs. She was having a conversation with other CHROs, and one of them said, "We created this leadership development and training program, and we made it mandatory for everybody, but still, a lot of people weren’t that interested in it. They weren’t engaged. They weren’t present. They were just going through the motions."
Then, another CHRO said, "Oh, we also created a leadership development and training program. We made it completely optional for everybody, but we also told them that if they wanted to move ahead in their careers and in this organization, this is something we highly recommend they participate in. We had a crazy adoption—everybody wanted to participate. Employees were signing up for these courses and programs."
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