ATD21 continued on Tuesday with a full day of education and networking sessions. Here's a recap of just a few of the many learning opportunities.
The Journey to a Learning Culture
There are different definitions of a learning culture, explained Laurent Balagué, product strategist with Docebo, in his Tuesday session “Learning Culture: The New KPI for L&D.” He then shared ATD’s definition: “Employees continuously seek, share, and apply new knowledge and skills to improve individual and organizational performance.”
He pointed out that a strong learning culture influences talent acquisition and development, and L&D—that is, securing young talent, continuously upskilling, and growing and engaging daily. Those are reasons leaders are discussing learning cultures.
Balagué then reviewed a learning culture model with four pillars: manager involvement, sharing and learning from others, learning agility, and resources and development opportunities. Taking a deeper dive into manager involvement, he stated that this relates to supervisors’ interest in their direct reports’ training before and after it. It’s also about organizational values: Are managers rewarded for their involvement in their team’s development?
He discussed six levels of management involvement.
- Acceptance: Managers aren’t for or against development. That is the bare minimum of involvement.
- Support: Managers encourage their direct reports to develop themselves.
- Role models: Senior managers, for example, may serve as role models to other managers by offering support.
- Reinforcement: Managers know how their teams want to develop, demonstrate interest, and offer their own perspectives.
- Enablement: Managers adjust responsibilities to ensure that there are opportunities for their direct reports to grow and implement what they have learned.
- Active coach: Managers consider their involvement to be a strategic objective. Balagué stressed that managers as active coaches will not happen overnight—it is a journey.
Balagué reminded attendees that a learning culture is embedded in the organizational culture. It’s about trust and respect, shared vision, continuous improvement, and an openness to new ideas. This session was recorded, and Balagué’s slides are available via the Resources tab of his session in Pathable, the conference platform.
What Are Your Emotions Really Saying?
If you think emotions don’t belong in the workplace, Lisa Christen, CEO of Christen Coaching & Consulting, will forthrightly tell you to think again. In her session “Emotional Articulation: How to Supercharge Your Emotional Intelligence,” she says that mastering emotional articulation is a critical precursor to mastering emotional intelligence.
She operationalized emotional articulation as “Defining the distinction between two or more related emotions and combining multiple emotion states to discover new insights and wisdom.” Christen advised participants to throw away preconceived thoughts and judgments about emotions. And she challenged them to see their emotions not as good or bad but as data points that can lead them to wisdom.
One tenet of emotional articulation is the ability to adequately express or label feelings. When articulating emotions, it’s important to understand the power of the words we use to describe them. Christen said it matters whether you feel irritated or annoyed. Likewise, are you jealous or envious? Developing understanding and meanings for those words can help systematically get to the root cause of your emotions and help you address it.
At the workplace, many people are guilty of shutting out the emotions they feel. Christen advised against that because ignoring emotions requires cognitive effort that you could better expend elsewhere. She called out that running from your emotions does not contribute to efficiency. Further, while your mind is busy trying to suppress the emotion, the physiological residue of those emotions is still at work in your body regardless of whether you know it. Ultimately any cognitive effort used to suppress your emotions is a sign that your emotions are controlling you as opposed to the other way around.
The real flex of emotional articulation is when you’re able to apply the process to yourself and to others’ feelings. For those in leadership positions, that skill is invaluable. As Christen notes, building a team where it is OK to discuss emotions can foster psychological safety among team members. If you missed this session, catch it on demand and hear Christen explain the complete Five-Step Emotional Articulation process.
Playbook for Rethinking L&D Teams
While the pandemic has hastened them, three forces of change were already driving the digital age, said Brandon Carson, vice president of learning and leadership at Walmart, during Tuesday’s Super Session, “L&D’s Playbook for the Digital Age.” Those forces are migration and globalization, the technology tsunami, and the rapid transformation of work.
He then detailed a playbook for transitioning an L&D team to current work realities and preparing it for the future. Among the steps are assessing the business landscape, evaluating the learning team’s capabilities, conducting an inventory of tools and systems, and creating a balanced scorecard for the team.
A learning professional today may serve as a performance consultant, learning engineer, data analyst, or instructional designer. L&D must embrace a multidisciplinary team with expertise in those four domains. The learning engineer, for example, marries science and the art of learning to make decisions at a programmatic level. L&D professionals, continued Carson, need competency in business acumen, technology acumen, and learning acumen—the latter meaning understanding how adults learn.
He noted four possible metrics for creating an L&D scorecard: consumption, efficiency, diversity, and impact. Consumption includes such things as number of learning items consumed by modality and by employee. Efficiency means cost per learning hour delivered and estimated revenue generated.
No one could have predicted the pandemic. Still, Carson encouraged L&D professionals to conduct scenario planning. To do that, they must be connected enough to the business to know plans for the future, such as forthcoming products or services.
Stay Clear of E-Learning Design Pitfalls
Be warned, if you approach Tim Slade of the eLearning Designer’s Academy and ask for a new training program, he’s not going to ask what your employees need to know. Instead, he will focus on what you need them to do. During his Tuesday afternoon session “Why Most E-Learning Fails and How to Fix It,” Slade posited that first knowing the actions you need employees to take is a good starting point to see whether a training session would even be effective in accomplishing your objectives.
Many L&D professionals, Slade noted, are guilty of investing significant time into a training program when implementing a best practice, for example, would be a more effective solution. One reason e-learning fails is because a training course was not the right solution for the performance issue. Other reasons e-learning programs aren’t effective is because they often are not designed for how people learn nor to show them what they need to do.
To avoid creating virtual experiences that fall flat, determine the learning outcomes and then link those outcomes to the appropriate learning objects. Learning outcomes can include transfer of knowledge or information, practice of tasks or behaviors, and application of tasks or behaviors. For example, if your goal is to provide just-in-time performance support for a group of employees, this is not the time for role play. More ideal training objects to support that goal could include video tutorials, job aids, and the like.
Slade also reminded session participants that there are certain things that a training program cannot fix. Knowledge and skills, for example, are areas where learning can make a difference. However, if the performance issue is centered on motivation or environment, those fall outside the scope of a training course’s influence. At the end of the day, Slade said that having a clear understanding of the performance issue is how you avoid developing learning solutions for nonlearning problems that ultimately waste everyone’s time.