Executing the CEO’s Agenda Through Targeted Learning | MIT Sloan Management Review

This article explains how CEOs and business leaders can advance their strategic agendas through targeted learning. It argues that while traditional approaches to learning focus on individual aptitude and skill, targeted learning focuses on the ways individuals work together — and disrupting and rewiring social norms. It’s a process that improves the way people collaborate in day-to-day execution. The authors offer four actions for driving targeted learning: 1) Develop a holistic view of strategy execution challenges. 2) Use targeted learning to intervene in the places that matter most for the CEO’s agenda, 3) Measure impact through leading metrics linked to execution, 4) Position the learning function to address strategic problems from the outset. Concerning #3 (measure impact through leading metrics linked to execution), it emphasizes how learning professionals need to understand what behaviors and ways of working must shift to enable execution. Then, targeted learning focuses on accelerating those changes, and the degree of behavioral change becomes the measure of impact. Other ideas are offered for transforming the learning function.