Leading On Learning (Part 1)
During my research I stumbled across a useful PDF booklet published by the UK Campaign For Learning entitled “Leading on Learning”. In this post I have extracted (and slightly re-ordered or [tweaked]) the sections of the document regarding “Overcoming Obstacles To Build A Learning Culture” which offer some great advice that I thought would be useful to share. In a later post I'll be covering some of the other useful advice.
You can download the full document for yourself at:
Campaign For Learning - Leading On Learning PDF Booklet
Summary: Culture Comes From The Top
There’s an important role for leaders to play in creating and endorsing a learning culture. Put simply: to see change adopted within a company, leaders must first endorse and start exhibiting the mindset and behaviours they’d like to see from those around them. The creation of a learning culture then benefits employee retention, motivation and productivity across the board.
Tim Simpson
3rd May, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini
Overcoming Obstacles To Build A Learning Culture
The challenges of the 21st century global economy require a workforce who are continually curious and keen to develop and learn. Some employees will be more motivated than others to meet this challenge.
Managers Have A Big Part To Play
Managers [including team leaders] have a big part to play in building a learning culture and linking the organisation’s most important assets, its people, to its goals and objectives. The organisation’s future success is directly linked to staff development and capability.
Building a learning culture requires the creation of an environment where learning and development are respected, supported and expected and where the benefits to the individual are made open and clear. It’s not something that can be left to individuals to just do for themselves [although there is a tendency to rely on this happening!].
Through strong leadership and small changes, obstacles can be overcome to build a learning culture.
Talk About People’s Development – Often
Open communication between manager and staff is the key to a productive working relationship. This includes discussing skills, knowledge and areas for further development. Have a conversation with staff before and after development activities. Make sure you always present any sort of development in a positive light, as an opportunity for the individual and the team, rather than as something to remedy a problem or something imposed by senior management.
Recognise And Validate Staff’s Learning And Development
Positive behaviour (in this case, continuous learning) is strengthened through acknowledgement and praise. When you notice how someone has improved as a result of a specific development opportunity – tell him or her and make it explicit how the improvement links back to the learning.
Leaders Must “Walk The Talk”
Leaders must consider their own development needs and take action. When people see that personal development is important to all levels and job roles within an organisation they will be more likely to engage in it themselves.
Nominate A Champion
Learning champions [I’m one] are people in the workplace who promote learning and development to their peers. Ask a member of staff who is interested in Learning and Development or has benefitted from it recently – there will always be at least one! Communicating the benefits or learning through word of mouth and personal experiences is very powerful.
Build A Common Language
Have a clear understanding of the difference between learning and training. Your team need to know that training is one of the many ways to learn and that learning is taking place every day in all sorts of formal and informal ways.
Explain why
If you ask your team members to attend training, they need to understand why they need that particular skill / knowledge and how it will benefit them. After they have done the training, they need early opportunities to put it into practice or many of the benefits may be lost.
Tasters
If you have reluctant learners, think about using fun and bite-sized learning that is not directly related to work (e.g. holiday Spanish) to get them engaged. Research shows that a positive learning experience is a key motivator to continue learning.
Use What You Do Already
You can also enable learning that doesn’t rely on time and money by using what you do currently on a day-to-day basis to create a learning environment:
- What activities and events already exist that you can use more productively?
- Identify some of your key partners / external relationships that you could approach to share learning.
- Identify current areas of good practice that you can build on.
- Use team meetings and away-days for brain storming, creative thinking or team quizzes.
- Use one-to-one meetings to discuss what staff might have learned from the previous week’s work or current project.
- Always use appraisal meetings to discuss learning and development planning.
Build On Relationships
Once a month, invite one of your partners or stakeholders to give a presentation and question and answer session at work. You may only need to spend the cost of tea and coffee. Set up shadowing partnerships where staff can learn from each other. This can lead to better understanding of what other employees do and result in more productive joint working. [We do this every day through our departmental daily stand-up run by a different team each day.]
Encourage Staff Input
Following development opportunities, ask staff to write a short paragraph listing the best thing about the course, the most important thing that they’ve learned already and whether they would recommend the experience to others. Ask people to share the key things they have learned at team meetings.
It’s Basically All About Getting People Engaged And Enthused
A learning culture doesn’t happen overnight but your actions and attitude will make a huge difference to how learning and development is perceived.
To engage with your staff really effectively, remember to:
Give People Choice
People have different learning preferences, rates of learning and areas of interest. Why restrict people’s learning and development to their job skills? Help them learn and develop in areas that they will find interesting and they will quite naturally become more positive, productive and valuable to your organisation. Offer relevant learning in as many ways as you can.
Focus On Learning, Not Training
Talk about learning rather than courses. People respond to appropriate learning because:
- It benefits and interests them.
- It helps them to grow and to develop their natural abilities.
- It helps them to make a difference.
- It helps them to feel good about themselves and their work.
Learning describes a person growing, whereas training describes and commonly represents a transfer of knowledge or skill for organisational gain. Point out how learning takes place naturally as part of people working together e.g. someone showing a colleague a shortcut on the computer or a quicker way to complete a process. Learning and development is key to effective and motivated staff. It’s also key to you as a manager being effective and motivated. Learning should be fun, fulfilling and shared.
Building A Learning Culture "To Do" List
To do:
- Ask your learning and development manager to run L&D drop-in sessions.
- Run regular presentations and coffee mornings.
- Organise staff days which include L&D sessions.
- Use existing meetings, one-to-ones, appraisals, team meetings etc. for learning and sharing.
- Use your stakeholders and partners for quick presentations and question and answer sessions.
- Ask your line managers to publicise their own learning courses / what they do.
- Ask staff to share their learning.
- Be really careful about what learning is / means and includes.
- Develop a network of learning champions.
- Publicise and promote development opportunities in a regular and consistent format.
- Create an environment of trust – people are rewarded for trying.
- Promote knowledge sharing as an expectation not a bonus.
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