Developing Groups

Groups can be developed to support and foster a learning community, to establish a culture of growth amongst leaders and your broader company, or, simply to ensure that certain subsets of leaders are up to speed on the most important competencies they need to push your organization towards its goals.

At its core, groups allow you to align leaders to a particular learning and development collection.

Groups can be created in any custom order you choose, and participants can be assigned to multiple groups.

Ways to create groups

The learning and development needs of your leaders often relate to where they are in their leadership and learning journey.

For example, your C-level staff may not extract as much benefit from an introductory program on networking and influence as a group of HIPOs. Identifying and creating a group of high potential employees, and aligning that group with a collection that boosts core competencies may be the perfect first stepping stone to catapult them further down their learning path, all while supporting each other along the way.

Here are some other ways you can develop groups:

• Groups that reside in other systems - if you have already segmented your leaders in other systems, by level, department, geography or office location, grouping them within AdminStudio serves as a quick and efficient way to apply learning and stay organized. Further, focusing on specific learning within departments and locations allows you to observe and optimize improvements in competencies directly related to your program.

• Program-type - there are a variety of program types that are available, depending on your plan. Immersive, faculty-led programs and individual coaching may suit one group, while another may extract higher benefit from the flexibility of on-demand programs and group coaching. Identifying which group is best supported by the different types of learning is another way to match the right type of learning to the right learner.

• Similar goals - when you have identified individuals who are all targeting the same leadership goals (i.e. improving empathetic leadership skills), designing a collection tailored to similar leadership objectives and aligning them to the group is a simple way to launch learning. You may consider aligning group coaching with these groups to ignite a culture of communal leadership learning.

• Similar leader-level - aligning your collection designs to a particular leader-level is a way to accelerate competency and capability at key leadership moments. For example, when a leader progresses from managing individual contributors to managing other managers.

• Talent objectives - forming groups around your talent objectives - succession planning, developing HIPOs, or retaining employees - is another way you can group participants by the goals you’ve identified.

• Competency - leveraging the ExecOnline competency framework is a great way to align collections to your own development framework. By grouping by competency, you can apply learning, measure, and optimize improvement on a group by group basis.

• Cohort - if you’re developing a program meant to meet a certain shared moment in leadership development, establishing a cohort may be helpful. For example, new management hires going through onboarding may benefit from sharing and socializing their individual learning experience within the context of a shared learning experience.

• Custom - since groups can be created according to any important attribute you identify, the customization options are limitless. Aligning custom groups and custom collections may be a great option to explore.

Members of multiple groups

It’s worth noting that a participant can be a part of an unlimited number of groups. This means that you can streamline the process of aligning targeted groups with your collections, even when your participant shares attributes across multiple groupings.

For example, a newly onboarded senior leader may benefit from programs underscoring your key values as an organization, while also benefiting from advanced leadership programs in advanced topics like global leadership.

More on groups

To learn how to create groups, import people, and invite groups to collections, see the below:

How do I add a group?

How do I import participants in bulk?

How do I add one or more participants to an existing group?