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Case Studies Boost Credibility During Interviews and on the Job

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Online Learning Success: The Critical Role of the Engagement Champion

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This edition of TD magazine features theme articles focused on cultural awareness and inclusion. Other articles explore instructional design, data mining, negotiation, and much more.

October 2024 - TD Magazine

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ATD asked members of its executive leader consortium CTDO Next how having a psychologically safe culture has driven innovation within their organizations. Here are their stories.

Psychological Safety: Cultivating Belonging and Driving Innovation

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Various ways learning structures, tools, techniques, and conceptual frameworks can help you catalyze results and enhance a performance culture. 

From WHY to Practice: The Role of Learning When Building a Performance Culture 

These suggestions will help prepare you to ask for the raise you deserve.

How to Get a Raise

An organization’s perception of performance management affects how it fosters growth. Performance management, however, is often reduced to a box-checking exercise a few times a year that is misaligned with both employee and business goals. What’s missing? True alignment among employees, managers, and the performance management process, facilitated by HR professionals.When performance management shifts toward collaboration, empowerment, and development, it transforms into a powerful catalyst for growth, accountability, and shared success. But such a shift requires guidance and intentional effort from performance management professionals, those uniquely positioned to lead this change.Applying a Librarian Analogy to Performance ManagementLet’s begin with a simple analogy: Imagine a student, a library, and a librarian.The student has goals and the freedom to choose what they want to learn. They are also accountable, however, for milestones like homework and tests. While a good teacher can guide them, much of their learning happens outside the formal classroom. To grow, the student must proactively seek knowledge.The library is a space full of knowledge, open to the public, and stocked with books, resources, and opportunities for learning and growth. It’s a place for personal development and entertainment, but only if an individual chooses to engage with its resources. The library provides the environment, but it’s up to the individual to take advantage of it.The librarian represents the human element. More than just a guardian of books, they are a guide who helps learners make the most of their time. With expertise in the available resources, the librarian can offer recommendations, but they cannot force individuals to read or engage with the materials.The workplace is like the library—full of opportunities for growth and development. Like a library, it only serves those who choose to make use of it. The organization can offer tools for success, but employees must take the initiative to engage and grow.Likewise, the student represents employees. Just like students in a library, employees control their journeys within an organization. They can explore opportunities, ask questions, engage with resources, and choose how to grow and develop within the organization’s environment. If they decide to misuse the space, there’s only so much the library—or the organization—can do to help them succeed.Finally, performance management plays the role of the librarian. Librarians help readers find the right books just as an organization’s performance management function should guide employees toward growth opportunities that align with their professional goals. Performance management creates a framework for discovery and development, much like a librarian helps individuals navigate their options and find the book that best suits their needs. This is where the disconnect lies. Too often, performance management is viewed as a top-down process rather than a partnership between an employee and their organization. Reimagining Performance Management in Your OrganizationHR and performance management professionals who aspire to guide employees toward meaningful growth must:Build a deep understanding of the business, its people, and its priorities. Review organizational goals, objectives and key results (OKRs), and strategies to understand where the business is headed and the skills and experiences required. Meet with leaders and teams to get to know them and how their roles interplay and contribute to the organization’s success.Focus on transparency and alignment to foster collaboration. Create opportunities for open dialogue by offering focus sessions and leveraging employee resource groups. Actively gather feedback from employees and managers to understand their needs and expectations. Clear communication fosters trust, alignment, and an increased understanding of performance management.Leverage knowledge of the business to reevaluate your processes. Use data-driven insights to tailor performance management processes to suit the unique timing and priorities of your stakeholders. Recognize that one size does not fit all. Be creative and adapt your approach to best fit your organization’s culture and goals.Much like the librarian, your role as an HR professional is to curate an environment rich with resources and opportunities for employees to explore. By fostering trust, offering guidance, and encouraging ownership, you can create a system that empowers employees to take charge of their development. By leading this transformation, you can turn performance management into a system that not only measures success but actively drives it. Are you ready to lead this shift?

Performance Management: A Librarian’s Approach to Growth and Accountability

In today’s world, leadership ideas are shifting, challenging long-standing practices. The traditional “command and control” style, where leaders make all the decisions, is being replaced by trust and collaboration. Leaders are now moving away from micromanagement and embracing team autonomy. If you’re responsible for leadership training, it’s important to understand how adopting these new approaches early can have a big impact.Let’s break it down.A Lesson From Science: Big Ideas That Change EverythingTo understand the impact of big ideas in leadership, consider how major scientific breakthroughs transformed the world. For example:Galileo and Newton described how objects move through space and time.Maxwell and Lorentz built on their work, showing that the speed of light is constant regardless of how an observer moves.Einstein then developed his famous theory of relativity, leading to the discovery that a small amount of mass could be turned into enormous energy—this led to nuclear energy.These ideas didn’t come overnight, but their impact has been profound. Nuclear energy, for example, reshaped international politics and power dynamics, with countries that control nuclear energy gaining major advantages.How This Applies to LeadershipJust like those big scientific ideas, leadership is undergoing a transformation. For years, leaders have managed teams through strict top-down control. Leaders gave orders, and teams followed them. But this old way of leading is giving way to something new.The emerging leadership model is based on:Trust and Interdependence: Instead of controlling everything, leaders are learning to trust their teams to make decisions at the right levels.Clear Goals: Teams and leaders agree on measurable goals, and everyone is accountable for achieving them.Collaboration: Leaders work with their teams to make decisions, rather than just giving orders.A “Speak-Up” Culture: Leaders encourage open communication, knowing the best ideas can come from anywhere.Belonging Over Conformity: Leaders focus on building a sense of belonging within the team, instead of forcing everyone to fit a mold.This shift allows teams to make decisions faster, avoid micromanagement, and reduce internal politics. As a result, teams led by transformational leaders are far more productive.Why Leaders Should Adopt These New IdeasJim Collins, in his book Good to Great, describes transformational leaders as “Level 5” leaders. These leaders drive extraordinary results by empowering their teams through trust and accountability. The benefits of adopting these new leadership approaches are clear:Faster Decision Making: Routine decisions happen quickly because they’re made by the people closest to the situation.Less Bureaucracy: Reducing administrative overhead means less time wasted on politics or approval processes.Increased Productivity: Teams thrive when they have autonomy and a clear vision to guide them.Creating a Transformational Leadership Training ProgramTransformational leadership training involves more than just teaching concepts. It requires a strategic approach that encourages new behaviors and practices. There are four pillars to an effective training program:Set Goals
Teach leaders to understand the big-picture qualitative outcomes they’re after—and the metrics they will use to define progress transparently. Leaders must learn how to set team goals collaboratively and ensure individual goals are deeply aligned.Identify Barriers
Barriers can be external factors like market trends and technological disruption—or internal factors like team dynamics and individual habits. Leaders must learn how to create an environment for honest, sometimes difficult, conversations.Change Behavior 
Teach leaders to treat every change as an experiment and encourage teams to change together—creating an environment that nurtures progress patterns. Lasting team momentum requires individual understanding and consent. It can be inspired, but not coerced.Evaluate Results
Show leaders how to guide their teams in continually comparing performance against metrics, updating goals and experiments based on clear evidence.By implementing these pillars, you can help your leaders transition from traditional command-and-control styles to transformational leadership, significantly enhancing your organization’s productivity.

New Rules in Leadership: Overcoming Toxic Command and Control

What makes this world so complex? Is it globalization with all the information we are bombarded with daily? Or is it the sheer number of interconnected relationships across the world? In many ways, it’s both and so much more.Not only are leaders constantly pressured to make decisions with incomplete information, but they also have to face the flow of information from their teams to the global world. Nothing is secret anymore and customers and shareholders make judgements based on information, hearsay, and more.How can leaders navigate this minefield?The Both/And MindsetAs this newspaper article on how today’s complexity is different explains, we no longer have a focal point in today’s decisions. Moreover, no one can fully understand the multiple interrelations in our complex system. Naturally, this makes most leaders nervous, and a normal reaction is to try to hold onto the familiar. So, many try to break problems down into parts and solve them in isolation.In fact, as this HBR article on How Successful Leaders Think says, a wiser approach is to look at a problem holistically. That means getting as many of the parts together to see how they all fit.Wisdom then lies in the ability to step back and see connecting patterns that can drive innovative solutions.A useful way to think of this is by adopting a both/and mindset.A both/and mindset instead of an either/or approach allows for innovative solutions:Complex systems often hold conflicting demands. Linear thinking can push us to, for example, prioritize individuals over teams or cost over quality. Alternatively, analyze the bigger picture and reflect on all possible cause and effect loops.Let go of either/or thinking. Sometimes it’s tempting to choose cost over quality, but instead, shift your mindset to leverage the benefits of both sides.Practice observing multiple truths. As people, we are all different, but deep down, we are the same. So, practice finding the common ground in all viewpoints.Nurture Empathy As we explained in our blog on how to stop failing at leadership development, leadership isn’t about just building competencies in one person.Today’s leadership development needs to cover both relational and individual aspects. That means giving current and future leaders stretch experiences—new ways of making sense of them and strong diverse networks, as explained in this paper on vertical development.As leaders then mature and evolve away from black and white thinking, they understand themselves better, which leads to greater empathy. Gradually, they gain the ability to hold conflicting stakeholder views more easily.They therefore become more intuitive in leveraging the minds and abilities of those around them to transform conflict and uncertainty into beneficial solutions for all.Nurture empathy and deep understanding to create interdependent teams that drive decisions:Balance emotions and thoughts. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated, the best decisions come from combining both logic and emotions. Leaders need to connect and listen to both.Connect with diverse networks—the more backgrounds we interact with, the more our empathy grows as we gain a wider understanding of the human condition.Explore the ego’s impact. Book clubs, the new corporate classroom, are a powerful way to explore both the ego and decision making for the greater good. Read this paper on transforming organizations through books to learn more.Final Thoughts on Supporting Leaders in Decision MakingAs the world becomes more systemic, we too must operate more systemically. Wise leaders know they don’t know everything, so they tap into the collective wisdom to gather all the parts. From there, they look for the big picture and potential solutions.Together, we can all let go of either/or thinking and move into both/and thinking, where we explore the gray of the world.As such, we need to connect with diverse people whilst deeply exploring the ego’s needs and how it affects our decisions. Let’s also remember to tune into empathy and our sense of playfulness.Or as Carl Jung would say, “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” And after all, decisions create something new.