How We Personalize Leadership Development at Scale

When we first describe our personalized learning solution for leaders, people often assume we’re talking about coaching. After all, we provide leaders with personal soft skills development each week.

Yet, after we say we can develop hundreds of leaders weekly, they wonder how we can personalize learning at scale.

While it’s true that we offer personalization matched only by coaches, our solution is more targeted than coaching, and it’s fully digital. We’ve coded 30+ years of behavioral science into algorithms, which allows us to offer impact-driven personalization at a scale unmatched anywhere.

Joyntly’s SaaS-based learning solution is designed to target the specific soft skills that each leader needs most and turn those skills into habits. Here’s how the magic happens.

This is a fancy phrase that means we use a scientific survey that adheres to rigorous standards in psychology and behavioral science, called reliability and validity.

Adhering to those standards means:

1. The assessment captures patterns that psychologists agree are real, meaningful characteristics of human behavior. In our case, we assess 30 behavior patterns based on the Big Five framework of personality, which is considered the gold standard for its scientific rigor and predictive ability.
2. The assessment is accurate, such that the results reflect a person’s true characteristics, without significant bias or error. When leaders take our assessment, we have confidence that we understand their true behavior patterns.
3. The assessment reflects behaviors that matter. By knowing a leader’s assessment results, we can predict which leaders will be more effective in the long-run and why. By extension, we know which behavior patterns a specific leader needs to improve to increase their chances of success.

We developed algorithms that combine what we know from 30+ years of research on behavioral science, with what we know about a leader from their assessment, to generate personalized learning sequences.

These algorithms optimize how and what each leader learns by identifying the most important soft skills that each leader personally needs to improve.

When developing our algorithms, we used the following criteria:

1. Important soft skills are those that will have the greatest positive impact on the leader’s team and organization if improved.
2. To determine important soft skills, we define impact as improvement in objective metrics, such as employee engagement of the leader’s team, retention of their team, team specific KPIs or OKRs, performance of the leader, and business unit performance.

Behavioral scientists study behavior to understand it, and ultimately shape it. The technology used to shape behavior – also called a behavioral intervention – is a targeted, systematic, and empirically supported process that reduces unwanted behaviors and increases desirable behaviors.

At Joyntly, we use this technology to transform unwanted behaviors like interpersonal conflict, procrastination, and ambiguous communication into desirable behaviors, such as open-mindedness during disagreements, proactivity in handling work tasks, and assertiveness paired with empathy when delivering feedback.

To sustain behavior change over time, we built key features into our technology:

1. Active learning. Leaders learn by doing. We give leaders personalized learning exercises—i.e., highly targeted micro-actions—to practice on the job each week.
2. Optimal framing. We frame learning exercises in terms of the desired action by telling leaders exactly what to do. This provides clarity and directs attention to optimal behavior even before acting on it (also called priming in psychology).
3. Motivation. We infuse psychological principles that enhance motivation into our technology, including goal setting, learner autonomy, task relevance, and optimal difficulty.
4. Repetition. Leaders repeat a set of targeted exercises until the desired behavior becomes a habit. The set of exercises is then refreshed periodically to maintain optimal behavior for months and years.

Our vision at Joyntly is to lead the industry in positive impact, and we designed our solution to do just that.

Are you ready to transform your leader’s habits? Contact us to learn more.