CLO Corner – Change the Learning Paradigm
By Susan Burnett
It’s a challenging business environment. Companies are facing less revenue growth than projected, putting pressure on their cost structures. Businesses are cost cutting, streamlining, laying off a portion of their workforce, and giving more work to their remaining employees.
It’s a tough time to be a business leader. And it’s an even tougher time to be a Learning and Development leader. Now, more than ever, L&D leaders need a new learning paradigm.
You still need to get people the skills and high-performance habits they require to be successful. You still need to help people transition effectively into new roles: new employees, new managers, new leaders. And you still have to grow people’s skills and careers, because that’s your only real value proposition in a skills economy. So how do you do all that when your people are too busy to go to training? How do you make this case when managers aren’t sure the time away from the job for training is worth it?
The answer is to create a culture and process for learning in the flow of work. What if you could create an environment where employees engaged in 5-10 minutes of learning every day? What if that learning was relevant to the tasks they need to perform successfully? For a new manager, that could mean learning to set goals, align them across their organization and make sure they support the business or function strategy (Read More). For new employees, it could be about the culture they have joined and the behaviors that will be key to their success. Whatever those key tasks are in your organization, it’s work that has to be done, so why not teach people in the flow of that work?
This isn’t about offering a learning library of courses. This isn’t about an LMS pushing roadmaps and online courses. This is about an employee at any level establishing a 5-10 minute time window every day, and engaging in the micro-learning that will set them up for success. It’s short, targeted segments of content, key actions, social learning with other peers and leaders, and the practice that builds a good habit. It can be scheduled anytime, done from anywhere, including your mobile phone, and it doesn’t require hours or days away from the job.
The added benefit of this approach is measurement. Now the learning organization can move from reporting attendance, to reporting on how many people have completed critical job tasks, taken desired actions, contributed to their colleagues’ learning, and built a high-performance habit. That’s a scorecard business leaders care about. That’s learning that can accelerate time to performance - every business leader’s goal.
For more information on how 1st90 can help you build habits that drive high performance in your organization click here.
About the Author
Susan Burnett has been a Chief Learning Officer for over 20 years. She was the first CLO for Hewlett Packard when they centralized all Talent and Organization Development. She was the SVP of Talent Development at Gap Inc. She was the Managing Director and CLO at Deloitte and was the driving force behind the Deloitte University strategy and campus. And she was the SVP of Talent Development at Yahoo! She is the CEO of Designing Your Life Consulting and she speaks and writes about designing strategies for individual and organizational growth.