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Getting Better at Getting Better: Tools and Techniques
Leadership in an organization is generally considered the pathway for competitive advantage. As the owners of the assessment and design for leadership development experiences, the talent development profession has a plethora of effective resources, theories, and tools to work our craft. Our ownership of training entrusts us with the responsibility for not only developing leaders at every level in the organization, but also modeling the practices we teach to others.
David Langford, of Langford International, focuses his practice on using quality management and systems principles with pre-K–12 teachers and, frequently, vocalizes this axiom: “Everyone a teacher; everyone a learner.” He starts with teacher because teaching others is their job and it resonates. He adds “everyone a learner” because of his focus on the collaborative team experiences needed to improve the system and the need to learn continually regardless of your functional field.
As learning leaders in a complex environment with advancing technologies, shifting demographics, and changing priorities, the work our organizations do is constantly being disrupted. In the Forum, a consortium for connecting, collaborating, and sharing, Langford’s mantra is used with intentionality. To stay competitive, organizations need to be flexible and ready to adapt when prudent. Adaptability requires leveraging current successful practices. A network like the Forum can jump-start new initiatives, but only if the members are willing to take the time to teach others, to share their ideas openly including lessons learned, and to learn constantly themselves. It is a give-and-take proposition.
As part of this book project, we researched the components or skills identified with leadership to serve as a guide for the chapters, and then crowdsourced with our members for further input and chapter authoring. We also interviewed some of our members to shine a spotlight on what leadership in action looks like, including the stories shared in other parts of the book. Additionally, we surveyed members for the tools, techniques, and processes they use to build their personal leadership skill sets. While the number of leaders was limited, there were overlaps within broad categories, as well as some of the tools and techniques employed. Because we know that growing our leadership skills is a lifelong journey, it is interesting to see which tools and techniques senior practitioners in the learning field are using to learn, teach others, and get better at getting better in their craft and in their daily roles of leading others.
Creating Awareness of Self
Knowing your strengths, weaknesses, and how you show up to others is one of the most critical aspects of personal leadership. In Learning Leadership, Kouzes and Posner (2016) state: “Inside-out leadership is about discovering who you are, what compels you to do what you do, and what gives you the credibility to lead others.” It is about seeing yourself the way others see you, and there are a variety of ways to learn more about yourself, including some specific tools in appendix 3.
Before setting goals for improving your leadership practices, you need to know where you currently stand. The leaders we interviewed use assessments, self-reflection, and feedback to understand the influence they have as leaders.
Assessments
In leadership development, one of the first places to start is by getting a clear and accurate understanding of the current state—how you show up to others. In Learning Leadership, Kouzes and Posner share how they both independently purchased a copy of Jim Tweedy’s painting Self-Portrait because of how meaningful it was in leader development. The painting depicts a chubby, friendly tabby cat using a mirror to help paint a self-portrait. While the mirror reflects an accurate image, the tabby is painting itself as a very large and stern-looking tiger.
Learning and development practitioners assess individuals in a variety of ways, and there are many vendors offering tools to support those initiatives, including feedback, coaching, and follow-up actions to enhance strengths using validated and job-related assessments. The repertoire available for most learning teams includes behavior assessments like the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), DiSC, Harrison, Hogan Personality, and Emergenetics, as well as 360-degree surveys.
Jeremy Jones of Asurion believes that the MBTI and other assessments, as well as participating in the Situational Leadership programs, helped him become a stronger leader. The MBTI helped him better realize the importance of not labeling people, but rather understanding how and where to meet them. When used for developing team skills to foster collaboration, these assessments help group members recognize and appreciate the different strengths and natural attributes that individuals on the team contribute. Group synergy can promote productivity and influence results in a positive manner. Situational Leadership helped Jones understand situational leadership approaches, goals around performance such as partnering with the business, and other ideas for personal development. He is a big believer in taking his own medicine and learning from all the assessments and tools employees use.
Alissa Weiher of Cochlear says that if you’re not taking the time to develop new capabilities, you’re not staying at the forefront of the learning industry. She is certified to administer the MBTI and Gallup StrengthsFinder assessments, and has used them with her teams. If someone is struggling or facing challenges, she likes to remind them of their strengths and what they excel at doing. As a leader, Weiher can use insights from these instruments to shift her focus and what she is talking about with a team member to make sure she’s addressing what is important to that person in that moment. She is also certified to administer a variety of 360 assessments and has also used this process to receive feedback. By using a 360 assessment she’s able to gain additional insights for her own leadership development and to facilitate more empathetic debrief conversations with others.
What happens when you think you’re one type of leader, but the data tell you otherwise? Carmen Reynolds of Boeing found herself in this position after taking the MBTI. Her results indicated a preference for extroversion, even though she didn’t feel like an extrovert. So, she decided to dive deeper and took step 2 of the MBTI. The results had a huge impact on her self-awareness, taking her understanding of the way she shows up to others to a different level. MBTI’s step 2 reveals five facets to each of the four MBTI dichotomies (extroversion and introversion, intuition and sensing, thinking and feeling, and judging and perceiving). For example, she loves to be organized and planned, but also thrives in the dynamism of working under pressure. A big takeaway was how important it is for learning professionals to be consumers of all the instruments to understand and empathize with employees and to make better decisions about their use.
Heather Durtschi of Walmart also recommends leveraging internal assessments and credits the Birkman Method with helping advance her leadership work with her team. The Birkman Method is a suite of questions used to measure the characteristics of the individual, the characteristics of the situation, and the interaction between the individual and the situation. Durtschi uses insights gleaned from her own results and the results of her team on the Birkman Method to enable collaborative partnerships that drive business impact and forge lasting relationships.
Self-Reflection to View With a Different Lens
Jay Erikson of Hitachi Vantara is a firm believer in self-reflection, which is vital to his development and well-being. He urges all talent leaders to spend a few minutes each day reflecting on key ideas related to work, values, goals, and life, in general. He suggests recording your experiences and lessons learned in a notebook or on a tech device or discussing them with a trusted colleague or friend. Your experiences influence your behaviors, which influence your actions and decisions. Think about the results of your actions and decisions. Why did you decide or act the way you did? How do you make decisions? Did the outcomes match your expectations? What, if anything, will you do differently next time?
Erikson’s suggestion reflects a process similar to the Kolb Learning Cycle, which is used to debrief team or group activities, such as an action learning team or a team challenge. It includes an accurate assessment of what happened, how it happened, the results or impact, the insights gleaned from the experience, and how the experience will change behavior going forward. Periodically talking with a trusted colleague, mentor, or coach about the experience and your assessment to obtain their feedback can be an added boost to help you learn more about yourself and the way you show up to others.
Soliciting Feedback From Others
Feedback is difficult, yet asking for constructive feedback and accepting it without defensiveness is one of the most effective ways to understand how you show up to others. When Claude Bolton served as the commandant at the Defense Systems Management College (now Defense Acquisition University), he was a U.S. Air Force general. He would say that his role was to provide ground support and air cover for everyone in his command. Every six months he would ask his direct reports, his peers in the Pentagon, and his superiors to respond to three questions:
• What am I doing that is working well?
• What am I doing that is not working?
• If you could change anything in the organization, what would it be?
The responses needed to be submitted by a certain date, were not to include the person’s name, and could be delivered in any format (such as an email or an envelope pushed under the door). Within a week of the request date, Bolton would express appreciation for the feedback and announce a summary of the results in a staff meeting. Additionally, he shared three actions that he would take to improve. He would also mention the feedback in more public all-campus meetings.
Terence Morley of NBCUniversal believes in consistently asking for specific feedback before he embarks on a new initiative. For example, he might ask, “To be better at A, one skill I’m interested in improving is X. Are you willing to give me feedback in how I currently do X?” Additionally, he will give people more and better feedback if they ask for it. Morley believes that part of the ask is finding the people who will help you take big steps in your career by providing honest and open feedback. Open and direct feedback (such as actively seeking feedback through mentors and individuals he supports) has also helped Jeremy Jones grow as a leader.
Building Personal Capability
It is easier to start improving your leadership practices once you have a realistic view of how others see you. Development opportunities—whether formal or informal—are all around. They happen through intense work challenges, formal training, and even while walking in the forest meditating. They are built through intention and discipline, as well as happenstance and serendipity.
Using Tools
One tool that Cory Bouck of Johnsonville uses as a leader with others and for his own development is Robert Brinkerhoff’s Impact Map, which is traditionally completed in conjunction with the learner’s manager (Figure 26-1). The map’s structure creates a line of sight between what is being learned and better on-the-job behaviors by explaining the positive contributions to organizational goals and the resulting metrics (the four column headings are knowledge and skills, on-the-job application, job and team results, and organizational goals). The theory supporting the impact map process implies that application and feedback are necessary for newly learned content to morph into successful new behaviors on the job. For example, the new skill might be to “Increase my team’s effectiveness when having conversations with business clients.”
Figure 26-1. Example Impact Map
Another tool Bouck uses to move his learning into the doing realm is the What? So What? Now What? tool. This creates a quick capture of the summary situation and the next steps:
• What? Summarizes the key takeaways from the experience.
• So What? Explains the application and impact of the What?
• Now What? Documents the next step actions and support that are needed.
This is a quick process for converting aha moments into behaviors for impact. While it can be a documented activity for yourself and for those you lead, it can also be used during conversations with colleagues and at meetings.
Learning as a Habit
Heather Durtschi believes that staying curious, asking pointed questions, and constantly seeking to understand are essential learning components needed to continually develop her skills and practice. She cites books, courses, and new technologies as integral to evolving as a learner and leader within talent development. Recently, she has pushed herself to learn more about virtual reality and augmented reality because they will likely play a prominent role in the future of learning. She has attended conferences in these areas, benchmarked companies that are already leveraging emerging technologies, and reached out to vendor partners to better understand their businesses. Retail is changing, and Durtschi knows that Walmart’s training has to change with it. Jeremy Jones also nurtures this curiosity and interest in technology because of his strong desire to know what is happening in the industry—and how it can influence and advance individual and group learning.
Randal Gross of PeaceHealth always makes sure to use the assessments or learning tools that will be part of internal course content. He has taken leadership development courses from the Center for Creative Leadership and recognizes the influence they have had on enhancing his leadership style. He believes that practice, reflection, feedback, and coaching are integral to the successful transition and sustainment of the training on the job. He feels very strongly about the importance of feedback and engaging with leaders he respects.
Being engaged in talent certificate programs has allowed Jones to obtain a better understanding of the theory behind learning. Through these programs he appreciates the foundational capabilities needed by talent professionals. Combining these efforts has provided a deeper understanding for what effective learning looks like, and what he needs to include in the learning solutions he provides the organization.
Chris Holmes of Booz Allen Hamilton encourages all talent development professionals to seek out new opportunities for learning and then share the experience with others in the form of stretch assignments or new roles or responsibilities. Learning agility is a fundamental skill that is tested when we stretch beyond our comfort zone—and this investment is circular. Learning and helping others will always come back in equal measure because it also helps you learn how to learn from others to advance your own development. Additionally, what you learn when you’re out of your comfort zone is cumulative, and the experience and skills gained will rapidly enhance your strengths and abilities.
Jay Erikson believes that to be a great talent and learning practitioner, you need to be an avid learner. He spends a lot of time reading, listening to podcasts, and taking training programs. He recommends consuming training experiences not only for your own professional development but also to learn what others in the industry are doing. Erikson requires each person on his team to include development in their quarterly and annual goals. He recommends they allocate a minimum of two hours every week (ideally in the mornings) for personal and professional development.
The research presented in Harvard Business Review’s “Good Leaders Are Good Learners” indicates that those in a learner mode adopt a growth mindset and are more open to experimenting with different strategies and approaches (Keating, Heslin, and Ashford 2017). Additionally, they are more prone to use after-action sessions to learn from experience and to document ideas for moving forward. Most of these sessions are modeled after the U.S. Army’s After Action Review (AAR), and focus on a discovery conversation and note capture. It is a more expansive version of the Plus-Delta tool and uses questions such as:
• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What worked well?
• What did not work and why?
• What surprised you?
• What should we do differently next time?
Journaling
Suzanne Frawley of Plains All American Pipeline keeps a journal of what she is learning, capturing ideas from articles, books, and podcasts. After trying something new, she jots down what worked, where she got stuck, and what she would do differently if given a chance. Then she does weekly and monthly reviews of her notes to decide what to keep doing and what upgrades to make. As appropriate, she also adds these ideas to an initiative or project. One technique that Frawley finds useful in building her ability to be a resourceful leader and in enhancing the journal process is Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal method, which many bloggers affectionately call the KonMari approach for journaling. The process involves what Carroll calls rapid logging, and consists of four components: topics, page numbers, short sentences, and bullets. It also incorporates a variety of symbols and reviews to migrate tasks into the future. While keeping a journal is helpful, using Carroll’s bullet format and ideas has expanded Frawley’s ability to capture information and has provided a more practical way for her to review it, thus adding to more implementation.
Marguerite Samms of Intermountain Healthcare also uses a journal for self-reflection to gain a deeper understanding of where she needs to grow. Through this reflection, she has discovered the freedom to learn that comes with a willingness to be vulnerable. She uses this self-awareness in her interactions with employees, leaders, and her own team to create a safe space for discussing real issues and for fostering a healthy place to work. In her experience, her own team has reported increased trust and more fun at work. She believes that staying true to her organization’s mission—helping people live the healthiest lives possible—starts with herself and her interactions with the people around her.
Podcasting
As part of his professional research on durable learning and learning in the future, Dana Alan Koch of Accenture realized the importance of learning about his learning as well as thinking about his point of view on those topics. Inspired by Accenture encouraging its employees to share blog posts on its internal social media site, Koch and two colleagues developed a public podcast called Learning Geeks. The podcast is dedicated to discussing the things that are influencing the learning world and reflects the adage that we do not know what we know until we tell others. This requires them to work through their point of view on the topic and organize it into a logical format that connects emotionally with others using stories and examples.
Building Capability in Others
Leadership is about creating an environment in which others can empower themselves to successfully meet their daily challenges. It thrives when the leader’s daily habits demonstrate how to use the tools and techniques and intentionally stretches their thinking and actions. Because of the value of learning from others, modeling practices that promote self-directed research, investigation, and experimentation not only helps the leader but also helps the employees.
Coaching Others and Using a Coach
Chris Holmes is a big proponent of performance coaching for enhancing an individual’s development. She believes coaching is an effective tool to rapidly discover and understand your personal strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, as managers and leaders, we are always coaching others. An executive leadership program she participated in at Cornell University emphasized coaching as a management style. “As a leader, it’s very important to bring others along in the decision-making and problem-solving process not only from a client management standpoint, but also in developing talent throughout the organization,” Holmes explains. “This is where you can be a great coach and help others develop.” Having your own coach is also an effective way to learn how to make coaching part of your natural management style.
Marguerite Samms manages her own learning by balancing the 70-20-10 framework. The 70 percent is learning from her experiences through action and reflection; the 20 percent is learning from other people, such as her manager, peers, mentors, coaches, and social media; and the 10 percent is learning from formal classes in person or online. She is a professional certified coach, certified team coach, and certified mentor coach, all through the International Coach Federation. Samms has found that coaching is the most powerful way to learn, and she identifies a new personal coach annually to keep her development moving beyond blind spots and habits that might otherwise get in her way. Additionally, she identifies a new mentor specific to the development area she is focused on each year. She asks the individual for an hour of their time every month, requesting they share stories of their leadership journey, hard-won lessons from their experiences, introductions to their networks, and sponsorship into events where she can learn and network.
Solving Problems With Gusto
A universal aspect of organizational life is the need to continually solve problems. Problems are everywhere—we can call the small ones “puzzles,” but those that are more complex, huge, and amorphous are called “conundrums” or “wicked problems.” One critical way for organizations to stay competitive is having a system in place for generically solving problems and for making improvements that are both continuous and breakthrough. Problems and system improvements are rarely accomplished by individuals; they are initiated and solved by groups or teams working across boundaries. Thus, teams that interact and are interdependent need a consistent, disciplined approach to problem solving so they can more easily influence business challenges.
There is no single problem-solving method. For example, a puzzle-type problem generally has an answer, but some information is missing. The goal is to find that information and the answer. Complex problems, on the other hand, are multifaceted and usually have more than one solution. Through the years a variety of models have been developed and the one you use might be different based on the level of complexity of the problem or of your organization. The Shewhart Cycle, known as Plan.Do.Study.Act., is one of the most well-known methods.
As a talent development leader, Suzanne Frawley of is constantly honing her ability to solve challenges, whether they are the conundrum types or general puzzles. Practicing these challenges increases her resourcefulness, helps her anticipate future issues, builds her portfolio of solution options, and enables her to flex more easily to ever-changing business needs. To stay current on new developments, she networks with colleagues from other businesses, vendor reps, and professional organizations.
Collaborating
To Terence Morley, collaboration stands out as critical when developing a new solution. NBCUniversal uses a brain trust, which is what they call pulling people together across business lines and departments to solve a challenge. Developing a team with different perspectives is a must when launching organizational initiatives. For the TD team, this expands its understanding of their internal clients and advances the credibility of the talent developers. Morley’s team also leverages Slack to stay updated on new content related to what’s going on in the talent and media industry. The platform is designed to help teams organize conversations, integrate tools, share and archive files, and talk face-to-face.
Using Stories
Storytelling for Terence Morley means adding creativity, energy, and real-life situations to the learning and instruction his team is providing. To him, storytelling makes a difference in how effectively they are delivering new information. Whether it is recommending a solution for a business or organization or during a weekly staff meeting, he believes it’s important to tell great stories that touch people’s emotions. The story about how NBCUniversal acquired the rights to the Harry Potter franchise and why it is so important in their theme parks business is one of Morley’s favorites. The more you can bring in stories and weave in the tales, the better. In addition, Terence often brings in personal experience and relates what he has been through to further humanize his perspectives when addressing others. Sharing a personal fear related to having difficult conversations helps others appreciate both the difficulty and the necessity of the situation in question.
Boeing’s Carmen Reynolds has also found that teaching is more about being a great storyteller than anything else—it does not always matter what the theory is behind it. It’s all about how the topic or point is presented and how you can make it come alive and relevant for others.
One-on-One Meetings
Jay Erikson conducts one-on-one meetings with his direct reports every week to discuss their priorities and how he can support them. These consistent meetings are essential for building trust and for open communication. The call structure is largely dependent on the management style that fits the individual and their responsibilities, and it’s critical to listen attentively and focus on them and not on yourself. In addition, Erikson’s organization, Hitachi Vantara, uses the Marcus Buckingham StandOut Assessment to better understand what motivates and energizes each employee. He works with his team to find opportunities for each person to do the things that align with their strengths and energizes them on a frequent basis.
Alissa Weiher likes to do her one-on-one meetings as walk and talk sessions with her employees. The physical exercise is good for everyone and it creates healthier behaviors that spark more authentic conversations. In her one-on-one relationships, Weiher leverages the skills she has gained from taking Situational Leadership courses. Using this training and her understanding of preferences from the MBTI, she is intentional in how she adjusts the way she interacts with each individual on her team.
Inquiry
Another tool Terence Morley uses is asking questions. By asking “What does your ideal vision of a product or program look like?” or “What does program success look like?” he not only invites others into the conversation in a meaningful way, but the resulting conversations generally produce ideas that can improve the current thinking.
Alissa Weiher also recommends using questions. She likes asking, “What do I, my team, and my organization need to do next to be more competitive?” She is also a strong advocate of Michael Bungay Stanier’s 2016 book, The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, because it distills coaching to seven simple questions that elicit rich insight and promotes team members talking and reflecting more in coaching conversations.
Michelle Webb of Accenture uses questions to leverage her natural curiosity and habit of working out loud. She purposely seeks out new opportunities and connections by asking insightful questions and talking to others about her projects and research. This leads to formulating new questions—for example, asking questions about the responses to her questions—enabling her to find new areas for exploration.
Expanding Horizons
While leadership is inside out and takes daily practice, one of the most fundamental ways to learn and get better at it is through learning with and from others, hence, making intentional connections that build professional relationships that grow over time. According to MIT Sloan Management Review, in “The Social Side of Performance,” one distinguishing factor of high performers “is their ability to maintain and leverage personal networks” (Cross, Davenport, and Cantrell 2003) The most effective performers create and tap large, diversified networks that are rich in experience and span all organizational boundaries. As Andrew Hargadon, a professor at UC Davis and a thought leader for innovative practices, especially associational thinking, stated in the 2014 ATD Forum’s Spring Lab, “One’s network is the innovation.”
Randal Gross relies on his own personal network to meet the ongoing demands in the workplace, especially given the speed of change. He reaches out to others to gain perspective on the best ways to develop new learning content because he believes that having a sounding board to learn what others are doing in the field makes a huge difference. The ATD Forum is an example of the partnering support PeaceHealth receives from networking. In addition, Gross has found a key to his success as a TD leader is partnering not just externally, but also across his own organization. This helps him to know the learning consumers and their work, and creates an awareness of the work the learning team does for the organization. It is definitely a win-win.
Getting plugged into the ATD Forum network, the experiential labs, and the ATD organization at large has equipped Jeremy Jones with new relationships that he has found extremely valuable. Being able to have personal interactions on challenging learning and development topics with people who have similar responsibilities but work in different industries has helped him gain new insights on content and delivery methods, which have, in turn, influenced his internal practices.
Alissa Weiher also reports the benefits of being in the right professional communities, which requires intentional networking and communicating with a variety of learning leaders. These conversations can run the gamut of the talent spectrum and range from how they source vendors, to the different alignment strategies they have used, to how they decide which learning solutions to design and to promote. Some of the best decisions she has made over the years were made in part by relying on the guidance and insight of other people in the talent industry that she knows and respects. She cites her involvement with the ATD Forum as being instrumental in helping her to grow as a leader. It’s also a relationship that pushed her out of her comfort zone. By getting involved, she has served as a teacher and as a learner, thus benefiting from contributing valuable intellectual leadership to the mission of the Forum and learning from other talent leaders. For Weiher, having a network of learning professionals outside her organization is critical.
Summary
In his classic works on leadership, Noel Tichy used the metaphor of leadership as the engine that runs the organization. The organization with the best-running engine wins the race. Those engines with the capacity to thrive in a complex world have leaders that continually learn from every experience and use that knowledge to develop teachable stories for sharing with others to help them learn. True learning leaders also generate ideas by asking questions and by wondering about how things in the business work. They focus on targets and goals and creating positive emotional energy in others.
It is evident from many research reports and leadership books that learning is the most important job for leaders. It seems intuitive this would be an imperative for leaders of learning teams. But which comes first—the passion for learning or the decision to serve as a learning professional and leader? And are they always tied together? From the experiences and examples provided in this chapter, it seems as though they go together. So, we as TD leaders need to continue to be curious, to keep asking questions, and to learn something every day. It is the only way we can stay in the race and continually get better at getting better and catalyze curiosity in others so they excel in their practice.
Key Takeaways
With the world of work continually being disrupted, work in all organizations is changing. This requires leaders to be in a constant state of learning—learning about the work, about the workers, about themselves, and about the future.
There are many tools and techniques available for continually improving our craft as leaders in general, and specifically as leaders of learning professionals. The ones we select and use are personal and dependent on our situation.
Building our own skills and capabilities helps our team and adds value to our organization. It also increases our confidence and the belief that we can do even more.
Questions for Reflection and Further Action
1. Have you thought about your own learning story recently and captured it in writing? If so, what insights does it provide to how you serve as a model for other learning leaders? If not, what about starting today using the tools in appendix 3?
2. What do you personally do to obtain feedback from others about your performance on a regular basis (such as monthly or quarterly)? Once you get feedback, how do you use it to build personal capability? How do others know you are using it?
3. How intentional are you in determining your focus for improvement, and how do you convert that desire into habitual actions?
4. If your team members were asked to report the ways they have advanced their personal learning by modeling your actions, what would be on their lists?