5 Low Cost Leadership Development Activities
I often hear from nonprofit L&D leaders about the challenges they face with constrained budgets. And I feel their pain. I know so many of you are working with small teams and few resources. But leadership development activities don’t have to be expensive and you don’t have to let a constrained budget keep you from developing your leaders.
That’s why, on this episode, I’m sharing five low to no cost ideas for leadership development.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
00:58 The cycle of learning
03:16 Training on a budget
05:16 Five easy low to no cost leadership development activities
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5 Low Cost Leadership Development Activities
My husband recently decided it was time to teach our oldest daughter how to cut the grass. This is a milestone moment. He told her he wanted her to learn so she could start doing it.
Here’s how it went:
He took her outside, got everything set up, and showed her how to cut the grass.
She watched, probably a little bored because it doesn't look that hard.
My husband let her have a turn. He watched and gave her feedback on her work.
Then he took another turn, she watched again, and so on.
This was not a one time event - they did this for several weeks. And guess what? She learned.
Is she the best grass cutter out there? No, not at all.
Am I ready to let her start a lawn care business next summer? Not a chance.
But she learned. And she'll continue to get better with practice.
Here's why this worked:
First, my husband communicated the expectation. He told her that she was going to start cutting the grass.
Then, he demonstrated the right way to do it.
Next, she got to practice.
Then, he gave her feedback and the cycle continued.
So, what does this have to do with L&D?
This was a low to no cost way to teach my daughter a skill. It took my husband's time to teach her and it took a little longer to get the grass cut, but it was mostly free.
I often hear from nonprofit L&D leaders about the challenges they face with constrained budgets. And I feel their pain. I know so many of you are working with small teams and few resources.
So, in this blog post, I’m sharing five low to no cost ideas for leadership development:
These are easy leadership development activities that you can implement right away, whether you have a large L&D budget or a small one. And it doesn't matter who you're training either.
I know a lot of larger nonprofit organizations are federated and while they're training staff, they're not necessarily training staff that they have “control” over. There's a lot of autonomy in a federated organization.
A lot of midsize nonprofit organizations may be training their customer (the person who is using or accessing something that they have to offer in their nonprofit) or members of an association.
Small nonprofit organizations might have one person doing L&D, and it might not even be their full-time job. They might be training volunteers. There are a lot of challenges with this, especially with low to no budgets.
I recently created a document for a client where we listed each of the competencies their staff needed to be successful and then for each competency, we identified ways they could develop themselves.
Some of those ways were formal training opportunities that cost money, but some of them were informal opportunities that were low to no cost. I used some of the ideas that I'm going to share with you today and just contextualized them to that specific competency and their unique organization.
1) Job Shadowing to Learn Technical and Leadership Skills
The first activity is job shadowing.
Much like the lawn mowing experience my daughter had, this gives your leaders the opportunity to shadow someone who is more tenured or has a deeper skillset in a particular area than them.
So for this, you'd want to select a timeframe and a focus and allow them to observe the other leader in action.
This is great for technical skills, but it's also great for leadership skills because they get to watch firsthand:
How this leader handled the situations they faced.
How they prioritized their work.
How they communicated with others.
You can learn a lot just by intentionally shadowing someone else and learning from their leadership style.
2) Group Coaching Calls for Collaborative Leadership Development
The second activity is group coaching calls.
If you have a particular set of skills that you want to develop in your leaders, you can lower the cost by bringing them together virtually for a group coaching call. They can bring the challenges that they're facing related to the skills that you identified, and they can work through those challenges together with a coach in a safe environment.
Now, this requires some level of trust and vulnerability because you want them to be able to open up and share. But it's a great way to develop leadership skills if those things are in place in your organization.
Here’s an example with communication skills:
You bring your leaders together on a group coaching call. They each bring some communication situation or challenge that they faced within the last week or two. They share what happened and what they did. You then have a group coaching session on how it went or what they could be doing differently.
Your leaders get a chance to learn from each other and have that coach's guidance with them as well.
3) Listening Tours to Develop Empathy in Your Leaders
The third low cost leadership development activity is a listening tour.
Similarly to the job shadow option, this allows leaders to observe others. But instead of developing a specific skill from another leader, it's all about empathy.
The goal is for your leaders to go through these listening tours and to have a better understanding of someone else.
That could be their team, their customers, the volunteers.
It doesn't matter who that person is, what matters is that they're developing empathy. Empathy is a foundational skill that enables so many other skills.
If your leaders:
Can go into these listening tours with an open mind,
Commit to asking questions,
And focus on learning about other people's perspectives and experiences,
This can be both life and leadership changing.
4) Research and Presentations to Cultivate Leadership Skills
The fourth activity that I want to share is research and presentations.
This type of activity allows your leaders to learn more about something and then synthesize that information.
And there's a bonus here…
When they share their presentations, others can learn from them too.
Here's what that might look like:
Maybe you want to develop strategic thinking skills in your leaders, so you ask a small group of leaders to pick one topic that has two opposing viewpoints.
It can be anything.
Can you put ketchup on a hot dog? That is a contentious debate in Chicago. No, mustard only is what the Chicagoans say. It could be something as simple as that.
Or, it can be something more serious, like using AI in business. Is it ethical?
Have them research both sides of the argument with an open mind and then have them create presentations to share what they learned about each side, presenting facts and being objective at first.
Then, once they've shared all of that information, they can share how they interpreted the argument.
But, we also want to hear what they learned about strategic thinking in that process, what they learned about their own leadership, and what they learned that they're going to take with them to other opportunities on the job.
5) Journaling to Reflect on Learning Experiences
The last example I'm going to give is journaling.
We often move from task to task and project to project without ever stopping to reflect. It’s our way of life.
Asking your leaders to begin this intentional time of journaling is a great way to help them learn from their own experiences.
Here’s an example:
Every Friday, you can ask your leaders to journal on the following questions:
What were my goals this week?
What did I accomplish?
What do I want to do differently next week?
There are a million good reflection questions that you can ask.
L&D could even say that they're going to send an email with weekly reflection questions that they expect leaders to spend 15 minutes journaling the responses to at the end of their day on Friday.
Prompt them to take that action to reflect on what they're learning.
Now, those are five low cost leadership development activities, but there are so many more.
I know how overwhelming and challenging it can feel when you don't have the resources you wish you had to develop your leaders but don't let a constrained budget keep you from making progress. In fact, that progress might be what gets you a larger budget in the future.
So take steps to develop your leaders, track what you're doing and the impact it's having, and tell everyone. That's how we make the sector stronger. That's how we do L&D.
To hear the full conversation I had on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 103.
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