Welcome to Inov8 Professional Development

To thrive in modernity, organizations and their members need to do more than meet minimum profit margins. Through productivity, teamwork and management, and leadership, organizations balance their triadic bottom line.  Our role is empowering people at all levels with the ability to see when opportunities for improvement arise.

Professional development is business development. The terminal objective of all that we do is enabling individuals thrive within their organizations. We know that each individual and each organization defines what it means to thrive for themselves. 

People want to develop in three unique and interconnected ways: in competence, connectedness, and self-direction. The term triadic highlights the distinct but related nature of each human need. In work, these needs appear as productivity, teamwork/management, and leadership.

Through the work they do, people always have opportunities to develop individual productivity, management, and leadership skills. To leverage this, organizations need to be learning organizations, where the developmental aspects of work are managed deliberately. 

The perennial debate in leader development is the extent to which leaders are born versus how much they can be developed over time. Leadership is a skill, different from management, but a skill, nonetheless. So, leadership can be trained. However, much of leader development happens in the affective domain, which is notoriously immune to skill training methods.

Classroom training is only part of the developmental process. It supports learning when it offers a safe space for people to gain initial knowledge (cognitive learning), practice with that knowledge (motor-skills learning), and internalize what they are learning (affective learning).  

Most people do not learn from passively listening to an instructor in a classroom. To learn, they need to actively engage in whatever they are doing, and regularly reflect on how they are doing it. This applies to leadership skills, as well as technical skills.

"Throwing" technology at a problem is the impulsive answer to perceived training and development needs. When done right, the employment of technology comes after the learning needs is identified. Then, it can be put to best use and be a real value-add to a solution.