Frontline

This morning I listened to this 18-minute HBR Podcast with Chris Zook. I listened to it because out of the 15 skills in the skills framework on L&D magpie, Commercial Awareness is the most interesting to the 2,000 L&D professionals we’ve asked. That sparked some curiosity into the skill generally. And my version of magpie recommended this podcast in particular.

For me, when I listen to a podcast or read an article I’m hoping for that moment when something changes in my brain, I feel inspired, and it sticks. Often that moment doesn’t come at all! But it did with this one. Zook described three components of a founder’s mentality: an insurgent mission; an obsession with frontline; an owner’s mindset ie taking responsibility. These resonate with me, as a founder. But Zook’s point is that this mentality is required by a much greater proportion of the modern workforce, especially in high-growth, high-performance firms.

Mission and responsibility are big, of course. But it’s the obsession with the frontline, with the ultimate beneficiaries of the work you’re doing that really struck a chord. While it’s entirely obvious that understanding the frontline is of paramount importance, it’s also easy to lose sight of as adjacent, administrative business paraphernalia start to obscure the view.

But frontline everything. If you really know your frontline, you have your marketing campaigns sewn up: you describe how you understand the audience and why they need the thing you have. Your sales force follows suit, just in person. Your Customer Success / Growth / Account Management team can share best practice between accounts. And your product team will have the input that really matters to constantly iterate.

Having spoken to hundreds of L&D people over the years, my impression is that there’s often a big disconnect between buyers-of-L&D and users-of-L&D. And the sad, inevitable consequences are: non-users of L&D and gripes from L&D people.

So we (Filtered) have become obsessed, not so much in the opinions of L&D professionals (probably the main readership of this article), but in the frontline, the actual workforce, those whom we all serve, in the end. And it’s even more interesting to hear from people who aren’t taking advantage of your learning provision than from those that are. We recently ran two surveys with end-users, real learners.

Here’s a little of what came out of that:

• The main reason people learn is to feel good. That surprised us. Ahead of promotions, earnings and job change (see chart below).
• Noone wants alerts by text, everyone wants alerts by email. That surprised us too.
• The most effective way to persuade someone to learn something is for that thing to ‘just look interesting’. So, how do you make it look enticing and spark that curiosity? Do not find out more here.
• There are intriguing similarities and differences between these two very different firms (one global, one UK, both tens of thousands of staff).

Here’s a chart combining both results for the reasons real learners learn:

Almost half the workforce learns to feel good. Does your learning strategy and provision reflect that? Do the assets in your collective libraries generally make people feel good? Do you know which assets make people feel most good? How do you even measure feeling-goodness? Are your staff aware of these joys? Is this statistic and story even true at your company? Maybe you should find out?

We’re doing a lot more of this kind of research about real learners now. We are furiously curious about it. If you’re interested in conducting a study along these lines with us to know your frontline better, please be in touch with me. We won’t charge for this insight which is as useful and interesting to us as it will be to you. And we’ll continue to publish aggregated results here in the coming weeks and months.