Tag: Learning

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Learning Strategy

The Complete 5-Step Guide to Crafting a Learning Strategy

In today’s fast-paced corporate world, it’s so easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of tasks and objectives.

Everything is urgent and a priority, or so they tell you.

In my yearly strategy sessions I had one quote I’d share at the beginning of the meeting. I’d often plaster it in big letters across a whiteboard.

If you try to do everything for everybody. 𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲.

For learning and development (L&D), less is often more.

Let’s delve into why focusing on fewer, high-impact goals can lead to a more effective learning strategy for your organisation.

How to avoid the pitfall of overcommitment

Overcommitting is a common pitfall in L&D strategies.

We’ve all been there. Too eager to please that we forget to consider what we can actually achieve with the resources at our disposal for the coming year.

→ Never commit to anything until you know the tools in your kit.

Here’s a line I’ve used often “That sounds interesting, [name]. Let me take that away to see what we could do and come back to you with a solution.”

You’re neither saying no or yes.

This simply buys you time to conduct a deeper analysis vs a knee-jerk reaction because you want people to like you. You’re not going to be everyones cup of tea – deal with it.

Actionable Steps to avoid this:

  1. Resource Audit: Conduct an audit to understand the available resources—time, manpower, and budget at your disposal.

  2. Align with Business Goals: Consult with business leaders to align L&D objectives with organisational goals. You’re there to improve the bottom line, after all.

  3. Set Realistic Targets: Based on the audit and alignment, set achievable targets for the year.

The power of specificity

Too many strategies aren’t specific enough.

They often have some confusing vision statement and format that leaves senior leader bemused. Specificity is your unlock to being clear in what, why and how you will deliver performance to the organisation.

Here, you want to identify the most value-add tasks your team should invest in to improve employee performance.

Actionable Steps:

  1. Identify Key Metrics or OKRs: Work with business functions to identify key performance metrics that L&D should focus on.

  2. Task Mapping: Map out specific tasks or programs that can improve these metrics.

  3. Pilot Programs: Before a full-scale rollout, conduct pilot programs to test the efficacy of these tasks.

Prioritise value

Prioritisation is easier said than done, especially when every goal seems critical.

Everyone is going to tell you they they and their asks are the number one priority. You’re going to have to work on your poker face for each conversation.

In reality, you’ll find very few of these ask are even tasks you need to know about.

You’re job as a L&D pro is to bring context to these conversations.

You need to:

  • Cut through the noise of self-importance
  • Read between the lines of what is being solved for with these asks
  • Analyse how focus on an ask will impact the goals of the organisation

Conversations alone aren’t useful.

You’ll need to call on a host of tools to guide you through the web of prioritisation.

Actionable Steps:

  1. Skill Gap Analysis: Use surveys, interviews, and performance data to conduct a skill gap analysis

  2. Organisation Skills: Explore the skills the company needs to thrive today and for the future

  3. Senior leadership consulting: Utilise your performance consulting skills to identify real problems

Leverage the power of data to focus on the right stuff and support your recommendations.

Ideally, I recommend committing to no more than 3 – 5 big goals for the year.

Double Down for Growth

Focusing on ‘big plays’ is your best move for ROI.

Don’t get burnout by trying to do the small, medium and big things at the same time. That’s why our focus on prioritisation outlined above is so important.

When you align on the big 3 – 5 plays which will drive performance impact, it’s time to go all in on these.

Actionable Steps:

  1. ROI Calculation: For each task or program, calculate the expected ROI in terms of skill improvement, performance metrics, or business impact.

  2. Resource Allocation: Allocate more resources to high-ROI tasks.

  3. Continuous Monitoring: Use KPIs or OKRs to continuously monitor the performance of these projects.

The Danger of Reactivity

Being reactive means you’re always playing catch-up, never innovating.

You’re like one of those kittens with a ball of string. Totally adorable but distracted by any new shiny thing. You need to stick to the plan.

Through the course of the year curveballs will slap you in the face. It’s inevitable.

Part of your strategy should be to make peace with the fact they will happen. Trust me, it helps.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t shift gears if the world and business goals change. Your strategy is never fixed. It will always be fluid and adaptable to the important movements.

Here’s some activities to keep in mind.

Actionable Steps:

  1. Future Skill Mapping: Consult industry reports and internal business strategies to map out future skill needs.

  2. Proactive experience development: Develop learning programs that address these future skill needs.

  3. Regular updates: Keep the strategy updated with quarterly reviews to stay ahead of the curve. Yes, that means more of those leadership conversation’s you love.

Taking a proactive strategy anticipates future needs before they knock you off course.

You can’t be the ‘all-seeing eye of Mordor’ but you can keep your ear to the ground on the movements that matter. Which means you at least know when that slap in the face might come 😉.

Final thoughts

Crafting an effective learning strategy isn’t about huge lists of objectives that please everyone.

It requires focus, specificity, and a commitment to doing fewer things exceptionally well. By applying these principles, I’m sure you’ll set the stage for a year of meaningful growth, both for individual employees and the organisation.

→ I don’t offer a money back guarantee, btw

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Learning Strategy

What The CIA Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Learning Teams

The CIA Central Intelligence Agency is the aggregator of all intelligence for the USA.

They offer world-leading infiltration and espionage training and are on the cutting edge of their industry.

Their purpose is to collate and make sense of all intelligence to give decision-makers the key things they need to make important calls.

Continue reading “What The CIA Can Teach Us About Building High-Performing Learning Teams”
Categories
Career Development

3 Simple Actions For Explosive Career Growth This Year

Here’s 3 actions each of you can experiment with for career growth over the next 360-something days.

You might be thinking, why only 3 actions? 

Simple. Many of us try to do too much.

Going big or going home rarely works. Unless you want to invite burnout into your life.

Instead, you need to get specific.

👀 Contents

  1. Grow slowly to go far
  2. We’re playing an infinite game. Don’t play by finite rules
  3. Small tweaks lead to big changes – keep compounding change
  4. TL;DR:

The stereotypical lists of ‘20 things you want to change in x year’ are bad ideas.

I feel the anxious pressure in my muscles just thinking about trying that.

I’m not looking at 1000x growth here. I’m focusing on what you can do 2x better.

You gotta walk before you can run, after all.

I’ve spent the last two decades working with and researching high-performers.

Here are the 3 actions I notice 99% embrace.

Steal these 👇

An image of a slow sign

1/ Grow slowly to go far in your career

This is a hard one for many to get their head around.

People want everything now. But, the overnight success story is BS.

The best of the best focus on decades not days. We often look at the end product, not the long journey that paved the way for the current success.

This gives the false illusion of doing big things at pace.

There are outliers to this, of course. But, for the most part, the optimal method is to build slowly.

Some have done well at pace. Whilst others have seen their empires crumble. Often, we can attribute this to shaky foundations.

Speed can be great. 

But it needs strong foundations to scale properly. You can view your career in the same way.

You miss valuable learning opportunities if you move too fast through the ranks. Those same lessons can be the very things that stop you from performing in a role down the line.

So, don’t be mad if your journey is not going at breakneck speed.

This is not bad.

Think in decades. Not years, weeks or days. 

Your chances of doing well in the infinite space are bigger if you tread slowly. 

→ Good things take time and to those who work their assess off.

2/ You’re playing an infinite game. Don’t play by finite rules

I’m going to say it. 

You sabotage yourself with deluded expectations in finite timeframes.

If this sounds familiar, you’re using a finite strategy to play an infinite game.

Quick context. Finite = time-bound, Infinite = timeless.

We want too much too soon. Just as we discussed earlier, growth takes decades not days.

The infinite game is all about looking at the road 10, 15 or even 20 years ahead. The actions you take now are compounding towards that goal.

Sadly, too few think like this.

If they can’t get all the success, wealth and happiness in less than 6 months, they give up. 

This is a classic example of finite thinking in the infinite game. 

You can have all those things. Even more. Our time on this spinning rock is finite, but to reap the rewards is an infinite pursuit.

Instead, I encourage you to build micro-sprints across your time to reach your goals.

Think not just about short-term success, but long-term too.

3/ Compound change

You see the big changes.

But, do you recognise all the little changes that got you there? Perhaps, not.

We all fall into this trap. Especially at this time of year.

We sit down (or you can stand, your choice) to write goals for the next year.

You get excited because you feel this time it’s different.

With pen in hand and inspiration flowing through your body, you ravish your notebook (or google doc) with the big changes you want to make in the next 12 months.

When you finish, you look down to review the words staring back at you.

This is the place where 99% of us already give up. 

This is why ⬇️

  • The changes are too big – you’ll need years not months to achieve them.
  • You have too many – you find 20 + staring back at you, when you really need the 3 most impactful.
  • You’re not specific enough. Broad statements lead to ineffective goals. You want to lose weight, great – but how much? By when? And how?

Thinking big is important.

It just needs the right structure to turn your aspirations into reality.

Try this instead ↓

Be brutal about what you can achieve in x months

Keep your big goals, but break them down into manageable chunks. 

As an example, let’s say you want to be a writer. 

This is great. But your starting point is most important here. If you’ve never written a thing before, saying I’m going to write once a day every day for 365 days is stupid.

A better approach is to say I will write something 2-3 times a week and learn how to build a system to scale my writing.

I didn’t start writing every day all of a sudden.

I spent years breaking down the process and putting infrastructure in place so I could do this long-term.

Unrealistic expectations lead to the death of too many goals.

Prioritise value and impact

What do you think is better?

20 goals that you half-ass across 2023 and feel meh about or 3 goals that you accelerate in??

I’m going to go with the latter.

Don’t worry, this is a classic goal-setting sin. You’re in good company too.

Society has drilled in the stupid slogan of “Go big or go home”. It doesn’t work – end of story. 

I’d prefer “Big things come from small moments of discipline” But that’s not very motivational, ya know!

The point is lack of prioritisation kills our performance.

We all try to do too much too soon and at the same time. The human condition you could say.

Bruce lee said “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” 

In other words, stop adding in filler and do the stuff that’s more killer (h/t to Sum 41 there).

Look at your goals with a clinical eye

Grab your pen (or mouse or trackpad or even phone screen) and rank your goals from first to last of importance in achieving your big changes.

Done that? Great. Now cross off anything outside the top 3.

I’m all for investing in the small thing to do the big things. But, we must invest in the right small things.

Get clear on the what and how

You already know the driving ‘why’ behind your own goals. 

We won’t cover that in any more detail. We need to get clear on what we need to do and how we will do it in our little equation.

Here’s an example:

I want to lose weight is a bad example.

Why?

It’s vague, too broad and has no specificity.

Now let’s put it through our ‘make it better machine’.

“I want to lose 20 pounds by the 29th of June 2023. I’m going to join my local gym, seek advice on the best weight loss protocols and apply these in my day to day”.

Let’s expand on why this is better…

  1. It’s specific: You’re clear on what you want to do and by when.
  2. It’s action-oriented: You define how you’re going to do all of this with clear action steps.

Ok, let’s wrap this up, shall we?

TL;DR:

  • For explosive growth double down on less, not more.
  • Grow slowly to go far.
  • We’re playing an infinite game. Don’t play by finite rules.
  • Small tweaks lead to big changes – keep compounding change.

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

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Categories
L&D Tools Skills

The 5 Essential Skills, Habits and Behaviours for Career Success and How To Develop Them

We’re all looking for that silver bullet, right?

The thing or things that’ll let us accelerate past everyone else to reach our aspirations in record time.

Sadly, life doesn’t work that way, but we can recognise the key habits, behaviours and skills that’ll enable career success in the long term.

Especially with lifelong employability.

That’s not a phrase which is used often in the careers game. But, it’s what we’re all aiming for when you think about it.

We’re all just trying to build the talent stack (my term for all your skills, experience, habits and behaviours rolled into one) that’ll give us that code which enables us to keep being employed.

This is not about staying in one career or being with one employer.

This is about building the talent stack which allows each of us to adapt to the ever-changing world, thus enabling us to be employable. You don’t want to be stuck and stale when it comes to career success.

This is something I preached in detail in the How to win in the Careerverse playbook.

As a learning and performance consultant, I spend (probably) too much time reading research on high-performing people, places and how this translates into the modern workplace.

Something that I’ve been obsessing over the last year is the 3-5 skills, habits and behaviours that modern organisations need from their people.

And, how each of us can build these to navigate the careers landscape today and tomorrow.

5 essential skills, habits and behaviours

Ok, let’s talk about the components you should focus on to build your talent stack for lifelong employability.

1/ Resilience

The team at EveryDay Health define resilience as:

The ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. Being resilient does not mean a person doesn’t experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. Resilience involves the ability to work through emotional pain and suffering.

Obviously, none of us wants to suffer.

Yet, we can learn valuable lessons during these times to take forward into the future. Dealing with sudden change is something that happens often in the working world.

This could be through a reorganisation or perhaps taking on a new role. No matter what it is, deploying your own resilience will greatly help you.

One does not just ‘build resilience’ though.

It is learnt through experiences over time. So, no, I can’t give you a course or perfect resource to help you. However, the folks at EveryDay Health have curated some great insight to help us all with this.

2/ Adaptability

I describe this as the ability to navigate new landscapes and deal with ambiguity. Which, in my opinion, is basically the ride of life.

The capability to adapt to new environments, new times or when presented with new data is key.

Classic examples of this include when Spotify disrupted the music industry with streaming, and when Apple released the iPhone, introducing the first smartphone and apps into our lives.

Recognising and understanding the need to adapt to a changing world is essential.

CEO of Vayner X, Gary Vee is a classic example of this.

Gary inherited a bricks-and-mortar wine business from his father. It was a small-scale operation with a few local stores.

This was in 1998 and Gary soon realised that the times were changing. He stumbled across an emerging, and little know at the time, video sharing platform called YouTube.

Gary felt this new piece of technology could help scale his business.

“I was completely convinced that online video was going to be a big thing. I knew it was a medium that was going to matter”

Gary Vaynerchuk

The old guard at the time didn’t see the changes in the world through the power of the internet and more new digital technologies. Or, perhaps, they didn’t want to face them.

Gary was told countless times that he was ‘crazy’ and going to ‘destroy his father’s business’. Instead, that little old Wine Library TV show Gary shared on YouTube blew up.

It blew up so much that Gary pivoted his career into the world of social marketing and broader entrepreneurship.

YouTube is now a daily must-use app and Gary sits atop multiple successful companies. And why so? Simple, he built the capability to adapt to the world around him, not try to make the world adapt to him.

You’ll never win with the latter.

3/ Digital Intelligence

This really has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with awareness.

If one thing is apparent across many generations of people I’ve worked with, it’s the lack of knowledge when it comes to using and understanding how basic digital technologies work.

A classic example of this can be found in workplace technology.

The average company provides employees with over 88 different apps to use in their workflow. That’s a lot of choices, right?

This often leads to trying to use too many tools and only utilising them to less than 10% of their capabilities. Bad for your skills and your work.

It’s important in an ever-growing digital world, where the lines between physical and digital are blurring almost daily, that we get better with understanding how tech can support us.

Those who are tech-savvy will have more career opportunities available in the long term.

This is not about learning how to code or architect a system. It’s far simpler than that. This is about knowing about popular and useful tech, and how you can use it to support your skills and career.

Consider how people use YouTube as a learning resource and the features of LinkedIn to build a professional brand and learn new skills.

Digital intelligence is about knowing how to use technology to support you.

4/ Emotional Intelligence

If there was one thing I wish they would teach us all at school, it’s emotional intelligence.

It’s weird that as emotional beings that we don’t recognise we have them and often try to suppress them. Especially in the workplace.

Emotions drive our behaviours, mood and actions. They are the data we use to interpret the world around us. The sooner we learn this, the easier life can be to navigate.

And, guess what? Emotions matter in the workplace too.

Healthy emotional cultures where people recognise and understand the impact of their and others’ emotions are instrumental in enabling us to do our best work.

The team at Verywell Mind define emotional intelligence as:

The ability to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively.

Verywell Mind

Here’s a few tips on improving your own emotional intelligence:

  1. Be aware of your emotions.
    The first step to improving your emotional intelligence is to be aware of your own emotions. Pay attention to how you feel in different situations and what triggers those emotions. Once you are aware of your emotions, you can start to manage them more effectively.
  2. Be aware of other people’s emotions.
    In order to be emotionally intelligent, you also need to be aware of other people’s emotions. Pay attention to the nonverbal cues that people use to communicate their feelings. This can help you better understand how they are feeling and respond in a way that is helpful to them.
  3. Practice empathy.
    Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. When you are able to empathise with someone, you are better able to understand their perspective and provide support when they need it. To practice empathy, try putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how they might feel in a given situation

5/ Future-Fit

This is not a skill nor a behaviour, it’s more of a habit or, perhaps, a state of mind.

I define being Future-Fit as understanding the skills you need to be world-class and navigate the current world, and have the curiosity to develop what’s needed for tomorrow’s world.

We’re blessed and cursed as a species with the ability to remember what has been but have the foresight to look ahead to what may come.

Now doing either can be problematic but with the right intent and context, they can be useful. We can’t predict the future, but we can do our best to plan for it with the data we have today.

When I think about being Future-Fit, I think about having the right skills in place to keep navigating the world and to do all of the above points.

It’s quite fitting that this last point rolls everything we’ve discussed so far into a kinda neat completion.

One of the ways I find useful to keep myself ready for what tomorrow might bring is conducting quarterly health checks for my skills.

It might sound like a cringey tagline. But skills pay the bills, so it makes sense to assess them often, right?

If we can keep building the right skills to navigate life and the career game, we can take some control of building opportunities and charting our own course.

Invest in yourself

That’s a wrap on this folks.

Of course, this list will evolve over time. Yet, I sense some of these will always be what enables each of us to design a rewarding career on our own terms.

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

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Categories
Daily Thoughts

Why I don’t do Training Needs Analysis

I assume the headline enticed you to click on this, so let me get to the point from the get-go.

A big reason I don’t do TNA is due to it being a shopping list rather than solving real problems.

I spend a lot of time (trying) to change the perception of what an L&D function does in an org to shed that wishlist mentality.

Continue reading “Why I don’t do Training Needs Analysis”