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Develop Your Team to Develop Their Team
Think for a moment about the role of the learning function. Our goal used to be gaining a seat at the table, and we were thought of as being operators for the 1-800-TRAIN calls from managers. However, the world of work has changed, and with it, so has what the organization expects and receives from the learning team. With our expertise in learning modern concepts (especially those related to the science of learning), the ability to incorporate new technologies, and a focus on alignment with the business goals and objectives, the learning team is now a key catalyst for successful change efforts. We are seen as designers of myriad types of learning experiences enabling new capabilities for the entire enterprise.
This move was partly the result of our functional domain morphing from a focus on training to learning and then to performance. Another aspect comes from research by Mary Broad and John Newstrom in the early 1990s, which indicated that the responsibility for improving the transfer of training from the classroom to the job must be shared by managers and trainees, as well as trainers. Further research, including Mosher and Gottfredson’s complete journey, depicts learning, transfer, and sustainment components, and again places much of the responsibility for moving from learning to performance on the manager.
While this concept has talent departments creating learning experiences to teach and support managers in their role of developing people, what is the implication for managers in the learning function? Not only do they serve as the enterprise-wide domain experts in learning, but, as managers and leaders, they also are responsible for developing their own team—and modeling excellence as people development leaders.
There is an old adage that the cobbler’s children wear no shoes. Too often we hear this being applied to talent development professionals. We spend so much time and resources investing in growing the knowledge, skills, and abilities of others, we often fail to make the same investment in ourselves and our team. The problem with this is that to stay current and effectively address the evolving needs of our corporate employees, our team needs to access current research, technologies, approaches, and options. Chamorro-Premuzic and Swan (2016) remind us that what enables success today will not enable success in the future, so it is imperative that we are agile in our willingness and ability to learn and prepare for the future. It is exceedingly important for our TD professionals to ensure they can continue to shape and evolve future learning experiences. As managers, we need to create an environment for our team to share and develop individual expertise in different domains and topics. While we need to coach our teams and emphasize their professional development, we also need to invest in our own personal development and model self-directed learning. And finally, we need to invest time in branding the members of our department as experts in their profession.
Creating an Environment for Staff to Stay Current
How do you help your team stay up-to-date with the latest in the field of talent development when we live in a VUCA world of constant change? We have experienced so many evolutions over the years. From the introduction of e-learning to the blended classroom, mobile learning, virtual reality, and the current era of modern learning, change is ongoing. There is always something new on the horizon, and while it’s often just a shiny object, it may also enable our work to be faster, better, and even stickier. It is important to be aware of any new and innovative models, resources, and technology; however, this can only happen if the learning leader creates time, space, and motivation for their team to stay current.
Start by Assessing the Current Situation
The first place to start with staying current is identifying what is already available within the team. Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, frequently stated: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” And, as the saying goes, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. As a business unit, what resources are already available within your team? While a 30-minute team brainstorm could produce a huge list, consider some of the following ways to dig deeper.
• Start with a list of your team members, then look at their roles. Each one probably has new developments, products, and thinking. Consider what related subtopics your team members might be interested in. This can help identify many topics, as well as who can take ownership for what—a divide-and-conquer approach.
• Next, take an inventory of what professional associations are represented within the group. Do team members regularly read certain publications? What thought leaders and experts do they follow via blogs and social media? Take the time to talk with your team and identify what they are already doing in this space. Develop a visual and have fun with the content touchpoints available within the team.
• Does your organization provide access to a broader learning database, such as LinkedIn Learning, Mindtools.com, or Harvard Business Review? What are other functional departments focusing on? Does anyone in your organization use Agile or Lean? What about game mechanics or design thinking? How can your department leverage currency by connecting with them?
Build a System for Sharing and Learning From One Another
Take a look at how you can start to share information and intentionally learn from one another. Do you have a knowledge management system in your organization or a shared drive where people can store information? Do you use an internal social-learning platform that enables you to easily share links and resources and tag others you think will be interested in the information? Start with what you have in your organization and see what works for you. If you find you don’t have a good platform for sharing, you may need to get your IT department to explore options and alternatives. Find out what other departments are using. If your expertise does not lie in this area, whose does? Let them take the lead to help you successfully get this off the ground!
Lead by example and serve as a champion. This means not only sharing any information you find that will be useful to others, but also taking the time to review what others share and provide feedback and insights on your related thoughts. This can be intentional—such as creating time and space at team meetings for people to share and discuss resources they’ve found. But it can also be indirect and subtle. One example is simply putting the book or articles you are reading in a conspicuous place in your office—then when a team member notices them, be ready to share your takeaways. Another example is calling out trends when they’re mentioned during meetings. This might be something like, “I am curious about how virtual reality might mesh with what we are doing for Project XYZ?” or “Have you ever wondered if blockchain is going to affect our work?”
Serve as a resource. When a team member is asking how to do something or for knowledge access, consider what resources you can direct them to. Are there people in your network they can speak with? Is there a good TED Talk online? Did you recently read a relevant article? Guide them to other tools and resources to support their interests and further learning. Consider going on a virtual scavenger hunt together. When your team sees you engaging in the behavior, it will help them see where they can go to find the information they need for self-directed learning.
Participating in professional organizations is an easy way to stay current while simultaneously building skills. For example, if a team member is focused exclusively on crafting e-learning content, groups like eLearning Guild or Online Learning Consortium may be helpful. On the other hand, if you are leading a TD organization, ATD can offer greater breadth. Other professional organizations include Training Industry, Institute for Corporate Productivity, Chief Learning Officer, and the Society for Human Resource Management (appendix 1). Some organizations offer membership at the individual level and others are offered at the corporate level. These avenues create a great space for professional networking and often provide access to additional tools and resources that can support further self-directed learning, often more affordably. If your learning team belongs to more than one organization, you can have different members serve as champions by sharing the information and ideas they take away with everyone on the team.
Most professional groups host an annual conference, which provides additional opportunities for learning. Consider carving out a little money each year in your budget so team members can attend a large industry conference. These three- to four-day intensive programs generally host keynote speakers who are thought leaders in the field; short, relevant sessions presented by practitioners and consultants; opportunities to meet with vendors; and networking events with other learning professionals. Like any learning experience, if you assess what is available ahead of time, determine your personal objectives, focus on the experiences that are most important, and preplan your path, you will be able to make huge gains in a short time. Additionally, if several members of the team are attending, you can divide and conquer to take in the maximum amount of information, and then share and compare.
One rule for sending team members to conferences should be bringing the information back home for all to learn. However, this is much more extensive than simply completing a block on their individual development plan (IDP) or impact map. This means they must review their notes, photos, handouts, downloads, and other collateral, and put together an old-fashioned debrief to present to the team. They should also share which thought leaders stood out most and what they were saying, the technology demonstrations, any new books they heard about, and the intriguing conversations they had with other practitioners. And most important, they should share at least one practice they are now including in their repertoire as a result of the conference. As the manager and the learning coach for your team, make sure to set this “bring it back” expectation before they leave, and help them set their objectives and plan their itinerary. As soon as they return, show excitement about what they learned, ensure that time is available for them to share with the team, help them connect the dots with what is happening in your organization, and look for ways to use some of their new ideas.
Staying current does not need to be costly or a one-person endeavor. There are a wide variety of online communities that learning professionals can join, many blogs to follow, and a plethora of easily curated content. As these resources continue to grow and evolve, staying connected through avenues such as LinkedIn will allow you to see new communities of practice and hear from others in your network about what new tools and resources people are accessing.
Offer Opportunities Through Certifications
Certifications can provide focused development and give your strategy a more targeted process. If you work for an organization where many of your team members are subject matter experts with little to no adult learning experience but great technical expertise, they may benefit from a focused certificate program in adult learning or a specific TD competency. For instance, after three people with no L&D formal education or experience joined my team, the two facilitators attended a training certificate course to learn some basic facilitation and adult learning skills, and the instructional designer attended a designing learning certificate program to learn how to apply design to adult learning. This helped them establish a solid foundation and common language while increasing their confidence and competence.
If your organization is experiencing rapid growth and you are trying to build future leaders from within the organization, you may find certifications highly valuable. Certifications can also help your organization work through competency modeling or assessing a leader’s learning agility. Obtaining a certification in 360-degree assessments may help you work with leaders on development plans that better equip them for the future. However, it is imperative that you evaluate your organization’s strategy to ensure your investments align with the long-term goals of the business.
One starting point for building your learning team’s capacity is the new ATD Capability Model, which serves as a template for success in talent development. The model details what TD practitioners need to know and do to be successful now and in the future. It also responds to trends affecting talent development, such as digital transformation, data analytics, information availability, and partnerships between talent development and business
Serve as a Learning Coach
As a manager responsible for creating an environment for employees to continually up their game, serving as a learning coach has specific duties and tasks. Ensuring that all team members have a customized and current IDP, impact map, or action plan is a critical step. These are not just pro forma documents to check off at the beginning and the end of the year; they are dynamic documents that guide frequent discussions and inform continuous feedback on progress. It is not one size fits all. Partner with each team member to create a plan that recognizes their goals and creates opportunities for continuous growth and development in a way that is motivating but also builds capacity aligned with the needs of the organization
According to Broad and Newstrom (1992), coaching by the manager is imperative for formal training. And as Shriver (2018) points out in the Four Moments of Truth model, the manager and the employee need to negotiate the expectations for the training beforehand as well as discuss how the training will result in application on the job. These discussions should set the employee up for a higher level of success during the training program. There should be objectives and questions that help the employee and manager dive into the experience with more interest, intentionality, and energy. More important, the discussion should include an IDP or action plan the trainer is expected to complete during the experience. As Shriver states, “If trainees clearly understand that they will be expected not only to learn something useful, but also to create a strategic document that reviews what they learned, how they plan to implement that learning on the job, and the projected impact the applied knowledge could have on productivity, it stands to reason that they will approach the learning event with an orientation toward action and achievement as opposed to ‘box checking’ and completion.”
The conversations after the training is finished are even more important. These are not just an exchange of the topic—for example, why was the learning experience needed in the first place? Discussions should start soon after the experience to probe for connections with the work and options for application. This first conversation should involve the manager reviewing the IDP or action plan, making thoughtful comments about the content, and offering support for the implementation. To truly make a difference, these coaching conversations should continue over several months, eventually including more feedback on the application process itself, progress toward the target, and new learning content.
Modeling Personal Development
Before you can identify the best way to continue your development and invest in intellectual currency, you must have a solid understanding of yourself as a leader and align your development with your organization’s key goals, values, competencies, and strategies.
The first step is assessing your strengths and understanding how you show up for others. There are a variety of commercial assessments and tools on the market for this—and you may already be using them as part of your practice. As a leader for the learning team, you should use every assessment instrument your team administers within the organization, which might include MBTI, Emergenetics, a 360-degree survey, or an assessment on emotional intelligence or learning agility.
You may consider an advanced professional degree as one option for your professional development. This is one I took advantage of when I was an early midlevel manager. My organization offered tuition reimbursement, making it more affordable, and I saw it as an opportunity to create a faster path for growth. Additionally, because the more senior-level positions required an advanced degree, pursuing a master’s degree felt like a worthwhile investment.
A few things you’ll want to consider when exploring this option for yourself or your team members are time, cost, and learning preference. While many courses are only three hours of class time per week, this does not account for reading assignments, research, group projects, or writing papers. I found I usually needed an additional three to five hours per week per class to complete those extra activities. It was critical that I understood how much time I could commit any quarter to determine how many courses I could take at once. As for cost, look into the benefits your organization provides. Does it offer tuition reimbursement, scholarships, or salary increases upon achievement of certain degrees? What is the budget that you are willing and able to personally commit to offset costs not covered by your organization? It’s also important to look at the cost of books, university fees, or labs. Finally, make sure you know how you learn best. Personally, I was very unfocused during my online courses—while I could get the work done, I was often disengaged in the process. Figure out what will work best for you—taking courses online with greater time flexibility or attending in-person classes where you are face-to-face with other learners and your professor.
There are a variety of options you can take advantage of to continually support building intellectual currency, including belonging to professional associations and attending conferences. However, as a leader you should go one step further and get involved. This might include serving on committees, writing blogs or articles, presenting at conferences, or even contributing to publications as a chapter or book author.
Branding Your Team as Stellar Producers
The motivation for building a high-performing team that delivers results and contributes to your organization’s competitive advantage is a worthy goal in and of itself. It enables you to help build capability at the system level and hopefully create a culture of learning throughout the enterprise. You can lift this to a higher plane by sharing your practices with professional colleagues or assessing your practices with a competitive standard using a national award. In the learning arena there are several ways to do this, such as the ATD BEST awards, CLO magazine’s LearningElite, and Training magazine’s Training 100 (appendix 1). At the organizational level there is the Baldrige Performance Excellence criteria and process.
Meeting such criteria involves submitting an application with standard questions, sharing data on efficiencies and results, and demonstrating alignment with organizational goals, objectives, and strategies. While the application process can be time-consuming and challenging because of the specific documentation needed, there are huge benefits for the learning team:
• Employees gain an enhanced awareness of the business impact of practices within the learning and talent space, thus making them feel more connected to the business.
• An application helps develop a common language around the practice, process, and entire learning ecosystem.
• The team is forced to consider how their practices are aligned with the performance that drives the business results, as well as the role of measurement. Additionally, it enables the learning team to identify the many positive stories associated with their practice.
• The application process helps employees learn about what’s necessary for a systematic learning culture, as well as how to manage processes and report results as a business in and of itself. Responding to the application questions helps all L&D employees learn how to accurately tell their performance story.
• Most award applications ask for programmatic data and information that is the same as the internal executives’ request. Thus, the application has many reuse features.
• Feedback from outside practitioners is useful for continuous improvements because it reports identified strengths and opportunities to improve.
• Reward and recognition for members, teams, and departments is a huge benefit, literally serving as a spotlight on projects and employees. This is even more important in tough economic times when many benefits are reduced.
• Participants respond well to attending an award ceremony and the public recognition it offers.
• External validation for internal processes exemplifies the values of continuous improvement, innovation, and transparency.
• Executives see that the program is validated externally.
Summary
Ultimately, if you understand the direction your organization is aspiring to and align your learning strategy, you should be able to identify key opportunities to invest in the development of your team and yourself. This will help promote growth from within, engagement, and retention because your team members will see that you are willing to invest in their growth. When you do this, your team will no longer be the cobbler’s children with no shoes; rather, they will be the cobbler’s children in Jimmy Choos.
Key Takeaways
You know development is important—you are a leader within your organization. Make sure you are prioritizing your team’s development so they can most effectively meet the needs of the business and stay on top of learning trends.
Build a network of learning leaders you can learn from and leverage as a sounding board. You are not the first person to face the challenge in front of you. And your organization isn’t the first either—take time to learn from the experiences of those who have gone before you and be willing to share with those follow after you.
One size does not fit all. Take the time to understand your team members’ learning preferences and motivators. This will help you direct them to the tools and resources that best align with how they like to take in new information.
Lead by example. If they see you taking the time to invest in your own development, they are more likely to believe they can carve out time to invest in their development as well.
Ensure accountability. While development opportunities are essential for knowledge acquisition, the application is far more critical. Take the time to support the creation of an IDP, action plan, or impact map, and continue having follow-up conversations around the experiences your team members are having in application. Learn about their road blocks, help them remove boundaries, and celebrate the successful implementations!
Questions for Reflection and Further Action
1. What is your defined budget for the year? Of that, what percentage should be earmarked for the development of your talent development team members?
2. What local opportunities or communities of practice exist for you and your team to actively participate in? How might you encourage engagement?
3. What is your plan to document and share your team’s favorite resources; for example, how can you live out Lew Platt’s quote?
4. What actions have you taken to align your team’s development needs to the organization’s strategy?
5. How and when are you serving as a catalyst to build and share your network and make new connections for members on your team?