Learning Strategy for Learning Teams

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Author's Note:

This article is Chapter 45 from my recently published book, The CEO's Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Empowering Learning for a Competitive Advantage. You can learn more about the book at the book's website (https://www.ceosguide.net/) or on Amazon (https://amzn.to/4674JGS).

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Preface

In the book, I write as if I'm writing to a CEO, letting him/her/they know how to manage their learning function to get a competitive advantage. I tell CEOs how they might manage us better and I tell them how they can get the most out of our good work.

The book is not just intended for CEOs and other senior leaders. It's also intended for us, learning and performance professionals, so we can empower ourselves to our full potential.

The book has received advance praise from leaders in the workplace learning field, including by the following people: ?????????? ??????????, ???????????? ??????????, ?????????? ??????????, ?????? ??????????????, ?????????? ??????????????, ?????? ??????????, ???????? ????????, ???????? ??????????????, ?????????? ????????????????, ?????????????? ??????????, ???????????????? ????????????, ?????????? ????????????????, ?????????????? ??. ??????????, ?????? ??????????????????????, ?????? ??????????????, ???????? ??????????: ???????????? ??????.

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NOTE: This is a rough draft, so if you want to advocate or cheer on an idea presented here, or suggest improvements, I would welcome it. Also, know that formatting options here are limited.

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Your Learning Team Should Have a Learning Strategy

Duh! Of course, your learning team should have a strategy, but here’s the question: What should it strategize about? When I taught business strategy in my leadership development workshops, I taught that strategy is about how to differentiate yourself—to make your products, services, and brand “differently better” in ways relevant to your customers (or “beneficiaries,” if you’re in a government, nonprofit, or social-purpose business). Strategy is also about choosing how to get to “differently” better—by determining what to do and what not to do. The secret to strategy is guiding organizational attention, team attention, and individual attention!

Ideally, your learning team should play an integral part in supporting your organization’s strategy. To give you a competitive advantage, your learning team must be differently better than other organizations’ learning teams.

To help you guide your learning team, I’m providing you with a list of learning team deliverables. It is designed specifically to help your learning team go beyond insufficient old-school training-and-development approaches. It is inspired by recent advances in the learning and performance sciences, by a focus beyond learning toward performance improvement, by a business and organizational focus, and by an employee focus.

I am specifically not providing a list of the capabilities required of your learning team. Such a list is beyond the scope of this book—and I’m specifically not including one because (1) such lists quickly become unwieldy and impractical, (2) capability requirements change quickly with time and advances in technology, (3) capability and lists of competencies can push teams to focus on their activities rather than their goals, and (4) it’s better not to micromanage teams but to enable them to determine how to reach the goals suggested in the list of deliverables.

Note, however, that—while I’m not dictating capabilities here—your learning team should consider and plan for the capabilities they need to be able to build and deploy the deliverables below. They don’t have to do everything, but they should consider their full set of options.

I am also not suggesting any specific strategic planning process. Instead, I’m providing a list of focal areas for your learning team to consider as they do their strategic planning. Specifically, by providing focal points, I’m preventing your learning team from generating strategic plans that ignore critical leverage points. Too many strategic planning initiatives fortify the top-of-mind preconceptions of the participants. The outcomes feel good because the participants’ thinking is reflected in the outcomes; however, because only top-of-mind considerations were surfaced, many critical constructs were not even considered. By having a focal list of critical considerations, your learning team will be much more likely to hit on innovative and unique ideas—the kind that lead to competitive advantages.

Learning Team Deliverables:

Included are items your learning team should consider providing to your employees and organization—not everything all at once, but to be used as a list of high-opportunity delivery targets! To make the list easier to read, I’ve divided it into categories—but the items are more important than the category names. Indeed, some of the items can fit under more than one category. What you want to avoid is having your learning team simplify their efforts down to the category names, because, by doing that, they’ll likely ignore important opportunities to provide value.

Information and Knowledge

1.?Training and eLearning

Helping employees learn important concepts and skills.

2. Knowledge Access

Giving employees quick, reliable look-up access to info they know they need, and automated context-based info when they don’t know they need it.

3. Social Learning

Augmenting opportunities for employees to learn from one another (in ways that are productive), through individual sharing and group learning.

4. Organizational Literacy

Keeping employees aware of the external forces relevant to their jobs and the internal mechanics that sustain operations, outputs, and success.

Learning Support

5.?Job Experience

Putting employees in new roles to give them experience in a wide variety of work contexts.

6. Learning Acceleration

Enabling employees to be more effective in their own learning and be more effective in helping others learn.

7. Decision-Making

Educating and supporting employees in making effective decisions—enabling wisdom around data gathering and analysis, avoiding cognitive biases, etc.

Practice and Reinforcement

8. Practice and Feedback

Enabling employees to practice and improve their skills.

9. Remembering Support

Providing systems and practices to support employees in remembering information that is critical to them and their work.

10.?Reminding

Using periodic reminders to enable additional reflection and to keep ideas, concepts, skills, and tendencies accessible from memory.

Enabling Change

11.?Creativity and Innovation

Enabling employees to generate creative ideas and take those ideas through the long and arduous process to innovation.

12.?Change Championing

Educating and supporting employees in leading complex organizational change initiatives.

Organizational Development

13. Management Development

Supporting managers in helping their teams be more productive.

14.?Work Culture

Supporting managers and others in creating routine practices and ways of thinking that benefit employees and organizational productivity.

15.?Talent Strategy

Considering and planning for long-term talent needs—aiming to satisfy needs for the organization, for units and teams, and for individual employees.

Work-Context Supports

16. Prompting Tools

Providing tools, checklists, job aids, performance support, and signage that directly prompt action.

17. Nudging

Enabling the setting of context triggers to increase the likelihood that desirable thoughts and behaviors are nudged into action.

18. Memory Accessibility

Creating strategies for keeping important goals, values, and behaviors consciously top-of-mind and subconsciously active and influential.

19. Context Enablers

Examining and modifying work contexts to ensure that performers have appropriate tools, rules, practices, norms, expectations, and time.

20. Context Obstacles

Examining and modifying work contexts to ensure that performers have sufficient freedom from obstacles, distractions, complexity, and noise.

Self-Direction Supports

21. Self-Direction

Supporting and enabling employees in their efforts to be proactive in their own learning, context triggering, development, and work performance. Also, encouraging and enabling more employees to be more self-directed.

22. Habit Formation

Supporting employees in developing good habits and weaning themselves off bad habits.

23. Coaching, Mentoring

Provide coaches and/or mentors to employees to provide guidance and support for individual development.

Content and Practice Improvement

24. Content Vetting

Providing research and analysis services to vet content to ensure its validity, relevance, and cost effectiveness.

25. Outside Expert Reviews

Providing teams with access to experts to provide unbiased diagnostic reviews and recommendations for improvement.

Employee Health and Well-Being

26. Well-Being

Examining employees’ physiological, psychological, and financial states—then lessening stressors and optimizing feelings of safety, belonging, and well-being. ?

27. Employee Empowerment

Enabling employees to have their individual and collective voices influence important employment-related decisions and practices.

28.?Employee Dignity and Respect

Enabling employees to be valued and respected—to be assumed worthy, to be granted grace, to be able to be their authentic selves.

All right, that’s 28 focus areas! Your learning team should have points of view and strategies for delivering each of these. They should also prioritize—emphasizing some all the time, and some only occasionally or periodically. And note that a “learning strategy” should really be thought of as a “learning and performance-improvement” strategy!

Responsibility for accomplishing goals within these areas can be shared with other units in the organization, but your learning team should offer expertise and/or support in how to carry out these functions. For example, your managers?are in the prime spot to promote creativity, but your learning team should be ready to facilitate idea-generation meetings and provide training on how to facilitate the creative process.

The bottom line on learning strategy is simple. By focusing on providing the most powerful—and most leverageable—learning-and-performance factors, your learning team will create a competitive advantage?for your organization!

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In this chapter, I provided a list of 28 focus areas for learning teams. The science behind this approach is simple. We humans are easily distracted. We forget what we want to focus on. Also, most of us simply don’t know what to focus on. In the learning-and-performance field, my colleagues and I have been educated to focus on only a relatively narrow range of performance targets. To provide a few examples, we’ve been told to get the content of our courses right, but we haven’t been fully educated about the importance of the work context?in triggering?thoughts and action. We’ve been focused on how to deliver content in ways that are engaging, but not on how people can best learn on their own or in groups. We are well practiced in developing courses but have virtually no experience in teaching managers?how to support their teams in learning.

?By providing learning teams with a list of 28 focus areas, we help overcome the limitations of our human cognitive architecture. First, we help learning teams know where to focus. Second, we help them avoid distractions from current fads and fancies, and channel popular new ideas into an actionable framework. Third, we help them remember their leverage points, so they don’t limit themselves to traditional training practices.

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How To Learn More

THE BOOK. You can learn more about the book at the book's website (https://www.ceosguide.net/) or on Amazon (https://amzn.to/4674JGS).

LTEM. (The Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model) is rapidly replacing older evaluation models. I invite you to join me in the LTEM Boot Camp open-enrollment workshop or contact me to arrange a private Boot Camp for your organization. LTEM Boot Camp LEARN MORE.

My Website. To access my research-to-practice reports, my blog, job aids, and get an introduction to my consulting services. WorkLearning.com/.

Coaching. I'm available as a coach, and offer a pay-what-you-can pricing option. Check out my coaching options.

Book Chapters Available on LinkedIn:

• Training Works! Says the Science.
• Learning Data is Often Crap Data.
• Learning Strategy for Learning Teams.
• Full-Factor Learning-Request Process.
• Separating Good Research from Bad in Workplace Learning.
• Your Experts Aren't Always Great at Teaching.
• Your Learners Don’t Always Know Learning.
• Why I Wrote the Book (not a chapter).

Other Articles Available on LinkedIn:

• LTEM Five Years Later.
• The Danger of Creating Learner Surveys Alone.
• Your CEO is an AI and has Advice for You as a Learning Professional.

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