The Performance Improvement Blog

Managers and Employee Learning

Managers of employees have a critical role to play in employee learning. These managers are in the best position to help employees acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful. By asking questions, by assigning opportunities to apply knowledge and skills, by modeling expected behavior, by providing timely information, by coaching application of learning, and by giving performance feedback, they can facilitate learning and, therefore, performance improvement of their direct reports. 

As I explained in a post on ASTD's Workforce Development Blog, four trends are increasing the importance of a manager's role as faciliator of learning:

1. Technology has contributed to a DIY environment for learning. The Internet has become a
   tremendoous source of knowledge and skills. Employees don't need HR and training professionals to provide all of their learning opportunities anymore.  What employees do need is someone who is readily accessible and knows the job who can guide them through the process of learning that results in performance improvement.
2. Technology has also made it possible to individualize instruction. Now we can "push" information to employees based on their individual learning needs and learning styles. Managers can ensure that this information gets to each employee when, where, and how that person needs it.
3. The accelerating pace of change and competition means that every employee must be learning continuously. Course schedules and annual meetings are insufficient. Managers must make continuous learning part of everyone's job. 
4. The vast amount of information, with a wide range of quality, makes it necessary for managers and their direct reports to be agile learners. They must be able to sort through the extraneous and useless information and turn what remains into knowledge and skills that can improve performance. Managers must become curators of performance-related information.

Managers who could model behavior, teach skills, and give useful feedback have always been the most effective supervisors. Now, because of these trends, that role as facilitator of learning is expanding and is more important than ever.

What Bothers Chief Learning Officers?

Chief Learning Officers who belong to the Linkedin Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group were asked by Jason Silberman to describe their three biggest “pain points”.  Silberman wrote, “What makes you emotional - what makes you want to punch a pillow?”

While not a scientific survey of Learning Officers, the 97 comments (to date) give us an indication of the kinds of issues that trouble learning leaders in organizations. I’m especially interested in knowing the challenges of these leaders because I’m co-founder of Learning to be Great™, an online marketplace designed to connect leaders with tools and experts who can help them be successful in their jobs.

After reading through the comments by members of the Linkedin group, I identified eight major themes. CLOs worry about…

1. Lack of organization-wide understanding of the purpose and intended results of a program.
   Managers not buying-in to the goals; learners not knowing why they were asked to participate; leaders not seeing the “line of sight” from learning interventions to performance outcomes.
2. Not knowing what results to expect from learning interventions, whether designed internally or purchased from vendors.
3. Not having the right training professionals that can provide learning interventions to help the organization be successful. Current training and development staff do not have the competencies needed in their organizations as they are today.
4. Managers and learners not committed to organizational learning and the learning interventions needed to improve performance. Managers not providing the attention and support that learners need.
5. Lack of accountability for what happens before and after training that supports learning. Managers not preparing learners and not following-up after the program is over.
6. Top leadership not valuing employee learning. Their expectations are low and this translates into little involvement and support for learning interventions. They consider training to be a cost, not an investment.
7. Inadequate design and delivery of learning programs. Not using technologies that could facilitate learning. Not matching content with method.
8. Lack of employee commitment to their own learning and development. Employees not making optimal use of the learning resources that are offered to them.

One observation that is striking about this list is the absence of a need for more resources. It seems that the “pain” does not come from a lack of time and money but rather how time and money is used. CLOs worry about wasting the resources they have, not trying to acquire more resources. 

How to Manage Temporary Employees

Temps, independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers have become the norm, not the exception. As I wrote in a post in March 2010:

Unlike previous recession recoveries, this one will not re-employ large numbers of laid off workers. Because of technology, operational efficiencies, a project focus, and out-sourcing, many companies are finding that they can be more productive with fewer employees. And because of uncertainty about the post-recession economy, they are reluctant to make new hires permanent. Employers have found that they can get the job done by supplementing their regular employees with temps. This gives companies the freedom to increase and decrease their workforce depending on what is needed at the time.

The May 10 issue of Crain’s Detroit Business confirms this prediction. The author writes:

Increased consumer demand, a greater need for flexibility and new health-care requirements are prompting businesses from Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co. to the PeaceHealth health-care system in Washington state to turn to staffing firms…The U.S. has added 913,200 temporary workers since the end of the recession in June 2009 – about 19 percent of all new jobs. Their number rose to 2.66 million in April, about 11,300 shy of the April 2000 record, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released May 3.

Labor economists are predicting that the number of temporary workers will set a new record in the very near future. And this is without including all of the contracted services such as legal, PR, accounting, Web support, employee training, and management consulting.

Are business leaders prepared for this change in the workforce? How will managers help temporary workers maximize their contribution to the organization?  

BusinessWeek labeled them the “disposable worker”, a pejorative term but symptomatic of the way many managers view this segment of employees. This view is based on at least three misconceptions: 1) temporary workers are not committed to the work, they just want a paycheck; 2) temporary workers are not critical to the success of the organization; and 3) it’s not worth investing time, energy, and money in the development of temporary workers.

The truth is that most temporary workers want to do a good job and care deeply about the quality of their work. The work they do is often critical to the success of the organization. And if they are customer-facing, then they are shaping customer attitudes toward the company.

As far as investing in temporary workers, that time, energy, and money will have immediate payoff and, because you never know how long that person will work for the organization or how many times they will come back to the company in the future, it is worth the risk to train and develop that person. When they go elsewhere, they take the goodwill and learning with them which is good for the community and good for the reputation of the organization.

Regardless of how long temporary workers have been with your organization, they should be treated as important contributors to your success. Applying the 5As Framework, here are five things you should keep in mind when supervising these employees:

1)      Make sure that they understand how their jobs are aligned with the success of the organization. They should know how what they are being asked to do contributes to achieving business goals.

2)      Let them know that you anticipate that they will have a positive experience and that their work is significant. Communicate high expectations for their performance.

3)      Form an alliance with them for the purpose of their learning and success. Give them informal and formal feedback on how they are doing and how they can improve.

4)      Create opportunities and give encouragement to apply what they know and what they are learning to their jobs. Being temporary means that it is all that much more urgent to provide these opportunities.

5)      Measure their success and hold them accountable for doing a good job. This means being clear with them about the indicators of success and how you will help them achieve those outcomes.

It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that temporary workers are not the real workforce and do not deserve our full attention. That is, in effect, discarding a large and growing portion of the workers who can make our organizations successful. We need to embrace this segment and apply the same good practices to them that we use to develop any high performing and engaged workforce. 

Evaluation Is Not Complicated

In his blog post, “Stop Evaluating Training!”, Amit Garg summarizes a presentation that Robert O. Brinkerhoff gave at the Australian Institute of Training and Development conference in April. Garg relates Brinkerhoff’s comments to the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of elearning programs. Garg writes:

So how do you evaluate the success of eLearning that you create?" As a learning solutions vendor, I’ve been asked this question countless times and have also encountered it in many an RFP. Proving the effectiveness of training and showing ROI is no walk in the park and still keeps L&D up at night.

Maybe evaluation of the impact of training is not a “walk in the park”, but it is not “rocket science” either. As Brinkerhoff explains in The Success Case Method, there is a simple logic to assessing impact. First we have to understand the alignment between a learning intervention, whether that’s classroom-based, elearning, coaching, on-the-job structured experiences, or something else, and the intended impact (e.g., customer retention, production, sales, revenue, market share). Then it’s a matter of identifying and interviewing learners who are contributing to that impact and those that are not contributing. The purpose of these interviews is to understand the nature of the impact and why it’s happening or not happening.

Three immutable laws drive this method of evaluation. One is the law of learning as a process not an event. This law holds that learning is a process that starts before an instructional event and continues after the event. To study the event only is to fail to include key aspects of what is facilitating learning and what are barriers to learning.

Another is the law of unintended consequences which holds that when there is change there are always outcomes that weren’t anticipated. A useful evaluation of training will examine these unintended consequences (positive and negative) as well as achievement of objectives of the intervention.   

And the third law holds that significant, lasting change in complex organizations is always the result of many factors, some that are not in the control of trainers and learners. For example, effectiveness of leaders, change in strategic direction, and the economy could have a profound influence on the impact that learners have on their organizations.

It’s not complicated. Understand how the learning intervention is intended to help the organization achieve its goals. Identify employees who are and are not applying what they learned. Interview these employees to find out what they did or did not do, how that affected the organization, what other factors were intervening in that impact, and what can be done to increase learner impact in the future.

Leadership Hustle

In his column for Forbes.com, John Baldoni writes about how Rick Pitino, coach of the 2013 NCAA national champion Louisville Cardinals basketball team, would keep track of his players’ deflections during their games. He wanted to measure “hustle” and a count of deflections was his best indicator. A deflection in basketball is anything that a defender does to “redirect the intended flight of the ball.” Depending on who is counting, this could include blocked shots, tipped balls, kicked balls, steals, taking a charge, and touched passes. You might hear about blocked shots and steals, but the other kinds of deflections are rarely mentioned. Each of these actions on the part of a defender usually requires concentrated, determined effort at disrupting the play of the offense. Do this enough and at the right times and it can be the difference between winning and losing a game.  

If you've read my previous posts, you know that I think we overuse sports analogies in our understanding of organizations. However, I wonder if we can use organizational deflections to measure leadership hustle? We could count the number of times a leader proposes a change in the strategic direction of the organization, asks an insightful question about current policies, challenges a bad decision, gets a co-worker to think about a situation in a new way, suggests new positioning for a product or service that is not doing well, uses own initiative to solve a problem for a customer, has a difficult conversation with a direct report, or embraces change. In each instance, the leader is deflecting the organization from its current path. 

Top level leaders do not necessarily have to hustle to keep their jobs and advance their careers. In fact, deflection is the kind of behavior often avoided by leaders because they fear the risk and consequences. To them, it is safer to continue doing what they've been doing then to change direction, even if things are going badly. They stay the course at all costs.

Leaders that hustle are open to opportunities for deflection. They are always questioning the status quo. They ask themselves and others if they are doing something simply because they can or because it’s the right thing to do. They ask, "Is this what is best for our customers, our employees, and the community? Is there a better way?" 

What actions indicate leadership hustle to you?