IT’S TIME TO

GO ALL IN ON
VIRTUAL
LEADERSHIP
DEVELOPMENT

{ perspectives } LEARNING DESIGN

© 2016 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School.
IT’S TIME TO GO ALL IN ON VIRTUAL
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Virtual leadership development isn’t a passing fad or a strategy
that only a handful of leading-edge organizations are testing out.
It’s now a proven method for delivering programs that accelerate
the speed and impact of learning and can scale to meet the needs
of the global enterprise.
BY JOSH BRAND AND DAVID ELBAZ

A few years back, leadership development profession-
als were being asked why they were investing in virtual
learning initiatives. Today, they’re more likely to be asked
why they’re not.
With the opportunities they provide for collaboration,
making connections with colleagues, and building net-
works, face-to-face classroom settings can create highly
engaging and memorable leadership development experi-
ences. Conventional wisdom once maintained that these
dynamic, career-changing experiences could not be rep-
licated within a virtual environment. This thinking is
being proven wrong by organizations of all shapes and
sizes that are delivering high-impact virtual programs for
leaders at all levels. These programs combine some of the
best aspects of high-touch, in-person training—the use of
cohorts, live events, and plenty of interaction—together
with learning content that busy leaders can access anytime
and anywhere. The result? Leadership development that’s
reaching a broader global audience faster than more-
traditional methods. Virtual development enables leaders
at all levels to acquire new capabilities without disrupting
their schedules, and is opening up exciting new avenues
for organizational learning.
When we look at our clients’ experiences across the
past several years, we see accelerated adoption of virtual
methods for developing the skills and capabilities
required of leaders at all levels.

 wo-thirds of companies use elearning methodologies in their

T
leadership development programs, and more than half are using
on-demand content.
2016 HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SURVEY
OF L&D PROFESSIONALS AND BUSINESS-LINE MANAGERS

H A RVA RD BU S I N E SS PU BL I S H I N G {1}
 What Do We Mean By Virtual?
We use the term “virtual” to refer to leadership development programs
that are a mix of live events, virtual experiences, and individual, anytime/
anywhere access to learning content, enhanced with collaborative
capabilities like online discussion forums. In-person, instructor-
led sessions may also be part of the learning experience, but are
not required. Our definition of virtual leadership development is not
synonymous with on-your-own, self-paced training.

Engaging leaders through virtual learning has allowed our
clients to benefit tremendously from the many advantages
that virtual confers. Our clients find that virtual leadership
development:
ooMakes it easier for leaders in widely dispersed loca-
tions to connect with each other more frequently
and react more quickly to changing global market
conditions;
ooAccommodates leaders’ busy work schedules by
reducing or eliminating the need to travel to tradi-
tional, classroom-based development programs;
ooProvides opportunities for leaders to review and rein-
virtual programs for leaders, wherever they’re located.
Today’s technology can capture in nuanced detail the
facial expressions of both instructors and learners, their
explanatory gestures, and overall body language, which
help create a dynamic live experience. Capabilities like
polling and chat enable active learner participation. Virtual
learning technology allows leaders to transcend physical
boundaries, encouraging interaction and critical thinking
among learners and instructors. Cohorts can collaborate
and share knowledge virtually with peers, mentors, and
instructors to cultivate a common business culture and
drive targeted change throughout an organization.

force new information so that the acquired knowl-

edge stays with them over time;
ooPresents content in a variety of formats that enables
all types of learners to engage; and
ooMeets the expectations of today’s tech-savvy and
connected leaders by giving them access to learn-  iddle management believes virtual
M
ing when and where it’s most convenient for them, classrooms are one of the more
and enabling them to collaborate where so much of effective tools for developing new
today’s business and life happens: online. leaders.
2016 HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING LEADERSHIP
All this is made possible through technologies that reliably
DEVELOPMENT SURVEY OF L&D PROFESSIONALS
deliver a wide range of capabilities that ensure engaging AND BUSINESS-LINE MANAGERS

{ 2 } IT ’ S T I ME TO GO ALL I N O N VI RTUAL LEAD E RS H I P D E V E LO PME N T

Advantages of Virtual Leadership Development
Harvard Business Publishing has worked with hundreds of
organizations around the world to design and deploy virtual leadership
development programs. Based on this experience, we have identified
these key benefits of virtual programs for leaders and organizations.

1.
SCALE LEARNING MORE QUICKLY
The traditional work model—where all employees work
from nine to five under one roof—has become the excep-
tion rather than the norm. Globalization is a major con-
tributing factor here. With so many organizations growing
their global footprint and expanding in new and emerging
markets, the proportion of employees working outside their
company’s home office continues to grow. Whether they’re
assigned to the home office or working across the world,
more and more employees are tapping technology to work
virtually. A recent Gallup survey found that 37 percent of
U.S. workers report that they have worked virtually. This is
quadruple the number who telecommuted in 1995. When
this increasing number of virtual workers combines with
globalization and the 24/7 nature of business today, we
have an unprecedented demand for development programs
that leaders can access anywhere, anytime.
Virtual development allows organizations with distrib-
uted workforces to quickly scale the delivery of engaging
programs to multiple groups of leaders. This accelerates
the alignment and development of key capabilities that
leaders need to drive strategic initiatives across a large,
distributed organization in real time. Think of how much
more efficient and cost-effective it is to reach hundreds
and thousands of leaders—at a variety of levels and located
throughout the world—with virtual programs, rather than
taking leaders off-line and flying them all to one location,
one small group at a time.
Fluor is a Fortune 150 company that provides engineer-
ing, construction, procurement, maintenance, and project
management services around the world. Its leaders work
on large-scale global projects. With a workforce of 42,000
and sites in more than 25 countries across six continents,
the company is challenged to bring leaders together for
face-to-face leadership development.
Fluor recently brought together groups of new manag-
ers to participate in the Harvard Business Publishing
New Leader Program. This virtual learning program is
designed to help new managers make a successful tran-
sition to the managerial ranks while also honing their
leadership potential. The program reached new leaders
virtually across eight time zones, allowing participants
to connect and collaborate with peers around the world,
strengthening networks and developing the critical skills
required to succeed in their new roles.
Fluor also utilizes Harvard Business Publishing’s
Leadership Direct program to strengthen business acumen
and strategic thinking among its executive and high-
potential populations.
“With the flexibility to complete
the program coursework on their
own schedule and the ability to
join the live sessions virtually, our
learners were highly engaged and
motivated to actively participate in
the program.”
ANDREW FOOTE, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, ASSET SERVICES,
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT, CBRE

H A RVA RD BU S I N E SS PU BL I S H I N G {3}

“Sharing knowledge and experiences
with my peers from other business
units and regions helped me broaden
my network in the company. We also
uncovered best practices from peers
that we can now apply to our own
area of the business.”
CAPITAL GROUP PROGRAM PARTICIPANT
2. 
GIVE BUSY LEADERS AT ALL
LEVELS GREATER FLEXIBILITY
With leaders working longer hours than ever before, devel-
opment can sink to the bottom of the “to do” list. Leaders
may opt out of development because they can’t afford
to leave the field for formal training programs. Or they
enthusiastically sign up for a program, but find themselves
so distracted that they aren’t able to fully benefit from the
experience once they are there.
Whether it means leaders participating in a class exercise
while sitting at their desk or accessing learning content
via their mobile device when they have a few minutes to
spare, virtual learning can be readily absorbed into the
workday. Leaders are more likely to take advantage of
these development opportunities. The time commitment
for each session is shorter than in a face-to-face classroom,
and learning is spread over time. Allowing participants
online access to materials, including archived session
recordings, offers even more flexibility. Learners who find
themselves with some free time can use it as a learning
opportunity, posting a question to their cohorts, reading
a case that will be discussed, or catching up on a session
they may have missed.
3.  DRIVE GREATER RETENTION
AND APPLICATION OF LEARNING
Development organizations have long looked for ways to
overcome the “forgetting curve,” which holds that most
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of the knowledge acquired during a training session is
lost within a day or so. Learning integrated within daily
work and delivered over time is “stickier” than knowledge
acquired at a one-time session that offers no ongoing
opportunities for leaders to absorb and apply information
on the job. This is supported by research published by ATD
and others that finds that wider spacing between learning
experiences, together with more repetition, helps learners
more fully remember what they’ve learned.
Unlike classroom-based programs, virtual learning can
be designed to deliver information consistently over the
course of several months, so that leaders can continually
learn, reflect, and apply knowledge as they work. The self-
paced aspects of virtual programs—being able to re-watch
a recording of a lecture, drill down on especially challeng-
ing concepts, or quickly review material when they have a
few minutes—allow leaders to practice and reflect on what
they’ve learned until they’ve mastered specific material.
This keeps them from falling down the forgetting curve.
Because the logistics are simpler than those for face-to-face
programs, virtual programs can also be set up more quickly.
They can provide more timely and relevant information
to leaders in the rapidly changing workplace. Think of
the challenge you’d be facing if your company merged
and eight people from a different corporate culture were
suddenly added to a management team.
CBRE is the global leader in real estate services. The com-
pany’s asset services group recently turned to Harvard
Business Publishing to help with a leadership program
for 350 regionally dispersed directors.
“Our leaders are not always able to take time from their
demanding schedules to participate in classroom-based
training initiatives,” says Andrew Foote, regional director,
asset services, learning and development at CBRE. “Yet
the competitive pressures of commercial real estate make
it essential that these leaders continue to enhance their
skills. Virtual leadership development makes this possible.”
The program CBRE implemented utilizes Harvard
ManageMentor®. It was spread over a period of five months
and designed to enhance competencies around customer
focus, change management, feedback, and innovation.
The program is proving to be highly effective, with 98
percent of the licenses in use. The results from one post-
module survey were typical: 89 percent of respondents
indicated that they found the module interactive and
engaging. And 93 percent indicated that the ideas, con-
cepts, or skills presented in the module were applicable
to their job.
Imagine how helpful it would be if the leader of that team
could attend a virtual seminar about leading successfully
in these circumstances, then access relevant content on
demand and bounce ideas off experts and peers as needed.
The same leader might have attended an in-person class
on this topic months ago—but would that knowledge still
be fresh and relevant?
Capital Group, a global investment management firm with
headquarters in California, is partnering with Harvard
Business Publishing to deliver a customized leadership
development experience that helps first-level managers
Grow with Capital. For an organization that places great
value on collaboration and relationships, managers are
realizing tremendous benefits from virtual discussions and
topics that delve deeper than traditional training sessions.
“Sharing knowledge and experiences with my peers from
other business units and regions helped me broaden my
network in the company. We also uncovered best practices
from peers that we can now apply to our own area of the
business,” reports a recent program participant.
The collaborative partnership between Capital Group
and Harvard Business Publishing has resulted in a highly
effective and highly rated global leadership program. 97
percent of the participants reported that they were apply-
ing or planning to apply their new skills, knowledge and
insights to their role as manager, and 92 percent indicated
that they had changed their behavior as a result of what they
had learned. Additionally, their program satisfaction score,
at 93 percent, places Capital Group as a leading partner
for the New Leader Program. These results illustrate how
virtual learning is having a positive impact on leadership
at Capital Group.
Cognizant Embraces a Virtual
Learning Environment
Cognizant is an organization with more than
50 delivery centers in 14 countries using
leading-edge tools to facilitate collaboration
across a global workforce. As a result,
Cognizant employees were used to working
virtually and across multiple time zones to
manage more than 20,000 client projects.
Yet the company’s leadership development
programs had historically been conducted in
a face-to-face environment.
The transition to virtual learning was initially
met with some reluctance, as senior leaders
expressed some skepticism about whether
it would work. They were concerned that it
was difficult enough to get participants to
complete assignments in a face-to-face
workshop, let alone when working
independently.
They wondered how virtual groups would
work and whether virtual learning would
come at a cost in terms of participants’
ability to interact with one another and forge
strong network bonds.
What they found was that virtual learning
was more engaging, more appealing
to a wide range of learners (especially
millennials), and—because it was so well
integrated with work—more likely to be
applied and to stick.
The results from the first cohort of
Cognizant’s virtual leadership program were
impressive:
•9
 1 percent were observed to have made
significant capability improvement
•4
 5 percent moved into target client partner
roles within six months
• 1 00 percent were seen by managers as
ready to assume their next role
H A RVA RD BU S I N E SS PU BL I S H I N G {5}

Technology Has Transformed
the Field of Education
Ever-improving technological innovations
have rapidly turned what was once a
distant vision into a current reality. Learning
today is drastically different than it was five
or even two years ago. Educators are using
video, social media, and collaboration
technologies to engage learners in new
ways. Teleconferencing platforms and
virtual classroom technologies are
A virtual environment provides a more level playing field
and better opportunities for all leaders to learn and contrib-
ute in a multitude of ways, including chat, online discus-
sion threads, polls, and—for those who want to preserve
their privacy—one-to-one questions to the instructor. In
addition, virtual programs typically combine a variety of
learning formats—including individual study, expert-led
lectures, online collaboration, discussion forums, and
action learning projects—that tap into different learning
styles. As a result, well-designed leadership development
programs can more successfully engage and motivate
a broader range of learning styles than event-based,
in-person programs.

reaching learners in real time, around the
world, fueling a fundamental shift in the
field of corporate education.
In 2012, Harvard and MIT, joined by
the University of California, Berkeley,
announced that edX, the nonprofit
massive open online course (MOOC)
platform, intended to reach a new,
broader audience of learners. As of
September 2015, edX had five million users,
and it’s been estimated that, overall, 25
million users enrolled in MOOCs between
2012 and 2015. edX is also beginning to
offer professional education courses
covering topics like cybersecurity and big
data, aimed at the corporate market.
5. 
BETTER ENGAGE ACROSS
GENERATIONS
An organization’s workforce has always been composed of
multiple generations, and today’s workforce is no differ-
ent. Baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials, and even Gen
Z-ers—who will be here before we know it—all work side
by side. And technology is an important factor in today’s
workplace, where we’ve now been emailing and remotely
conferencing for decades. While it’s true that millennials
were raised in an “always on” world and embrace tech-
nology in all aspects of their lives, it’s become clear that
they’re not the only ones. Baby boomers Facetime their
grandchildren and deliver sales presentations remotely.
Gen X-ers text their college-aged kids and collaborate on
projects with colleagues around the globe. Busy leaders
of any generation are comfortable using technology and

4. 
have the expectation that their workplace will be up to
REACH A BROADER GROUP WITH date. They welcome the opportunity to take advantage of
VARIED LEARNING STYLES
development experiences that don’t take them out of the
Virtual learning helps support a broader range of learn-
office to participate in training sessions.
ing styles. In a traditional classroom, participants may be
physically in the room but hiding out in the back, letting
their peers in the front answer questions and take the
lead in discussions. The people who tend to participate
in a traditional classroom are those who are comfortable
speaking and being the center of attention. Less vocal
learners, or those participating in a nonnative language,
can become detached from learning when a conversation
takes off without them.

{ 6 } IT ’ S T IME TO GO ALL I N O N VI RTUAL LEAD E RS H I P D E V E LO PME N T

 Using Virtual to Transform Organizations
Harvard Business Publishing is working with its clients to create MOOCs that are specifically
designed to meet an organization’s needs. Recognizing how rapidly its industry was changing,
one major global enterprise decided that it needed to change the way it leads. And the
company wanted to expose tens of thousands of its employees—managers and knowledge
workers alike—to its new way of doing business. The only way to cost- and time-effectively
reach so many learners was through virtual learning. This client worked with Harvard Business
Publishing to create a program that would change employee expectations about what it means
to lead and manage, and to develop the skills its employees needed to make the transition. The
initiative combines existing expert content with content that addresses the company’s unique
specifics. The program combines self-paced asynchronous learning and synchronous, mega-
group broadcast sessions. It includes small group activities, individual tasks, and discussion
boards. And it’s all delivered virtually.
Our experience with this initiative, and those of our other clients, demonstrates the widening
acceptance of virtual learning, for both MOOCs and for smaller cohort-based programs. And
as a result of this acceptance, we now see corresponding shifts in learner expectations. Virtual
is becoming a given, and learning professionals need to continually refine their approaches,
leveraging the best of what’s available to reach and engage learners.

It’s Time to Go Virtual

Most organizations with distributed workforces are already reached participants in over 75 countries across six con-
delivering some virtual training to segments of their staff. tinents, and demand keeps growing.
Now more than ever, there is an imperative to expand Learning and development groups no longer have to jus-
virtual development programs to reach all leaders. With tify virtual. They now have to justify why virtual would
a virtual approach, development dollars are allocated to not be part of their learning strategy, even for leadership
development itself, as travel and other expenses related to development.
in-residence programs are decreased. Today’s technology
If you’ve hesitated to move to virtual, it’s time to go all in!
tools and platforms are delivering the energy, engagement,
and collaboration benefits of in-person experiences while
more effectively driving business strategy across the orga-
nization. Successful organizations are increasingly find-
ing that virtual delivery is the best choice for leadership
development. Harvard Business Publishing’s experience
designing and delivering virtual leadership development
programs illustrates this. In the past year, these programs

H A RVA RD BU S I N E SS PU BL I S H I N G {7}
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOSH BRAND is senior director of global delivery and
is responsible for the delivery of Harvard Business
Publishing’s solutions for clients around the globe.
He has more than 15 years of executive education
and management consulting experience and has
built management education programs for clients
around the world. Josh was a member of the Babson
executive education team, focused on designing and
delivering customized executive education programs.
Before that, he spent more than a decade as a
management consultant, helping global companies
formulate strategy. Contact Josh at josh.brand@
harvardbusiness.org.
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DAVID ELBAZ is a senior learning solutions manager
for Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning.
In this role, he is responsible for consulting with clients
and architecting world-class leadership development
programs that drive organizational impact by aligning
participant-centered learning with key business
strategies. David was previously the product strategy
director at Senn Delaney, overseeing the successful
implementation of strategic initiatives, product
development, and client solutions, all focused on
creating healthy, high-performing cultures among
global Fortune 1000 companies. Contact David at
david.elbaz@harvardbusiness.org.
ABOUT CORPORATE LEARNING
Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partners
with clients to create world-class leadership development
solutions for managers at all levels. Our team leverages
the management insight, thought leadership, and
expertise of Harvard Business School faculty and
authors from Harvard Business Review to create tailored
leadership development solutions. With more than 25
years of practical experience, our innovative, technology-
enabled solutions drive meaningful and lasting business
results. Corporate Learning is a market group within
Harvard Business Publishing.

ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING

Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as
a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard
University. Its mission is to improve the practice of
management and its impact in a changing world. The
company achieves its mission through its relationships
with customers in three market groups: Higher Education,
Corporate Learning, and Harvard Business Review Group.
Through these platforms, Harvard Business Publishing is
able to influence real-world change by maximizing the
reach and impact of its essential offering—ideas.
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