When the time came to select images for this May/June cover, visions of daffodils and other spring flowers danced in my head. After this never-ending winter, I was more than ready to choose buds bursting into bloom as the metaphor for our 2014 Emerging Training Leaders (although I can’t complain too much as my colleagues in Minneapolis were still enduring snowstorms in April, a month after New York finally thawed out – yet another reason I love telecommuting).
I hope you will read all about the 25 Emerging Training Leader (ETL) winners who have been in the training industry for two to 10 years and have demonstrated stellar growth in leadership skills and business acumen. As Farmers Insurance CLO, Training Top 10 Hall of Famer, and ETL Judge Annette Thompson notes, “The 2014 Emerging Training Leaders are clearly in the thick of complex business environments, including support of new distribution channels, product lines, or expanding learning reach for their organizations across the globe. What’s most impressive is the clear leadership and alignment with business strategy and focus on delivering business results for their organizations.”
Organizations today are finding that leadership development is not a walk in the park. According to the Deloitte GlobalHuman Capital Trends 2014 report, leadership development was the single biggest challenge cited bymost (86 percent) of 2,500 business and HR leaders in 94 countries. And the Global Leadership Development Survey of 1,030 organizations conducted by Training, AMA, and i4cp found that while more companies have leadership development programs today than four years ago, the number of respondents who considered their effectiveness to be high/very high dropped from 42 percent to 19 percent. See “Striving for Global Leadership” for additional survey results and “Leadership Leaders” to discover leadership development best practices from Training Top 125 winners and Top 10 Hall of Famers who also appear on Chief Executive magazine’s Best Companies for Leaders list. One vital piece of leadership development is coaching—and it’s one that organizations often fail to adequately train on. Check out our special section on Coaching to find out the 10 must-haves for a coaching program, how to train leaders to be better coaches, and more.
I look forward to learning about your coaching programs on the 2015 Training Top 125 application (yes, it’s that time already), which is now available for download at www.trainingmag.com/learn-more-about-training-top-125.
We also have a brand new awards program: Top Training Videos, aka Ttvs. Send us a two-minute clip of your most effective and engaging training video. Our expert panel will choose the Top 5, which we’ll screen at a special awards dinner September 22, 2014, at blues guitar great Buddy Guy’s Legends Club during our Online Learning Conference in Chicago. OLC attendees will select the No. 1 video on the spot. Visit https://www.onlinelearningconference.com/tvs.cfm to submit your video by June 18, 2014. (Limit of two submissions per company; both training vendors and in-house training professionals are eligible to submit.) I can taste the popcorn already!
CORRECTION
KESDEE Inc. should have been included on the list of sponsors of the TrainingTop 125 Golden Gala published on p. 44 of the March/April 2014 issue of Training magazine.
