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Want better leadership skills? Go grab a virtual human!
I am a writer first and foremost, but I am also a trained psychological coach, so I understand how to work with all types of individuals to help them thrive. The coaching industry is full of coaches like me who specialise in one type of coaching or another and who work helping individuals with their “leadership” skills. Some of us are independent, and some work alongside HR and L&D within big corporations. Either way, I would always recommend that if you want to enhance your leadership skills, get a coach…. but… science is telling us a new story.
What Science?
A new paper published 12 April (2021) in Frontiers, entitled “Evaluating Virtual Human Role-Players for the Practice and Development of Leadership Skills,” provides us with some new insights into how leadership skills can be developed. Coaches — this is something to think about.
The report tested the leadership skill technique, “role-playing”, in three role-playing scenario’s. The first scenario used human role-players (for example, actors), the second used Virtual Reality (VR) delivered in a virtual setting with virtual humans (VHs) as the role players, and the third used Mixed Reality (MR), which incorporated a real physical environment with virtual role players.
