As you embark on your daily career, have you considered who is on your learning path? There is a lot of talk around intentional inclusion and diversity in our world today, questions are being asked, “are we hiring a diverse work force?” Let’s start asking ourselves, “am I seeking coaching and feedback from diverse colleagues?” As a talent development professional, I have encouraged people to have a mentor, be a mentor, share knowledge and support other’s growth and development. I would like to add to this personal reflection to encourage you to remove your shades and build diverse mentoring relationships.

• Define who holds you accountable.
• Describe your mentor’s skill sets and mindset?
• Does your mentor always agree with you?
• Does your mentor only encourage you?
• Have you opened the door to allow him to challenge you to grow and develop new skills, new ways of solving programs?
• Does your mentor compliment your skill set? Or are they just like you?

Let’s set a goal to invite someone that is different than us to listen to our thoughts and ideas and see what we can learn from their perspective. Modern mentoring is diverse. It is not limited to gender, race and ethnicity. Diverse mentoring opens up connections that are cross functional areas

In our last issue, we asked you to consider several questions:

• What are your talent development and employee engagement strategies?
• What new skills and competencies do your banker’s need?
• How can The Community Bankers Association support your needs?

As you continue to participate in our professional development opportunities, we want to encourage you to avoid leaving out the learning transfer piece. Sometimes, we “have to” attend training and sometimes we “want to” receive training. When we choose a learning solution, we normally choose a posture to take action after receiving the knowledge. The term for this is learning transfer. Take 10 minutes after the course and write down three things you will do as a result of your learning. Then take action and share it with your team. Overtime, you will see progression of your own personalized return on investment. Your CBA team believes in ongoing knowledge building and we are here to serve our bankers and associate members with training. Call us with your learning needs.

​Why not? What happens if you don’t? You will fall behind if you cut the training budget. Training and development programs support organizations in many ways, especially during a pandemic, a recession, change(s), and strategic efforts. Derrick Thompson, a writer/editor for Association of Talent Development writes, “that corporate learning programs are essential to workplace transformation.” Training & Development Budgets and Strategies - do what?

• Invest in your people while investing in your financial institution.
• Set up strategies and people for success.
• Improve resiliency.
• Nurture people and processes.
• Provides tools and resources.
• Model and shape behaviors.
• Develop and improve skills.
• Foster understanding and environments for trust, communication, empathy, and support.

There are many benefits and value statements that can be written to encourage leaders to implement learning strategies. Supporting and developing leaders should be a priority along with ongoing staff development across the bank’s organization. Our bank’s managers are supporting a diverse workforce; not only a variety of ages and back grounds in experience but diverse locations, varying job responsibilities with internal structure changes and community and customer changes. Leadership development will foster trust and open communication that will produce value. What are your talent development and employee engagement strategies? What new skills and competencies do your banker’s need? How can The Community Bankers Association support your needs? Our new and enhanced program offerings provide participants opportunities to refocus and to support your bank’s vision, mission, values, and strategic goals. Call us, we work for you and are ready to connect your bankers to the right solution and learning tools.