Q&A: How to Personalize Learning & Development with Listening Data

Key Takeaway

Research from our Center for Workforce Transformation found that organizations that effectively integrate listening data with their learning and development programs are 2.3x as likely to meet financial targets and achieve higher workforce engagement and retention.

In 2025, forward-thinking organizations are breaking down traditional silos between employee listening and leadership development. The most mature listening organizations have a significant advantage in this area: they are 1.8x as likely to use employee experience data and 360 feedback to personalize their coaching and development programs.

Why are organizations integrating employee listening insights with leadership development?

Integration creates a powerful feedback loop for three important reasons:

• It's holistic: When manager development is based only on what HR or senior leaders think is needed, critical perspectives are missing. Employee listening provides the complete picture.
  
  
• It enables true personalization: Development can target each manager's specific growth areas while addressing their team's unique challenges.
  
  
• It coordinates employee experience efforts: If organizations plan their actions based on employee feedback, but don't equip managers with the skills to execute those actions, initiatives fall flat. Conversely, directing development resources toward skills that don't address actual employee needs results in wasted investment.

The result is a leadership development solution that directly addresses employee experience gaps while building manager capabilities that matter most.

Why is personalizing leadership development important?

Personalized leadership development creates fundamentally better learning experiences. When learning is tailored to a leader's specific context and challenges, they engage more deeply with the content, retain information better, and apply new skills more effectively in their daily work. Leaders are also more motivated to complete development activities when they see direct relevance to their actual challenges rather than generic concepts.

But for businesses, the benefits extend far beyond improved learning outcomes. Organizations with effective leadership development programs see substantial business benefits. Our research shows they are 2.3x as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, 2.3x as likely to achieve high workforce engagement and retention, and 2.2x as likely to adapt well to change compared to organizations with less effective programs.

This connection between personalization and business results explains why nearly 3 in 4 HR leaders plan to increase personalization in their leadership development programs in the next year. When learning experiences are tailored to individual leader needs, based on actual feedback from their teams, the impact on both leader effectiveness and business performance is significantly greater.

What leadership development methods are most commonly used in 2025?

Traditional leadership development approaches are evolving rapidly. While group training remains the most common method (used by 48% of organizations), new approaches are gaining ground:

• Group training/coaching (48%)
• On-the-job mentoring (42%)
• Peer-to-peer training/coaching (36%)
• Asynchronous digital platforms (33%)
• AI-powered asynchronous platforms (32%)
• One-on-one training/coaching (30%)

Notably, AI-powered and asynchronous digital platforms have surpassed traditional one-on-one coaching in popularity. These newer methods offer advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and real-time personalization, ensuring leaders develop the specific skills they need when they need them.

How can organizations use employee feedback to improve manager effectiveness?

Managers continue to have an outsized impact on employee experience, yet many struggle to translate feedback into meaningful action. The Center for Workforce Transformation’s research reveals that while 71% of employees say survey results are shared with them, only 51% report seeing actual improvements resulting from listening events.

Our research into the barriers to manager action has found that managers face several challenges:

• Setting goals but struggling with follow-through
• Lacking skills to interpret results and determine priority actions
• Being overwhelmed by competing priorities
• Finding it disruptive to daily operations to pull teams together for action planning

Organizations can address these challenges by using listening data to:

1. Identify specific manager behaviors that most impact team engagement
2. Provide managers with personalized development focused on these behaviors
3. Offer targeted, science-backed action suggestions that simplify decision-making
4. Create technology-enabled solutions that allow for action in the flow of work

By simplifying the reported data and providing relevant suggestions rooted in behavioral science, organizations free managers to focus on taking action rather than spending valuable time deciding which actions will be most effective.

What makes some coaching and development programs more effective than others?

The most effective leadership development programs share several key characteristics:

• Clear outcomes: Successful coaching and development programs are nearly 3x as likely to have a clear set of outcomes defined. The best organizations begin with the end in mind, specifying exactly what manager behaviors they aim to develop and how these behaviors connect to business results.
  
  
• Personalization: Programs are nearly twice as likely to be effective when they utilize specific data about and from employees. This includes 360 feedback, employee experience survey data, and other behavioral insights that provide a clear picture of development needs.
  
  
• Integration with listening: Among organizations with mature listening programs, 77% also succeed in coaching and development, compared with just 40% among organizations with less mature listening. This correlation highlights how effective listening creates the foundation for targeted development.
  
  
• Follow-through mechanisms: The most successful programs include accountability systems and ongoing reinforcement to ensure that development activities translate into sustained behavior change.

Why is the "forgotten middle" of management a critical focus area for learning and development?

In every organization, there exists an essential yet often overlooked segment of leadership: middle managers who form the backbone of daily operations. These aren't senior executives who receive specialized coaching, nor new managers enrolled in early leadership training. They're the steady performers who keep things running day in and day out — the "forgotten middle."

Our research shows that employees with excellent managers are 5.3x as likely to see growth opportunities and 4.1x as likely to feel valued by their organization. Conversely, those reporting to poor managers are 10x more likely to leave within a year, with these departures representing nearly half of all voluntary turnover.

How are innovative organizations reinventing manager development?

Forward-thinking organizations are moving away from episodic training programs toward continuous, experience-aware development that's personalized, actionable, and measurable. Perceptyx's research-based leadership development solution, Grow, exemplifies this approach by creating a virtuous cycle between feedback and development.

This new model rests on four interconnected components:

1. Flexible Multi-Source Feedback: Regular insights from 360 feedback integrated with broader employee experience data reveal not just what behaviors need improvement, but which ones will have the greatest impact on team experience and performance.
   
   
2. AI-Assisted Development Planning: AI-driven analysis of feedback generates personalized development plans tailored to each manager's specific needs and team context, removing the blank-slate paralysis that often follows feedback.
   
   
3. Actionable Coaching in the Flow of Work: Intelligent Nudges — bite-sized suggestions rooted in behavioral science — meet managers where they are with relevant, immediately applicable guidance without disrupting their workflow.
   
   
4. Measurable Behavior Change & Impact: By connecting development activities directly to employee experience metrics, organizations can quantify the impact of leadership improvement on engagement, retention, and business performance.

What makes "experience-aware" development different from traditional approaches?

Traditional leadership development and experience-aware development differ fundamentally in their approach and effectiveness:

• Traditional approach: A manager receives feedback that they need to improve team communication. They attend a generic workshop on communication skills that offers best practices but lacks context about their specific team challenges. Back at work, they struggle to apply these concepts amid competing priorities. Six months later, with no follow-up or measurement, any initial improvements have faded.
  
  
• Experience-aware approach: The same manager receives feedback highlighting communication gaps, but AI-driven coaching shows them exactly which communication behaviors their team needs most, based on employee experience data. The manager sees that psychological safety scores are low and learns that team members are hesitant to share concerns. They receive a targeted development plan focused on the precise behaviors known to improve psychological safety at work.

Throughout the following weeks, the manager receives Intelligent Nudges in their workflow — micro-learning moments that provide practical guidance for upcoming meetings, one-on-ones, and projects. These aren't generic tips but contextual prompts informed by their team's actual needs. As the manager practices these behaviors, both their engagement with development content and the impact on team metrics are measured through changes in team sentiment over time.

What makes this approach distinctly powerful is that it's not just personalized — it's "experience-aware." By understanding how teams are feeling, what behaviors are holding them back, and which cultural priorities matter most, organizations can foster trust through leadership development that's personalized, purposeful, practical, persistent, and proven to drive measurable improvements.

Get the Full Report

This Q&A provides only a snapshot of our comprehensive research. To dive deeper into these findings and access detailed recommendations for improving your organization's listening and leadership development strategies, download the complete State of Employee Listening 2025 report. 

To learn more about what distinguishes Grow as a leadership development solution, download The Future of Leadership Development: AI-Driven Manager Enablement and schedule a demo with a member of our team.

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