The Mind Tools L&D Podcast

How can we help managers demonstrate care for their teams, while maintaining high standards of accountability and performance?

In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Dr Anna Barnett are joined by Joris Merks-Benjaminsen, Managing Without Power, to discuss:

• why nice managers can still provide mediocre management
• how managers can balance care for their teams with high levels of performance
• and how to build better managers.

For more from Joris, visit managingwithoutpower.com

The paper Anna discussed, on 'nondecision-making', was: Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1963). Decisions and nondecisions: An analytical framework. American political science review, 57(3), 632-642.

Google's research into great managers (Project Oxygen) and effective teams (Project Aristotle) is available online.

During the discussion, Joris referenced the prisoner's dilemma.

We also discussed findings from our report, 'Building Better Managers'.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Anna recommended Those People Next Door by Kia Abdullah.

Joris discussed Sinterklaas.

Ross G discussed 'sovereign AI'.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work. And our new Manager Skills Assessment.

You can also email [email protected] and Ross G will get back to you.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Dr Anna Barnett
• Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

Are you an over-committing over-achiever? In Toxic Productivity, author Israa Nasir argues that you can only maintain that approach to productivity for so long. 

Eventually you’ll burn out, exhausted by all those ‘time management hacks’ that organizations (like Mind Tools!) keep suggesting.  

So this week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Israa joins Ross Dickie and Ross Garner to offer an alternative approach. We discuss: 

• how toxic productivity manifests in our lives 

• how getting rewarded for our productivity tricks us into trying to achieve more 

• how the signals that managers send sets expectations for their teams. 

The book, by Israa Nasir, is Toxic Productivity. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross D recommended checking out the NotebookLM AI-podcast version of our newsletter. 

Israa recommended the ‘Under the K’ venue in New York. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Ross Garner 

• Israa Nasir 

Learning measurement is difficult, complex, and expensive. Or is it? 

In Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring, Dr Alaina Szlachta applies a Build-Borrow-Buy approach to learning measurement, and joins The Mind Tools L&D Podcast this week to share her insights with Ross Dickie and Owen. 

We discuss: 

• the importance of asking the right questions 

• how to bake measurement into your programs 

• what ‘Build’, ‘Borrow’ and ‘Buy’ look like in practice. 

Find out more about Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring. 

You can also sign up for the book launch party, or sign up for Alaina’s newsletter.  

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Owen Ferguson 

• Dr Alaina Szlachta 

Measuring management capability is intrinsically complex. Unlike sales training, where you have sales, or customer-service training, where you have CSAT scores, management doesn’t have a built-in metric we can use to quantify learning impact. So, what’s the solution? 

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Dickie is joined by Owen and Anna to discuss our new ‘Manager Skills Assessment’ — a scientific diagnostic that managers and their organizations can use to evaluate their capability. We discuss: 

• what the Manager Skills Assessment (MSA) is, and how it works; 

• how we designed the MSA based on scientific research; 

• what managers and L&D teams can expect to get out of the MSA. 

To learn more about the Manager Skills Assessment, visit our website. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen mentioned SpaceX’s ‘Mechazilla’. 

Ross D also referenced Donald Taylor and Egle Vinauskaite’s latest report, AI in L&D: Intention and Reality. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Owen Ferguson 

• Anna Barnett 

If you work in learning and development, you probably get some direction from your senior leadership team about what to focus on and how much to spend. But, once you get into the details, you have lots of room to play.

In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Chief Learning Officer Marc Steven Ramos joins Ross Garner and Ross Dickie to discuss:

·       the strengths and weaknesses of different genAI tools

·       whether tools like ChatGPT are living up to the hype

·       how L&D can start experimenting, and why it’s the ideal team to do so!

Marc discussed these ideas in more detail on his Substack and in his article for Harvard Business Review (with Marc Zao-Sanders).

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross G recommended a warning on ‘pokies’ from The Guardian.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer. 

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Garner

·       Ross Dickie

·       Marc Steven Ramos

In Power to the Middle, McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field argue that the ‘middle manager’ is key to organizational success. Long maligned (often by McKinsey), the manager is in fact responsible for delivering objectives, addressing underperformance, building trusting relationships, and resolving team conflicts.

In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Garner, Ross Dick and Nahdia Khan discuss:

·       why managers are so important

·       the role of ‘manager’ vs ‘individual contributor’

·       how to develop better managers

The book, Power to the Middle, is available now.

Our report, ‘Building Better Managers’, is also available now.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross D recommended the podcast series Slow Burn.

Nahdia discussed cloud seeding.

Ross Garner discussed the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw, via @CulturalTutor.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer. 

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Garner

·       Ross Dickie

·       Nahdia Khan

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Garner and Ross Dickie are joined by Kathryn Hume, strategic workforce planning and L&D consultant, and author of the book Learn, Solve, Thrive.

In the book, Kath argues that learners have a responsibility for managing their own learning and outlines strategies that anyone can adopt to make that process easier.

We discuss:

·       why we can’t ‘wait around for someone to teach us’

·       some of the difficulties we experience when we try to learn

·       the relationship between workforce planning and training.

For more from Kath, visit her website: workforcetransformations.com.au

The book, Learn, Solve, Thrive, is available now.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer. 

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Garner

·       Ross Dickie

·       Kathryn Hume

It’s been three years since the first edition of The Learning and Development Handbook by Michelle Parry-Slater was published. In that time, a global pandemic, rise of AI, and shift to remote working, have transformed how we work.

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Michelle returns to the show to discuss the second edition of her book with Ross G.

We discuss:

• what has changed (and what hasn’t) since the first edition was published
• the evolving role of the modern learning professional
• whether it’s still possible to keep up with the rate of change.

During the discussion, Ross referenced Amazon’s decision to tell staff to go back to the office five days a week.

He also discussed the paper: Albarracín, D., Fayaz-Farkhad, B., & Granados Samayoa, J. A. (2024). Determinants of behaviour and their efficacy as targets of behavioural change interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1-16.

To find out more about Michelle, visit kairosmodernlearning.com

For the book, check out thelndhandbook.com

Quite note: Apologies for the slightly dodgy audio on this episode. After 400+ episodes, Ross G can still pick the wrong microphone to record.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription.

This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer. 

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Michelle Parry-Slater

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Garner and Ross Dickie are re-visiting their L&D mailbag to answer your questions.  

We discuss: 

• What is L&D actually doing well with Large Language Models? (via Gill Chester) 

• What’s the top 3 least likely L&D jobs to be replaced by AI? (via Alan Hiddleston) 

• How can learning teams partner better with the rest of the org? (via Sarah Danzl) 

• What has been the most popular content on MindTools this year, and why...? (via Adam Lacey) 

• What lessons from Centauri's Shadow can L&D professionals take forward into the autumn to boost their skills? (via Matthew Batten) 

During the AI discussion, Ross Dickie recommended Ross Stevenson’s Steal These Thoughts newsletter, and Philippa Hardman’s Dr Phil’s Newsletter. 

Ross G referenced The Rest is Politics’s interview with Audrey Tang. 

Ross Ganer also recommended our previous episode with Natal Dank, ‘Agile L&D puts the “human” into “Human Resources”’, and his own newsletter on the many benefits of text content. 

Finally, Ross Dickie recommended Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex. 

And Ross Garner grudgingly referenced his own debut novel, Centauri’s Shadow, available now from Amazon UK and Amazon US. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer.  

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Garner 

• Ross Dickie 

Hey listeners! No new episode this week, but we wanted to revisit this 2022 classic with Jane Bozarth because we thought it paired nicely with the latest edition of our L&D Dispatch newsletter.

Do check out the newsletter Ross G discussed on our L&D Dispatch page, 'Four papers that will make you laugh (then make you think)'.

Regular show notes below.

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In learning science, there are certain ideas that have leapt the fences of academia and seeped into the public consciousness. Often, these ideas gain traction because they feel intuitively true. But what does the data say? And how should we apply these ideas as learning professionals? 

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Garner and Ross Dickie are joined by Jane Bozarth, Director of Research for the Learning Guild, to discuss three research papers that challenge the received wisdom. We cover: 

• Generational difference
• Learning styles 
• The “Marshmallow Test”. 

The three papers we discussed were:

• 'Generational Differences in Work-Related Attitudes: A Meta-analysis', published in 2012 in the Journal of Business and Psychology. 
• 'Another Nail in the Coffin for Learning Styles? Disparities among Undergraduate Anatomy Students’ Study Strategies, Class Performance, and Reported VARK Learning Styles', published in 2018 in Anatomical Sciences Education. 
• 'Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes', published in Psychological Science in 2018. 

The Atlantic did a good write-up of the controversy surrounding the 'Marshmallow Experiment'. See here: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmallow-test/561779/ 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross Garner mentioned a Twitter thread from Aaron Berman, in which he shares writing tips from his time as editor of the US President’s daily brief: https://twitter.com/aarondberman/status/1541576231891525633?s=21&t=1_oHB0tqjbt4VXZXmTMnXQ 

Jane spoke about Kate the Chemist’s recent session at DevLearn. To find out more about Kate, visit her website: https://www.katethechemist.com/ 

Ross Dickie recommended the technology podcast ‘Hard Fork’ from the New York Times. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, or through the NYT website: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podcasts/hard-fork-technology.html 

To find out more about Jane’s work at the Learning Guild, see: https://www.learningguild.com/ 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.    

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter:     

• Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT 
• Ross Dickie - @RossDickieMT 
• Dr Jane Bozarth - @JaneBozarth