Virtual leadership is the application of virtual worlds to leadership development. There are many ways of applying it, but the one I am most interested in is as a tool for social learning.
Social learning is a relatively new area of study that looks at how people can learn from each other without the need for a teacher, but where the social environment provides some of the same benefits as a physical classroom.
Why is Virtual Leadership Important?
Leadership is an essential life skill. It is a skill that you will use every day, and your ability to lead will determine your success in life.
Virtual worlds make an ideal learning environment for leadership because they provide the best of both worlds. They are a safe environment in which you can learn by trial and error without any real risk to your life or limb, but they are also a realistic environment that provides many of the same challenges that you will face in the real world.
Virtual worlds can be used to replicate almost every aspect of the real world artificially. This means that you can learn how to lead a team to success, how to manage a budget, how to market a product, and how to measure your effectiveness as a leader.
What’s more, virtual worlds allow you to build these skills through trial and error, so you can learn from your mistakes and develop at a pace that is comfortable for you.
Why is it different?
Virtual worlds represent a unique approach to leadership development because they combine goals, challenges, and feedback into one system, which makes virtual leadership much more powerful than traditional learning methods.
Moreover, virtual worlds provide leaders with challenges and goals, which are essential elements of any learning situation. Virtual worlds also provide feedback on whether or not those goals have been met. For instance, by allowing you to see whether or not you have achieved what you set out to achieve.
However, virtual worlds also provide something extra: they give you access to other people who are learning how to lead within the same virtual environment. This social element brings some benefits compared with traditional methods of developing leaders:
1. You can learn from others.
Virtual worlds allow you to see how other people have solved the same challenges that you are facing. You can see how they dealt with difficult situations and what strategies they used to be successful.
Additionally, virtual worlds also allow you to talk with these other people and ask them questions about how they approached a particular problem or challenge.
This ability to learn from others is one of the key things that make virtual leadership so powerful because it allows you to develop your skills without having to go through the early painful stages of learning by trial and error.
2. You can learn from mistakes.
Learning by trial and error is a powerful learning technique because it allows you to solve problems in a way that suits your strengths. However, it also presents a major challenge: making mistakes is painful, especially when those mistakes have real consequences in the real world.
Virtual worlds allow you to avoid this pain by allowing you to make mistakes in a virtual environment, where there are no real consequences for your actions.
This makes it possible for people who would not otherwise develop their leadership skills because they fear making mistakes to do so in a safe environment where mistakes don’t count for much.