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The best L&D resources of February 2021

Lavinia Mehedin?u

Co-Founder & Learning Architect @ Offbeat | Learning & Development

发布日期: 2021年3月2日

February came to Offbeat with a new need L&Ds have - finding a role that fits what they are looking for in their career. So a couple of weeks ago I launched a Job Board I update every week. ??

?? If you have an L&D role and you want to reach over 1000 L&Ds from all over the world, please give me a ping. Let's help each other out!

?? Any share is really appreciated! :)

Meanwhile, if you're looking for the best L&D resources I shared through Offbeat in February, dig in! Thanks to everyone who contributed.

ARTICLES

The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal

This article showcases the 4 C of the leadership role: (1) Champion - advocates externally for their teams, (2) Catalyst - stimulates collaboration and innovation, (3) Conductor - ensures teams work together well and in harmony, (4) Coach - helps individual team members achieve peak performance.

Make Your Remote Team “Feel” Like a Team

I bet both you and your people managers & employees have been struggling with team building if you're still working remotely. This HBR article pinpoints some tips & tricks for making teams feel like teams again: (1) Build “buffer time” into your meetings, (2) create team rituals, (3) work "out loud", (4) share the pain.

For as long as humans have formed tribes, they’ve used rituals to bond those tribes. This is why most high performing teams regularly engage in shared rituals — they increase cooperation, build trust, and create a sense of belonging.

Increasing Workforce Agility with Talent Marketplace

I have been honestly a bit obsessed with the idea of internal talent marketplaces as I feel they are such an important asset we can provide to our companies. While reading this article I came up with so many ideas, starting with opening roles first internally, and then do it externally, mapping skills for each department, rather than roles, and using marketing tactics to let people know which skills are you looking for.

How to strike a balance between autonomy and support

This article provides two interesting pieces of information. The findings of a CultureAmp research came back to inform us that (1) the level of autonomy people feel is higher now that most of us are working remotely, (2) managers are more open than ever to receive information. So how do we make sure managers offer the right kind of support while still giving people the autonomy they got?

With constantly shifting priorities, employees may be uncertain about how to spend their time or the value of their role. This can negatively impact their confidence in making decisions and make them feel unsupported by their organization. That’s why our research found that it’s important to clarify what needs to get done and where people should focus, given the overall increase in stress and decline in connection.

Upskilling Your People: Getting Started with Skill Data

Career Development and the Internal Talent Marketplace are both trendy topics. But none of them are so easy to start with. So without complicating the situation even harder, you should be thinking about the data you have available. Degreed put together a list of data sets you can access and steps you can take to make sense of them.

Company Culture Is Everyone’s Responsibility

The title drew me to this article as I consider the statement to be true. It lies down the different responsibilities every stakeholder of a company has in nurturing its culture. If you're currently working on culture projects, you might get a few ideas into how to engage each stakeholder in the process.

Top ted talks for learning and development professionals

Every time I look for inspiration, one of my go-to sources is Ted Talks. So I'm really happy that someone put together a list of TedTalks L&Ds should watch. I've watched the ones delivered by Dan Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, and John Doerr, and definitely recommend them.

Keys to a safe and successful remote onboarding

I got a couple of interesting ideas from this article about the remote onboarding process. The most important one for me is creating a steady flow of information so that the new employee feels you're in control so that they feel safe, and not as alone as they could be. How can you do this? Set-up a set of emails you deliver after they sign the offer, one week before they start, on day one, and so on.

How to Shift from a Competency Model to a Skills Strategy in 5 Steps

This article honestly brought me some peace of mind. I have always struggled with understanding how competency models could serve an agile workforce. It seems it actually doesn't. But there's another approach - skill strategy. The main difference? While competency models are role-focused and have contextual meaning, skill models are transferable across roles and have a more universal meaning, making them more agile.

Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development

My interest in psychological safety sparked when I read about it being the basis of effective teams. But I still had this feeling that I couldn't put my hand on something concrete I could do as an L&D to support it. Honestly speaking I still haven't figured it out completely. Still, this new Mckinsey article points into one direction - introducing the idea into leadership development programs.

Let's start from the beginning. People feel safe when they "feel comfortable asking for help, sharing suggestions informally, or challenging the status quo without fear of negative social consequences". This is important because it helps both people do their best work and organizations innovate.

How can leaders foster psychological safety? By:

Consulting their team members, solicit input, and consider the team’s views on issues that affect them;
Demonstrating concern and support for team members not only as employees but also as individuals;
Encouraging employees to do more than they initially think they can.

To do so, leaders should receive help in acquiring skills like sponsorship or situational humility. Both of them according to a Mckinsey survey, being the ones least addressed in leadership development programs.

So next time you design or upgrade a leadership development program, you might want to consider these less known skills.

IDEO U’s 2021 Career Growth Guide

IDEO U put together a list of resources to help everyone achieve their goals. What are they tackling? Becoming a better leader, more playful, more collaborative, level up ones' career, make a change in your organization, become a better storyteller, be more creative, and be more empathic. Go dig in!

REPORTS & E-BOOKS

Top Skills for 2021

Findings:

They showcase three categories of skills: human, technical, hybrid;
Leadership is the most important human skill of 2021. Closely behind stand influencing, accountability, and self-discipline;
Top hybrid skills are operations and research;
Technical skills are categorized in the article by industry, which is pretty cool.

The State of Skills 2021

Findings:

They as well showcase categories of skills: technological, social, and cognitive;
The top technological in-demand skill: Advanced IT and programming skills;
The top social in-demand skill: Leadership and management skills;
The top cognitive in-demand skill: Project Management, followed by Creativity Skills.

5 L&D Trends to Watch Out for in 2021

Learnerbly put together this ebook showcasing some trends we should follow and ways to start working towards them: (1) Personalisation will enable employees to choose learning opportunities, (2) Companies will focus on building a learning culture, (3) Digital learning will (further) transform L&D, (4) ‘Flow of work learning’ will become common, (5) Coaching and mentoring will complement digital learning.

How Top Companies Structure Their Mobility Strategy

Ladders are not the only way to drive mobility? Say whaat? This report shows 4 other ways to reach this goal: (1) lattice, (2) agency, (3) outside-in, (4) reset. To understand which approach fits you best you should look at how much ownership do employees have over their careers + assess if you're more role or skill-focused. Pretty insightful!

The Science of Employee Learning

Here's a short summary of what I got out of it:

Growth mindset

70% of growth happens through informal learning, or outside of informal spaces like workshops. Informal learning happens when individuals have a growth mindset, so L&D should focus more on supporting it.

The 4Cs of informal learning:

Context. There's a big difference between "far" learning and "near" learning. Near transfer is knowledge that is transferred in similar contexts, being the one that fades harder. How much of your L&D strategy focuses on it?
Connectivity. Feeling connected to others boosts psychological safety, the willingness to admit and share mistakes, innovate, and share feedback;
Cadence. Although it's tempting to do what comes easily to you (the trap of expertise), to keep learning and growing you need to spend time on tasks that are a little beyond your current skill level. To improve the cadence of your learning strategy you first need to cut down your content;
Continuous improvement. Instead of looking at vanity metrics like how much people like your programs, you should be looking at what actually drives change. To support continuous improvement keep only what works.

Nudges support L&D because:

they are context-focused;
teams can receive complimentary nudges, and drive up connectivity;
are just in time suggestions that focus on the nearest step toward improvement;
they can be easily measured and adjusted to support continuous improvement.

The e-book also showcases the way various ways of learning support the 4Cs of informal learning. The most effective ones out of these four being nudges and self-paced online learning modules.

PODCAST EPISODES

How people learn

I've read How People Learn a couple of years ago and I became a fan of the storytelling approach Nick Shackleton-Jones had to explain how we learn. So I was pretty happy to listen to this podcast episode where he brings the theories from the book to the way we do L&D in organizations.

Lessons From 'The Line' Into L&D - with Paul Jocelyn

This podcast episode reminded me of how important it is for L&Ds to jump at the opportunity to take upon a role in another function if the opportunity presents itself. There's no better way to find out the needs people have than being among them.

L&D Lockdown (Again) With Eva Adam, Alice Collier-Niblett and Sean Cooper

If you are living in a country that went (once again) in lockdown this podcast episode might make you feel less lonely and give you some cool ideas for L&D programs you are working on right now.

Why Are So Many Companies Building Talent Marketplaces?

In this episode of Digital HR Leaders, David Green talked to Ina Gantcheva about the importance of implementing a talent marketplace strategy. They covered the four P’s of iterative dynamic talent marketplace design, the role of HR in supporting the transformation and associated change management involved in talent marketplace, and examples of companies who have implemented a successful talent marketplace and the benefits they are enjoying as a result.

OTHERS

Manager Standards LifeLabs Sample

There are so many cool ideas in this doc. (1) Congratulate your new people managers for taking upon the responsibility, (2) Use this as an opportunity to reinforce what's expected of them and showcase the competencies you're looking at when it comes to managers, (3) Look into creating accountability by linking those competencies to all your processes.

LifeLabs Energy Audit / Burnout Buffering Tool

I love these practical templates LifeLabs Learning is providing. This one, although not L&D focused is pretty cool giving the time we live in now. It covers how to notice signs of burnout, how to hold a burnout buffering conversation, and what suggestions you can give. This might be a pretty useful tool for people managers.

ABOUT OFFBEAT

In the past couple of years, the learning industry started transforming. We are now in the middle of acquiring new technology, working agile, looking closely at measuring the L&D impact and so much more. Offbeat takes all these conversations and gives them a fresh, actionable twist so that learning professionals can learn more from what they read.

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