L&D Spotlight

In this episode, we explore the best strategy for L&D to create and deploy leadership learning programs with a realistic reach and influence and what type of work the company's leaders have to do to adopt healthy leadership behaviors throughout the entire organization successfully.

Guest: Andrei Postolache, Founder at Xeriously, leadership and soft skills consultant focused on the IT industry, author of "Fun & Fearless Leadership".

Highlights:
* Leadership is more nurture than nature; virtually anyone can develop their leadership skills.
* Leaders come in all shapes and sizes: charismatic, quiet, deliberative, introverted; not every leadership style works in every situation.
* Companies can support leadership development through formal and informal learning interventions and opportunities. Most companies will settle on a hybrid approach.
* Formal leadership programs are most necessary when a company is trying to reset its values and kickstart a new leadership journey.
* It takes months and even years for a company to see significant lasting changes in its leadership culture. This is especially true for large companies or situations where a radical culture change is needed. A relevant example is Nokia's failure to change its culture before running out of time and resources.
* A problem with leadership programs is that they are not persistent enough and not integrated with the rest of the culture.
* The organization leaders' task is to show to employees that they're consistently embodying, promoting, and supporting a change for the better.
* Cutting corners on culture will send the wrong message to employees.
* Improvements in leadership are hard or sometimes impossible to measure objectively. It's mostly a matter of observing, over time, if positive changes in culture are noticeable by both leaders and employees.
* L&D should be part of the leadership team and take part in the decision-making process when deciding to implement new programs.
* L&D does the bulk of the work of understanding the organization, creating leadership development strategies, planning activities, and creating/curating learning content.
* The leadership team, through its example, can make or break the success of any leadership development initiative.
* Having the right kind of culture and leadership mentality in the company is the number one job of the CEO.
* "The culture of a company is defined by the worst things leadership is willing to tolerate." - found in "School Culture Rewired" by Steve Grunaert and Todd Whitaker, as well as in a podcast episode on How to Build an Inclusive Workplace by Adam Grant.

How to start developing leadership learning programs:
1. Define the vision of the intended to-be leadership behaviors you plan to develop.
2. Break down the newly defined vision into values, then competencies and skills.
3. Create learning opportunities to promote and develop these skills.
4. Start with a pilot, then showcase the results to leadership. The company's leadership team is an internal customer of L&D, alongside learners.
5. Arm yourself with patience, as leadership development is a long-term endeavor.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we look at the relationship between leadership, failure, psychological safety, and the effect these have on a company's stability, growth, and ability to innovate.

Guest: Andrei Postolache, Founder at Xeriously, leadership and soft skills consultant focused on the IT industry, author of "Fun & Fearless Leadership".

Highlights:
* Failure is neither always bad nor always good. When understood and internalized adequately, failure is an excellent tool for progress.
* Failure is an essential component in an individual's leadership development journey.
* The larger a company is, the higher its organizational inertia to maintain its current working style. The more risk-averse this company is, the harder it is to encourage employees' day-to-day innovation initiatives.
* Society-changing innovation more frequently comes from outliers, people, and organizations outside of a particular industry, not from established companies within that industry.
* But it is possible, even for huge organizations, to implement frameworks for micro-innovations coming from any employees.
* Two exciting reads on innovation, leadership, and effective management are Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations.
* The Great Resignation, though it did negatively affect many people worldwide, also has an upside. It's made employees realize the importance of finding a workplace where they are respected as individuals with fresh ideas a willingness to express themselves and take risks in a psychologically safe work environment. As a result, it's forcing employers who want to keep their workforce to revisit the opportunities and space they offer their employees to contribute.
* A workplace isn't, however, a platform for self-expression, but a place where people go to achieve professional, company-focused goals. Employees can and should expect to have the space to be themselves, but it all happens within the context of reaching their work-related objectives.
* Psychological safety and innovation go hand in hand; a toxic work environment, where the fear of failure, criticism, or ridicule stifles new ideas, will not be conducive to innovation.
* Google's early innovation-oriented model, the 80/20 Rule, is a good example of actively creating a specific framework to encourage innovation.

How to de-risk innovation and make space for people to contribute:
1. Psychological safety is the basis of an innovative workplace culture
2. Be specific about the innovation initiatives you want to implement
3. Allocate resources and make sure they don't get redistributed or lost
4. Failure is a natural potential outcome and shouldn't be punished
5. The ownership of failure falls on the shoulders of leadership

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we tackle a notion that has become a buzzword in recent years but is still sometimes misunderstood: Leadership. We're looking at defining leadership, how it ties into company culture and what mistakes we commonly see leaders and organizations make.

Guest: Andrei Postolache, Founder at Xeriously, leadership and soft skills consultant focused on the IT industry, author of "Fun & Fearless Leadership".

Highlights:
* Leadership is a fundamental human behavior whose purpose is to help us become organized around a specific objective. It is a way for us to "do things together".
* Leadership is as much about the individual as it is about the team; it only exists in a context where people work together to reach a specific goal.
* Leadership manifests both when someone takes charge of a situation and when that individual purposefully steps back and lets someone else steer.
* Both micro-managing and too much laissez-faire are approaches that are not good leadership examples. Healthy leadership sits somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.
* A good leader is both an idealist and a pragmatic.
* The size of an organization influences the reach of a leader. Within a small team, it's easy to align on values and debate decisions. In a large company, however, the leader rarely comes in direct contact with their employees. This forces the leader to implement effective, mass communication methods to keep people informed about and aligned to company values.
* Difficult situations are when the company culture is put to the test. Employees will internalize how leaders behave in these situations as company culture.
* If leaders aren't consistent between how they advertise their values and how they act when their values are tested, people become disengaged and will ultimately leave the organization.
* Most organizations fail at the implementation stage. Leaders must embody the values they promote without cutting corners to improve company culture. Any sign of compromise will create a ripple effect within the organization and make people doubt their reasons for being a part of that team.

Leadership How-To in 3 basic steps:
1. Leadership starts at the top: the leader's behavior sets the tone for company culture
2. Leadership requires effective communication: sending the appropriate message is crucial for value alignment
3. Choose one value and promote it relentlessly to the organization; the beneficial effects of upholding that particular value will overspill into other areas of the business

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we talk about cohort-based learning: what it is, what situations it's most suitable for, and some of this method's shortcomings.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* Cohorts are a method of offering knowledge to the same group of people synchronously, over a pre-defined amount of time, until the delivery goal has been reached. It's very similar to how formal education is currently offered to children and young adults.
* This teaching style has become the default method since the Industrial Revolution, as explained by Sir Ken Robinson in his RSA talk on changing education paradigms. In his speech, he highlights how this teaching paradigm no longer serves current and future generations of children; this finding is also relevant for adult learning. There's a fun animation based on this talk that you can watch here.
* It's hard to make a case for offering cohort-based learning programs in general. The potential, apparent benefits of learning synchronously (for example, relying on your peers to keep up with the class and stay engaged in the learning process) are offset by each individual's need for a personalized learning experience. The reality is that each person has their preferences and style of acquiring knowledge, which sits at the core of self-directed learning.

When to use cohort-based learning programs:
1. Particular situations where a group of people with the same learning objectives and level of knowledge/skill must go through a learning activity with a well-defined goal in mind.
2. Some examples include compliance scenarios or situations when your organization launches new products or services and must quickly bring its employees up to speed.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we take a look at nudges in the context of L&D and see how an organization can put in place such a tool to enable positive behavior change.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" shows us that humans are irrational creatures who rely on two systems to make decisions. If adopting a new behavior requires too much cognitive power from the brain, it will default to the so-called fast system, which is biased and unreliable, thus failing to change.
* Nudges are a tool that enables easier behavior change by removing decision-making friction with the help of choice architecture. Richard H. Thaler explains this in further detail in his book "Nudge".
* Humu has a ready-to-use library of nudges for the workplace that L&Ds can use to kickstart their work with nudges in their organizations.
* There is no specific time frame in which people form new habits, as previously thought. It's simply a question of how long it takes to make the new behavior automatic, thus no longer requiring the slow system to burn too much energy to execute.
* Nudges should be subtle enough not to distract the recipient's attention, which means that nudges must be very well immersed in the person's work context not to become spam.
* Nudges are more effective than formal training or eLearning for impactful behavior change. Still, they should be part of a complex ecosystem that contains communities of practice, mentoring, knowledge sharing sessions, coaching, and other L&D methods. No one L&D method in isolation is sufficient to produce long-term, lasting results.

How to start working with nudges in your organization:
1. Start with behaviors that you already measure in employee engagement surveys or the 360 feedback process and develop campaigns relevant to this context.
2. Put in place nudge campaigns for specific cohorts and, once implemented, determine how much of the campaign was observed by employees through interviews and data analysis. Remember that nudges are subtle by design, so lack of feedback might mean one of two things: either the information was received but not remembered, or it was not acknowledged at all.
3. Observe changes in behavior by way of data gathered to see if the cohorts exposed to nudges exhibit a different behavior to those not exposed.
4. Remember that you must personalize nudges to the employees' context; otherwise, they risk becoming overbearing and ineffective.
5. Experiment, iterate and learn from the data you're gathering to understand how many nudges are just enough to start producing results without becoming a distraction.
6. Some nudge mechanisms might require a lot of time and resources to implement, so start small and gradually build your business case to expand this new tool to new, more complex behavior change goals.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io. 

In this episode, we look at how L&D can showcase its value in the business and speak to decision-making stakeholders.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* The L&D team typically sits between two business environment extremes. One side is when L&D is entirely disconnected from the business's objectives and metrics. The other one is when L&D is a true business partner and actively contributes to improving these metrics.
* L&D should take specific action to measure the impact and effectiveness of learning programs and find out ways to promote these positive results.
* L&D can invest time and effort into getting closer to the business, understand the language, immerse itself in the operational departments to understand their context.
* Having a separate L&D thread from business objectives like revenue streams or cost optimization is the single most negatively impactful activity for L&D's image.
* Showcasing L&D value to the business is a gradual, slow process, as it has to do with other stakeholders' behavior and perception change - not different from the process of learning itself.
* An excellent L&D professional is brave and assertive in promoting the value of their team and knowledge.
* The essential factor that L&D brings is the deep knowledge and understanding of adult learning principles. L&D is the expert here, and this is where it can make the most significant contribution.
* Doing a premortem analysis before launching a new learning program or technology is the best way to prepare for a conversation with decision-making stakeholders.
* L&Ds must keep their consultant hat on when speaking to business stakeholders, making sure they consistently ask the right questions, then measure the impact of L&D programs and feed it back to the business.

Reasons why the business might not fully understand the value of L&D:
- L&D is not trying enough to prove value by showcasing good examples or metrics to the business.
- L&D is not speaking the business language and does not have common points on which to relate to the business.
- The business does not have a formal learning culture and only relies on informal learning interactions.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we look at situations when L&D is not the right solution for performance or accuracy problems identified by the business.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* Cathy Moore's flowchart is a good starting point to help guide L&D professionals in understanding whether knowledge or skill acquisition can solve a specific business problem - as seen in Offbeat Issue #64
* The business will likely come to L&D with a request for a training session or learning content when employee performance decreases or errors are identified.
* L&D's are better equipped than the business to identify if a learning intervention helps solve a problem by playing the role of a consultant.
* Asking the right questions is an excellent way to help the business identify the source of a problem.
* Especially in these situations, L&D can work together with people managers and operational teams to understand the root cause and identify an effective solution.
* If the business still insists on receiving a learning intervention, L&D must set the right expectations about the very limited expected impact of that intervention - advice coming from Anamaria Dorgo, founder and community catalyst of L&D Shakers and Butter.

L&D can showcase its value to the business by:
- putting in place a consistent consultancy process, which is especially important for more junior L&D roles
- interacting openly with all levels of the organization and asking for support in promoting the way L&D works, especially in hierarchical organizations.
- creating case studies from previous business situations, together with the alternative solution identified.
- advertise to everyone in the company, especially decision-makers, how adults learn, the time it takes to see behavior changes, the real impact of learning.

When is L&D not the solution?
- When documentation or procedures are not put in place or are incorrectly created, employees can't execute their tasks, which can seem like a performance issue.
- If employees don't feel safe or comfortable at work, they might have performance issues that don't come from a lack of knowledge or skill; in this case, even if a learning intervention is decided, it will likely not be effective. Learning is one of the first things compromised when there is no psychological safety in the workplace.
- Lack of resources, such as access to people, tools, or the right level of influence to unblock a problematic situation, which might hurt individuals' performance.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we explore the concept of Psychological Safety and understand its impact on team learning and organizational performance.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* Psychological Safety is the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or while making mistakes.
* Amy Edmonson's research paper sits at the basis of the concept of Psychological Safety as the main influencing factor in team effectiveness and learning.
* Google also did a research project called Aristotle on the same topic; they offer a framework and free tools for any organization to start fostering Psychological Safety in teams.
* Adam Grant and Melinda Gates put together an experiment at the Gates Foundation. They asked leaders to show vulnerability by talking about their mistakes to create a more welcoming and trusting work environment.
* Radical Candor by Kim Scott also touches on how leaders can create an open and honest working environment by showing people that they care personally while offering feedback or having difficult conversations.
* L&Ds can help create psychologically safe working environments in their organizations. First, by identifying issues with trust and belonging on the various teams they support, then by helping executives and team leaders understand the importance and effectiveness of being supporters and promoters of psychological safety on their teams.
* The absence of Psychological Safety prevents employees from focusing on learning since they're using their cognitive resources on workplace survival rather than acquiring new knowledge.
* The biology of how the brain works also supports this: learning and going through new experiences protects and improves the neurons' myelin sheath, enhancing cognitive function - more details about the science behind this in Amy Edmondson's book The Fearless Organization.

How to foster Psychological Safety:
- Leaders should show vulnerability to the organization
- Mistakes are seen as learning opportunities
- Showing concern for colleagues on a personal level
- Creating a sentiment of mutual trust and belonging within the team
- Encouraging people to step out of their comfort zone

What prevents Psychological Safety in the workplace:
- Public shaming or shaming in general.
- Punishing mistakes instead of recognizing effort made and focusing on points of improvement.
- Putting on a brave face even when it is unnecessary, for fear of being judged or ridiculed; not showing vulnerability.

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we take a look at Business Acumen: what does it mean in L&D, why it's essential to have this skillset, how it helps L&D professionals and organizations.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* Business Acumen is a combination of skills and knowledge that, summed up, explains how well an L&D professional understands the business they operate in. Having Business Acumen means understanding how that business makes money, what it spends money on and what drives business performance.
* L&D's role is to support business performance either by driving down cost or driving up revenue through skills and know-how development.
* Having Business Acumen builds organizational trust in L&D.
* L&Ds don't typically have this know-how for two main reasons: the main focus of L&Ds professionals is psychology-oriented, and the business' expectation of L&D is to execute upon request rather than to advise.
* To acquire Business Acumen, L&Ds can: expose themselves to the operational and financial teams' work, take part in projects to practice business-specific skills, or learn about the industry from external sources (i.e., domain research papers, articles, podcasts).
* Understanding business metrics and KPIs directly from operational and financial teams is essential for building them into effective learning interventions.
* Prototyping learning interventions together with operational and financial teams ensures a close connection between business growth and learning.
* Measuring the impact of a learning intervention is easier when you build business KPIs into learning program prototypes.
* Understanding what drives a domain, a business, or an employee is the best way to exercise the support role that L&D has towards an organization.

Business Acumen as a form of knowledge:
- Understanding the business model
- Knowing the drivers of profitability and cashflow
- Understanding the interdependencies of the various business functions

Business Acumen as a skill:
- Knowing how to act based on the information above
- Proposing and implementing L&D solutions that fit the need identifies
- Forecasting the impact of these solutions and measuring results

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.

In this episode, we take a quick dive into Future Skills: what they are, why they are relevant, who they are for and how to acquire future skills at your job.

Guest: Lavinia Mehedintu, People Experience Manager at eMAG and co-founder and curator of Offbeat.

Highlights:
* The accelerated adoption of technology and automation is affecting the way we work; Future Skills enable employees and companies to cope with these changes sustainably.
* With the pandemic as a catalyst for change towards digitization, the way organizations and people acquire skills has drastically changed.
* Current formal education is not preparing young people to deal with how complex life can be, both professionally and personally, as it is designed based on an industrial mindset. Learning is not personalized to the individual.
* People who now join the workforce can expect to change careers seven times over the course of their adult life.
* Future Skills are relevant for employees at any step of their career, not just for young people joining the workforce. It is not a matter of age but instead of experience and each individual's mindset.
* L&Ds can gauge the adoption and practice of Future Skills in the company by relying on People Analytics to track improvement in business metrics and behavior changes.
* People Analytics helps L&Ds measure access to learning resources, career growth opportunities, internal transfers, engagement, retention.
* More resources can be found by following Kevin Yates, Sam Allen, and software products that focus on People Analytics: Culture Amp, Lattice, Nifty Learning.

Future Skills essentials:
1. Adaptability, being able to welcome change
2. Intentional learning - shared by McKinsey in August of 2020 and updated with a practical guideline published here, as seen in Offbeat Issues #13 and #47
3. Growth mindset
4. Innovation, Resourcefulness
5. Data Awareness

To join the conversation or get in touch, reach out to Liz Stefan on LinkedIn or email liz[at]niftylearning.io.