Managers hold the key to unlocking an organization's learning culture and agility

Human beings are naturally conditioned to learn and adapt to their environment in service of the goals they desire. Survival as a goal is the most basic desire but not the only one. How a person manifests the learning and adapting to their environment depends on how they make sense of the environment, their desires, and how much control they believe they have over the environment to create what they desire.?

If we view organizations and the experience of a job as an example of “the environment” in which a human being needs to learn and adapt, then the way the person manifests their learning and adaptation at work will be subject to the same conditions described above.?

This brings me to a question I often hear when discussing learning in organizations-

“why are people not learning?”

The truth is that people are learning every day. What I think that question might actually be asking is, “why are people not using the learning solutions or experiences we are making available to them? Meaning the digital library subscriptions, external training, and any internal workshops? Nominations are low, utilization of subscription licenses is low, and so on.?

I believe the real problem isn't that employees aren't learning but that they don't seem to be adapting to the work as it evolves. The pace of evolution of work has sped up so much that it has become a lot more obvious that people aren't changing as fast. People simply rely on what they already know and can do and would rather "wing it' than truly learn and adapt.

This behavior is holding back countries from growing entire industries and sectors, holding organizations back from being as productive, competitive, and responsive to changes and trends as they could. But more importantly, it is holding people back from developing and growing, becoming better professionals and better people, in control, happy, and fulfilled.

The question is, therefore, not why people are not learning but why people are not demonstrating the natural human ability to learn and adapt, especially in professional situations, as employees, adapting to the evolution of work, the digitalization of work, the shifting expectations of people, and so on.

Without oversimplifying the challenge, I believe we need to return to some fundamentals as a first step to figuring out what we could be doing differently or better to address this. The answer to the question “why aren’t people learning and adapting?” needs to start with answering three other questions:?

1. Why do people learn and adapt, and how do managers unlock this 'why'?
2. How do they figure out what to learn and how do managers unlock these insights?
3. How do they learn what they figure out they need to learn, and how do managers unlock the experiences?

Before tackling these questions, I need to make a point about management that underpins what this article outlines.

People Management is a Domain of Practice and Expertise For All Non-Individual Contributors, it is not HR!

Understanding and managing people is a domain of practice and expertise like any other domain, technology, medicine, law, finance, etc. This means that there is a body of knowledge associated with this domain. The body of knowledge enables sense-making and decision-making about what types of results can be achieved, what actions to take to achieve them, and how to perform or adapt those actions based on the situation and context.

This Sloan article that I shared a while back very clearly describes the nature of this domain and what I got from it is that we need to recognize this as a domain with the following:

• clear results and problems to be solved - for example, creating and fostering meaningful jobs, "skillfully hiring, engaging, developing, coaching, supervising, evaluating, and promoting people," etc.
• a defined and growing body of professional knowledge, insights from research, and practice
• and most importantly, with expectations that non-individual contributors are the ones who need to develop domain expertise and activity mastery to solve these problems.

So, now we can look at how managers unlock learning and adapting at work.

1. Why Do People Learn And Adapt, And How Do Managers Unlock This 'Why'?

Learning requires a willingness to open oneself up to scrutiny and change. It requires vulnerability and humility. Learning requires effort and commitment over time.?

We tend to choose to invest effort and time in learning and development actions when we want to close remedial, aspirational, and growth gaps that we care about, gaps that mean something to us. We invest the effort and time because first, we can recognize and understand the gap, then we believe we can close the gap, and finally, we believe the development actions in which we choose to invest our effort and time will help us close the gap.?

To understand the idea of performance gaps as I am using them here, do read this post: "Harness the power of gaps". In the post, I explain the view of the gaps shown in the image below:

Given the above, if we want to encourage people to invest time and effort in learning and development, we need to make sure we are facilitating the following:?

Managers need to foster intentionality and purposefulness in the role

Maybe people aren't seeing or connecting with the need to learn and adapt at work because they are not experiencing any gaps. Maybe they are not seeing or connecting with the changes or evolution of work in any real way.

So, we make no assumptions and go back to basics, are people clear about the nature of their roles in a way that makes it impossible to ignore changes in the role?

If we want people to experience the gaps that trigger learning and adaptation, we need to ensure the individual can develop and maintain adequate knowledge and understanding of the role’s purpose, first at an industry level, knowing what types of achievements are possible through this role and then using that to understand the internal context, needs, and expectations of the role. This understanding should not be assumed, and it evolves as the industry and organization evolve. ?Each person has to CARVE their niche. Your Life. Your Rules.

It is easy to assume everyone is trying to "achieve results," but the reality is that at work, most people are just trying to get stuff done, as shown in the examples in the images below.

Clear results aren't enough. Clear results enable intentionality, but meaningful results enable purposefulness, and meaningfulness comes from value. So where does the value for job results come from?

By ensuring everyone can see and remain connected with the purpose of their role as it evolves, any changes that impact the ability to fulfill that purpose, achieve those results, and solve the necessary problems, will trigger the awareness of a gap. This shift from activity to results is the most fundamental shift required to initiate learning and adaptation.

However, recognizing a gap is one thing. Willingness to do something about it requires something more - belief and accountability.

Managers need to assign clear accountability and support the development of self-efficacy

A necessary element of role clarity is accountability. True accountability defines results that I must achieve, and it is in the face of these clear results that I might experience fear and anxiety.

Regardless of experience or educational level, everyone experiences anxiety in the face of clear performance expectations.

Most people dealing with these anxieties without the right support will likely develop highly ineffective and maladaptive coping mechanisms that do not include the development and growth in competencies and capabilities made possible by the experience.

For people to take action to learn and adapt, they need to believe their actions will produce the results they desire. It is, therefore, important to build the individual’s level of confidence and courage in sync with their deepening intentionality and purposefulness in the role. ?This isn't really about the specific performance capabilities but rather about belief in themselves and their abilities and potential.

This earlier article, "Your source of confidence and courage to define and achieve aspirational goals" goes into more detail. In there, I made a reference to the serenity prayer:

"Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other"

At the heart of this prayer is a sense of accountability.

In this post, "Are you accountable?" I explain how accountability is for results which is different from responsibility which is for deliverables. In the article, I explore accountability using the elements shown in the image below:

What is obvious from the above is that you can't have role clarity without accountability, and you can't have accountability without authority.

Managers need to align individual and organizational expectations of the role

Continuous alignment of each individual's assumptions and beliefs about the role's purpose with the organizational expectations of the role is key to ensuring the individual is experiencing and making sense of the reality of the role within the context of the organization, and that is what is driving the learning and adaptation.

For all intents and purposes, employees experience organizational expectations through the expectations of their direct manager. However, managers are employees as well and their experience as employees will significantly impact the experiences they create for their direct reports.

Therefore, managers' experience of intentionality, purposefulness, accountability, and self-efficacy in the management role is the key to unlocking learning and adaptation at scale across the employee population.

Managers' experience recognizing, diagnosing, and closing their own remedial, aspirational, or growth gaps will greatly influence what they do with their direct reports.

How this relates to transformation efforts like digitalization

If the organization needs people to develop knowledge in a specific area, for example, digital literacy, or specific skills, for example, coaching, the first place to go is not to source "training programs". The first place to go is to work with managers around the following:

• Clarifying the expectations of specific job-related responsibilities, actions, deliverables, and results where the new knowledge and skills are required to achieve the expected results.
• Establishing alignment with each individual around the expectations, not the knowledge and skills.
• Facilitating the identification of the relevant type of performance gap, remedial, aspirational, or growth.
• Diagnosing the gap - it is worth noting that some people might already have the knowledge and skills so armed with clarity, they simply decide to shift how they approach things; others might realize they don't have it and need to work on developing it if they want to succeed in delivering on the clear expectations of the role.

Again the focus is not on whether they have the knowledge and skills but whether they can deliver on the expectations that require the specific knowledge and skills.

We need to stop sending people for training and instead focus on making them experience a gap that triggers in them the need for development. If individuals can not experience a gap in their work experience that triggers the need for what we want them to learn, then either they already know it, or the gap introduced by what we expect of them does not require them to learn what we want them to learn.

Sometimes we say things like, I think it's a good idea to learn this because it's a trending skill - instead, we should find out what their career aspirations are, next role opportunities, and types of experiences we can facilitate related to those next role opportunities and if those require the 'trending skills' then it will be in the context of their aspirations.

Another example is that we offer digital fundamentals training to everyone as a way to drive digital transformation. Instead, we should run workshops that help managers understand the productivity gains possible with better digital literacy in their teams. These gains exist at very fundamental levels, like using Microsoft office tools more effectively (this can have significant productivity gains already!), all the way to the more advanced job-specific tools that people might not be fully leveraging, just as with MS office tools. The focus is not to teach them the tools but to facilitate an experience of the gap that exists between their current productivity as a function of how they currently do their work and use available technologies and what level of productivity is expected going forward as enabled by the affordances of the available technologies (e.g., turn-around time or quality of presentation, etc.). Shift the expectation to create the experience of a gap (remedial, aspirational, or growth), then diagnose the gap to reveal, if applicable, digital literacy as a knowledge and skill reason for the gap, and then support the closing of the gap using appropriate conversations, debriefs and scaffolds.

2. How Do They Figure Out What To Learn, And How Do Managers Unlock These Insights?

With the “why” in motion, managers are then able also to use ongoing interactions and conversations to identify and diagnose gaps in the performance layer and work out what they can do to close those gaps; for example, it could be a simple case of increasing effort in performance layer with more effective use of the existing scaffolds in the ecosystem or activating the development and the meta development layers.?

I wrote a piece on "Why bother to learn" that discusses this point in greater detail. In that piece, I walked through the layers shown in the image below.

Managers need to use conversations and debriefs to facilitate the experience, recognition, and diagnosis of gaps

So, a key part of the performance layer experience is recognizing and diagnosing gaps. With the clarity of expectations and the alignment of expectations being addressed, the focus now shifts to gap recognition and diagnosis.

Through workplace conversations and debriefing of significant experiences, managers can facilitate a diagnosis of the gaps, identifying the knowledge and skill enablers of the decision and actions to be performed within the scope of accountability.

In the post "If you're thinking about development, start by answering these three questions",

The three questions are:

1. Why?do you need development?
2. What?capabilities?do you need to build to address that 'why'?
3. What?knowledge and skills?do you need to develop for the capabilities you need to build, and how do you develop them?

We answered the why already, so the focus now is on what capabilities and what knowledge and skills.

For more information on "what capabilities", you can read these posts: "What is your professional domain of practice?", "What do you actually do in your role?", "What role activities have you mastered?" and "Understanding competencies as the ultimate leveler." The posts explain the capability wheel shown below:

For more information on knowledge and skill, the post walks through the knowledge and skill areas shown below:

Managers need to adopt varying time horizons in thinking of the work-related experiences they are facilitating

The ongoing interaction with direct reports should adopt a scaled horizon perspective of the employee's experience, from immediate to longer-term.

Higher or more significant goals should have a longer-term horizon, and immediate or shorter-term goals should have easier goals. The immediate shorter-term experiences can then be intentionally used in a formative way as scaffolds aimed at ensuring capability readiness for the longer-term goals, which are reviewed in more summative or final ways.

An example of the time scaling is reflected in the list below:

1. On-going longer term - e.g., career (formative)
2. Annual - e.g., appraisal-related (summative)
3. Quarterly -?e.g., checkpoints, project milestones, etc. (formative for checkpoints and potentially summative for project milestones)
4. Daily/Weekly - e.g., micro tasks/activities (formative)

Each of these time frames represents different performance layer development opportunities. The best way to think about this is to see it as managing the individual's experience over time across four phases

• Exploring: What we say in job ads and how we position the work (industry) in our context (this organization and, more importantly, this team)
• Engaging: the candidate experience, the interactions, and what they present about expectations
• Aligning: onboarding and early experience of the reality of what was seen during exploration and discussed during the engagement. Quickly closing remedial gaps, which is a necessary state when new.
• Delivering: moving from closing remedial gaps to defining and closing aspirational and, eventually, growth gaps.

3. How Do They Learn What They Figure Out They Need To Learn?

I referenced the three layers, performance, development, and meta-development, already in this post. In reality, learning occurs in all three layers but is different in each layer.

How people learn depends on what they figure out they need to learn. Learning happens in all layers, including the performance layer however, learning in the performance layer only works when the capability gap is not too big. When the capability gap exceeds what can be reasonably addressed in the flow of work, the person needs to step away from work and focus on development.

The matrix shown in the image below gives an idea of how managers and individuals can think about this.

Managers need to drive learning in the performance layer, which requires deconstructing performance in their area of practice and scaffolding experiences from novice to mastery

Learning in the performance layer is learning in the flow of work, what I call the hot zone because there are real risks and consequences to manage.

The performance layer already offers performance scaffolds within the operating ecosystem in the form of technology systems, established processes and practices, and other tools relevant to the practice and role.

However, the configuration of these scaffolds and contextual adaption to the context of specific roles depends on the capability of individuals and managers. I'll explain.

Every job can be performed at various levels of complexity, from very basic to the highest level of complexity possible for those activities in that domain (industry). At the lowest level of performance, the focus is on actions that require minimum knowledge for very basic decision-making, small enough to be performed without much experience or practice, and performed with supervision or oversight. This idea was introduced in the article "What is your professional domain of practice and expertise?" where I introduced and positioned the image below:

I also talked about how an activity can be broken down into microelements that progressively move from micro to macro in this article on "What role activities have you mastered?"

I revisited the above ideas because I believe that to maximize the value of the available systemic scaffolds, individuals and managers need to be able to see the job not as one fluid thing but as a series of decisions and actions with varying levels of complexity and fully explore the affordances of available systemic scaffolds including creating new ones if needed, in supporting the various points in the series of decisions and actions.

The series and related scaffolding support can then be intentionally sequenced from simple to complex as a way to onboard or facilitate the development of people who need to perform in that role from when they join to after they have been in the role for years. Individuals and managers need to learn how to think, analyze and break down work tasks and activities this way.

Managers need to enable and facilitate access to learning in the development and meta-development layers

For the development and meta-development layers, the manager and individual will need to access L&D scaffolds in the ecosystem, thus relying on L&D to make these scaffolds available.

1. Self-directed digitally-enabled L&D solutions - performance support & education
2. Non-self-directed solutions (education & workplace simulation workshops)

Often access to these experiences is controlled, and awareness of what is available is limited. Managers' belief and understanding of how and when these experiences help will influence how the manager enables and facilitates access for their direct reports.

Self-directed digitally-enabled L&D solutions - performance support & education

These actually provide support in the performance layer either by direct recommendation by the manager or individual self-directedness. However, for this to be effective, the L&D function needs to ensure the design and availability of the solutions are fit for purpose.

With these digital, self-directed L&D solutions, the goal is to ensure there are adequate resources covering all domains, self-knowledge, and related skills. The adequacy of coverage needs to address both industry-wide knowledge and skills as well as internal-to-organization knowledge and skills, with the latter being the priority.?

The configuration of the digitally-enabled self-directed support system needs to offer both an in-the-flow of work performance support?and step-away-from-work self-directed education.?

Non-self-directed solutions (education & workplace simulation workshops)

For the non-self-directed L&D education and workshops, the L&D function needs to

1. Make available external educational experiences that leverage cohort experiences to broaden perspective while deepening understanding
2. Develop and make available workshops that simulate workplace experiences with a focus on addressing the cognitive, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence competencies that underpin development and performance layer decisions and actions.

For the workshops to achieve the goal, the design needs to focus on?

1. Realistic simulations of stretching or significantly stretching role-specific experiences,?
2. Purposeful and deliberate practice of identified key actions that enable success within the series of decisions and actions of the role
3. Debriefing methods that facilitate reflective practice. This helps individuals learn how to self-identify performance gaps and diagnose them. Identify the need to go beyond the performance layer and activate development or meta-development layer actions. These facilitated reflective practice experiences in neutral zones help people develop their ability to access greater self-awareness, to recognize, engage with and challenge their assumptions and beliefs as they see and appreciate how these impact their decision-making process and the way they perform actions. ?

In Summary…?

The article - "Your source of the confidence and courage to define and achieve aspirational goals" lays the foundation for much of what I talked about in this article. The article starts from the premise that learning and development require individuals to connect with the need for it.

What I have tried to outline in this article is the idea that the starting point and most important driver of growth through work experiences is the nature of the work experiences themselves, not the training offered by L&D.

A key aspect of the experience is clarity of purpose aligned with the organization’s expectations as facilitated by direct managers.

The clarity with alignment is between individuals and managers, and with it comes the ability to recognize gaps that mean something.?

Having gaps identified based on clear and aligned role purpose and expectations makes diagnosing and coming up with actions to close the gaps almost intuitive, starting with scaffolding job tasks and achievements as needed.?

Success with people in these roles will cascade and ripple across the organization, one manager at a time, one team at a time.?

L&D's role in facilitating what I have described above is to configure and maintain the efficacy of the elements that enable the experience summarised in the image below. The "role" to prioritize is non-individual contributors - managers. Prioritization here means designing and deploying a workplace curriculum that develops domain expertise and activity mastery from novice to master for the people management domain of practice and expertise.

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