Businesses look to games for leadership development strategy

Leadership development is one of those corporate buzzwords that gets thrown around enough to make my eyes glaze over and my mind wander. Large businesses have complex organizational hierarchies and are always looking for ways to make themselves and their employees perform more efficiently. I have heard many a raid leader detail just how their experience organizing boss takedowns has translated into positive management skills in their workplace. Considering this, it's really not a big surprise that businesses are finally starting to look toward the system of rewards and achievements that many games employ in order to promote engagement and interactivity in leadership training programs.

A recent Forbes article outlines the way a specific organization, NTT Data, is using gaming strategies to implement management training courses. Their "global head of gamification," Naureen Meraj, had the idea to make a game that put the trainees into a series of simulated leadership scenarios, and track their progress. Similarly, Deloitte's Leadership Academy tracks its participants' progress using a mission or quest format, awarding badges (achievements), and maintains leaderboards so that "players" can compare their own achievements to others.

According to their own metrics, the programs have been wildly successful so far, which seems to signify a promising outlook for the gamification of certain business strategies. What do you think? Would you be more interested in professional training if it adopted certain features of your favorite games, such as WoW? Or do you want to keep your work and hobbies firmly separated?