Entering the minds of 24,000 leaders across various industries

Leaders are spending more time on learning. And they do it most via podcasts and videos during three specific timeslots: 8am to 9am, 12pm to 2pm, and 6pm to 7pm.

Tigerhall’s recent report, Building the C-Suite of 2030, entered the minds of 24,000 leaders—from managers, to directors, to C-suite leaders—for an understanding of their learning patterns.

What stood out was: leaders are keen on personal development; they want to learn from other C-suite leaders; and they seek people in non-business roles for learning examples. Scroll below for a detailed insight on each of these findings, and more.

The report gathered the views of leaders working in MNCs across industries like technology, financial services and consumer goods. The leaders mainly come from the Asia Pacific region, from countries such as Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and more.

Personal development is crucial

One key finding from the report is that "leaders are spending more time learning this year more than last year.”

Based on Tigerhall’s data, between Q1 2020 and Q2 2020, there was a 39% increase in time spent learning on the platform per user. Comparing to Q1 2021 to Q1 2020, there is a 47% year-on-year increase in time spent learning among users.

Further analysis suggests that “the uptick in learning was not a one-off result of the seismic changes in work dynamics and lifestyles that happened in Q2 of 2020.”

With regard to what leaders are most keen on learning, the data revealed top three topics: ‘personal productivity’, ‘communicating as a leader’, and ‘managing change and business transformation’.

Other upskilling domains highlighted were:

• Boosting team performances
• All things communication
• Being the best sales performer
• Wellbeing at work
• C-suite leadership

Role models

When it comes to who leaders prefer to learn from, most respondents in the report pointed to C-suite leaders (i.e Chief Executive Officers, Chief Operating Officers, and Chief Finance Officers) and Managing Directors (MDs) as their teachers.

Tigerhall’s report shared that there is “a strong demand amongst leaders to learn from people in aspirational positions who have plenty of insights, mistakes and successes to share from the experience they’ve gathered while rising up a particular industry.”

Some leaders even pointed to experts from non-business backgrounds.

“Providing external perspectives is an important feature when designing a leadership development programme for C-suite leaders,” the report stated.

Findings showed that among the different leader groups, C-suite leaders spent the most time learning from successful practitioners with non-business roles such as psychologists, athletes, neuroscientists, and others.

Time is of the essence

While leaders view personal development pertinent today, they don’t have a lot of time on hand to do so freely.

According to Deloitte, cited in the report, “professionals can only afford to dedicate 1% of a typical work week towards training and development.” That opens up to only 24 minutes a week. Thus, Tigerhall shared, the length and type of content is vital. Not to mention, the mode of learning.

So, what its data revealed were three points:

• Leaders prefer training and development to be mobile-friendly;
• Leaders prefer podcasts 3.5 times more to readable formats;
• Leaders are also more engaged with video content

And since time is of the essence, the respondents tend to capitalise on three specific time periods, dedicating them for upskilling. These are: before work between 8am to 9am; with 6pm to 7pm, and 12pm to 2pm closely behind respectively.

Image/Pexels

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