The best L&D resources of June 2022
Lavinia Mehedin?u
Co-Founder & Learning Architect @ Offbeat | Learning & Development ??
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I honestly can't believe we're almost done with the first half of the year. It's been very tumultuous and I don't expect the second part to be any different. Meanwhile, we continue doing our job and delivering as much value as we can to L&D professionals. So here's what we've been up to:
And of course, we sent some amazing articles, podcasts, videos & advice in our weekly newsletter, so enough about us! Let's dig into the best resources of June 2022.
Short, but a useful resource to share with your first-time managers. The article is a compilation of questions first-time managers should ask about trust-building, work preferences & team dynamics, grievances & desired improvements, and meeting motivations & aspirations.
A very interesting view about start-up managers. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t apply in general and it also doesn’t apply only in start-ups, the pool of respondents being very small (138), but its results are something to reflect on. Micromanaging and harassment & discrimination seem to be some of the biggest shortcomings, while speaking to HR, giving feedback, and quitting seem to be some of the options given by respondents.
The most interesting idea from this article is the outcome of the authors’ research: leaders develop through: (1) sensemaking - understanding how the business world and the organization around you work and how others relate to you, (2) experimenting - testing ideas picked up in a classroom session, from colleagues, or from personal experience, and (3) self-discovery - figuring out your own identity in the workplace.
It’s been 8 years since this article was published and it still resonates today. If you’re managing a leadership development program McKinsey raised some risks you should avoid. So, why do leadership development programs fail? Because they overlook context, they decouple reflection from real work, they underestimate mindsets and fail to measure results.
This article captured me right from the start: All organizations develop a culture of conflict, whether or not their leaders have a hand in shaping it. Without thoughtful design, behaviors emerge organically and grow wildly — often replicating the temperaments of founders and leaders. It covers 3 steps to building a culture of productive conflict: develop a vision of your ideal conflict culture, implement tools to plant seeds and kickstart growth, tend to your culture and nurture what’s grown.
One resource you can share with all your people managers! It talks in-depth about why leaders are failing, focusing on setting direction, providing coaching, and considering career development to become a better manager, and managing employee engagement and manager performance.
The activities that make you successful as a manager look nothing like the activities that make you successful as an individual contributor.?
The interesting story about how Spotify decided to look at succession planning. The purpose? Focusing on accelerating growth and readiness of our talent bench, sharing our successors, and providing a tool to access a more diverse talent bench for our leaders just in time when they need it.
However, to us, successful succession planning means focusing on accelerating growth and readiness of our talent bench, sharing our successors and providing a tool to access a more diverse talent bench for our leaders just in time when they need it.
They need us. We need them. Sometimes they drive us crazy. Sometimes we get to see the light at the end of the tunnel with them. Our stakeholders can be of all kinds and if we want to actually deliver impact, we need to learn how to better manage them. This article covers 10 steps I found very interesting and valuable when it comes to managing stakeholders of our L&D function.
Interesting research performed by Red Thread Research + LinkedIn. Here are some of the findings: (1) L&D pros mentioned Leadership skills the most, (2) Data Analysis was a top skill mentioned by L&D pros, (3) Business Core skills are essential to L&D pros in high-performing Organizations, and (4) L&D pros in high-performing organizations emphasize Collaboration / Teamwork skills.
I got to learn this year that reflection is one of the most important parts of the learning process. Srishti Sehgal reflected about different types and spaces for reflection (a bit of inception here). She talks about self-reflection, peer reflection, group reflection, and reflection outside the group, their different purposes and questions to ask.
A long piece for all those that are passionate about L&D analytics. The?first part?of this series addressed how we make conscious and unconscious assumptions during any analytics exercise. This second part will be about the use and misuse of statistics by mixing correlation with causation.
Some nice thoughts from Spotfy’s L&D team, also called the GreenHouse on learning measurement. Some interesting this they use: 360°assessments to measure leadership development, team maturity assessments to measure the development of teams over time, highlighting how they are becoming higher performing teams, their People Analytics team to see how they can draw correlations or see patterns that indicate growth and development looking at all the data they have access to.
When you as HR and L&D professionals are asked to state the ROI or business impact from the development activities, don’t get stuck in only direct measurements, or think that everything needs to be counted. Look at the bigger picture.
A new step-by-step guide to launching a successful DE&I initiative from Blinkist. It covers 7 steps, as follows: (1) Get buy-in from leadership, (2) hire an external consultant, (3) create awareness, build trust, and identify the issues, (4) formally collect quantitative and qualitative data, (5) interpret the data and identify action points, (6) Educate, Educate, Educate!, (7) embed D&I into the culture and let go.
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It’s essential that you give a platform to the marginalized voices at your company. Setting up a solid comms strategy is key.
Buffer completed their first DEI report, compiling data collected from an internal survey and audit to give them formal insight into setting goals, measuring success, and helping to hold them accountable for continually improving our culture. A very interesting way of doing things, that shows the commitment they have toward DE&I.
Some love ideas in here! I loved the following: (1) seed non-work conversations with thoughtful team bios, (2) check in on your team’s mental health and morale in lightweight ways, (3) nominate a rotating monthly social chair to choose virtual team-building events, and (4) try coworking with a shared Spotify playlist.
The author of this articles thinks of purpose, strategy, and culture as a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart. He presents three types of levers companies can use to profoundly shape an effective culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition.
I’ve been a fan of Dave Ulrich for a few years now, and this article didn’t disappoint. First, fun fact, there’s a book that identified 164 definitions of culture . . . in 1952! Just imagine now! The most interesting parts of the article are: (1) what culture matters and (2) how to create or change a culture.
BCG conducted a very interesting analysis of millions of online job advertisements posted between 2016 and 2021 and created the Skill Disruption Index. A very interesting part of the resource is the four big trends discovered: (1) digital skills in nondigital occupations, (2) soft skills in digital occupations, (3) visual communication, and (4) social media skills.
Many of us moved to a hybrid way of working in the past few months. But how do we know if it works? This article comes up with some interesting KPIs. Among them: 1:1 meetings with managers, collaboration vs focus time, team overlap, and onboarding ramp rate.
A new report from Asana pulled answers from 10,624 individuals on questions regarding the tasks they spend their time on, the locations they prefer to work from, and wellbeing & work. An interesting idea I got from it is the 3M framework for breaks: macro breaks, meso breaks, and micro breaks. Each of them has its duration & purpose, all with the intention of maintaining mental health & wellbeing.
If you’re as obsessed with behavior change as I’ve become in the past few months, this resource will seem gold! It covers some basic models, such as the self-determination theory, the fogg model, the COM-B model, or the behavioral drivers model. Each of them is explained and explored both from a strengths and weaknesses perspectives.
A fun, short quiz from Humu on Ideal work-life boundaries. There are only a few questions and the result can be shared with others, so they know how you prefer to work. For example, turns out I’m a cycler. When working with me, keep in mind that although I will periodically put in some work time over the weekend when needed, that’s not always the norm - oftentimes I prefer to stick to working during business hours.
I’m a big, big promoter of curation. I truly believe it can save people’s time (hopefully just like I do it for you, when you open Offbeat). So I think we can do more of that for our colleagues as well, especially in a world of information overload and where you can go down the rabbit hole on Google for hours. This article is a beginners’ guide if you want to learn more about it.
Microlearning has been a trend in L&D for a while now. It never hurts to go back to the basics and understand the reasons why microlearning might be an effective solution. This long-piece covers: (1) what is microlearning, (2) the Science Behind Why Microlearning is Effective, (3) benefits of Microlearning, (4) challenges of Microlearning, and (5) principles and Best Practices of Microlearning.
We focus a lot on individual development. But what about team development? This is not the first resource that pushes me toward this idea. Some interesting thoughts: focus on team coaching as much as individual coaching, doing a baseline intake (more about this in the article), and consciously asking for individual commitments and accountability.
That's all, folks! See you next month. ??
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