Three Must-Haves to Enable Pull Learning

Trying to make Pull Learning work in your organization?  Without some critical supports, your efforts are likely to fail.  In my previous post, we explored the distinction between "push" and "pull" approaches to training and developing.  Here I elaborate on the three most critical types of support needed to make pull strategies work: feedback loops, curated learning ecosystem, and guidance.

Must-Have #1. Feedback Loops

Without sufficient feedback, individuals and teams have no way of knowing that change is needed; what specific skills they need to improve; what progress they've made as a result of prior development efforts; or how much they still need to grow. 

Development without feedback is
like driving a car while blindfolded.
You only know the ride is over
when you crash!

When we think of feedback in the workplace, we tend to think of formal, often yearly performance appraisals. Feedback loops certainly include a manager's performance feedback but are by no means limited to that, nor does all of the feedback need to be formal.  Feedback loops work best when they are timely and tightly focused on a few key job behaviors.  If the ritual of giving and receiving feedback once a year feels awkward to  you, you're not alone.  As a business leader recently said to me:

"Yearly performance appraisals are like not talking to someone for a year and then showing up at their wedding and being asked to give a toast." 

When managers and their employees interact and exchange feedback frequently, on an ongoing basis, the yearly appraisals become a mere formality.  Weekly or bi-weekly check-in meetings and after-action-report meetings can provide the necessary frequency and timeliness for manager feedback.  Regardless, a manager's performance appraisal is only one of many ways to give employees feedback.

Stakeholder Feedback

One of the most powerful and scalable types of feedback is stakeholder feedback.  This can involve interviews, focus groups, and/or surveys of clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders.  Ideally, this type of feedback is collected routinely for mission-critical aspects of a business.  Long ago, when I was a retail manager, I received monthly secret shopper comments and customer survey results, which I shared with my team members and used in my performance management discussions.  Today, in my consulting practice, as we reach a milestone and near the end of a project, I briefly interview my clients to gather feedback on the process and our service levels.  This type of external feedback lends tremendous validity to the feedback I provide my team members and increases the likelihood that they will buy into it. 

Scorecards

Feedback can also include rankings and metrics related to business processes, key initiatives, and other success factors.  When designing processes, define your success factors and begin collecting data from day one. It need not be a huge undertaking.  A one-question Net Promoter Score survey, for example, takes minutes, not hours.  When launching a new initiative, ask your stakeholders how the success of the initiative should be judged, then build evaluation strategies into your project plan, so it's just baked into your team's work. 

The more we can quantify and organically integrate feedback loops into our day-to-day business processes, initiatives, and projects, the better.  A recent Harvard Business Review article, Feedback Without Measurement Won't Do Any Good (Schrage, 2015), discussed the emergence of Self-Quantification (think FitBit for business) as a more effective way to build feedback loops than traditional coaching:

"Our expanding abilities to digitally, visually and pervasively self-monitor will transform how on-the-job feedback gets defined, developed, and delivered."

Self-Awareness Tools

In addition to performance feedback, it's important that we provide individuals with opportunities to reflect and gain insight into their own personality, strengths, weaknesses, and potential derailers and help them see how those traits impact others and their own success.  Using 360 feedback tools (download this annotated bibliography from CCL) and personality assessments (e.g., StrengthsFinder, DiSC, Myers-Briggs, Social Styles), we can help our workers hold up a mirror and develop greater self-awareness.  This looking glass is especially important around common blind spots that we all have, such as our potential derailers, strengths, affinities, emotional intelligence, and personality.  Mentors, and in some cases executive coaches, can also help individuals discover hidden strengths and uncomfortable truths about themselves.

Performance and developmental feedback from managers (direct and indirect) and mentors can be invaluable, especially when combined with the other types of feedback loops mentioned above.  Good feedback loops can provide the external insight needed to attain self-awareness and can often be the spark that lights the motivation needed to drive self-improvement. 

Must-Have #2. Curated Ecosystem

Talent development professionals who simply make learning content available using a "build it and they will come" mindset are often disappointed that learners don't flock to that learning ecosystem and immediately start using it.  When you don't have a great deal of discretionary time to invest in development to begin with, being given access to a myriad of resources and being asked to choose your own path can actually feel overwhelming, not empowering.  We can alleviate that stress and generate more traffic in our ecosystem by scaffolding the process of choosing how best to address different development needs and by organizing and pre-assembling learning resources for our learners.

Some Assembly Required

Managing a learning ecosystem is often compared to curating a museum.  Curators organize content--be it artwork or historical artifacts--in a way that engages visitors, tells them a compelling story and helps them gain new insights. 

When building an exhibition, museum curators start by zeroing in on a specific goal and target audience.  For example, at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the curators recently established an "American Enterprise" display in its Innovation Wing, to celebrate American ingenuity in business, including an homage to Silicon Valley.  At Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, curators wanted to highlight legos and the broader concept of building.  For the curator of a workplace learning ecosystem, goals are typically be based on current talent management needs, competency models for different job families and management levels, and emerging business needs.  Once they have an audience and goal, curators set about locating, evaluating, and selecting content resources in order to assemble the best collection for what they want to achieve. 

In a learning ecosystem, these resources likely include formal elearning modules, webinars, and instructor-led workshops as well as videos, games, and assessments, some of which may be internally generated by the training department or licensed from external content providers.  In addition, the ecosystem can include informal social media that are generated internally (wiki on SharePoint) or externally (e.g., YouTube).  At the Constitution Center, my family and I competed in a Jeopardy-style game to see who knew the constitution best.  By the way, you can play the Bill of Rights Game and other games online, if you like.  A good ecosystem offers a wide variety of content, in small increments, and in different formats, to allow learners maximum flexibility.

More than Media

A learning ecosystem should include more than just media, though.  Interactivity, mentoring, and experiential learning are vital elements that need to be included.

The Scrimmage mobile learning platform is an example of where things are headed.  Through their ipad's portal, learners can intuitively access LMS-based elearning content as well as PDFs, video clips, and other media residing on other servers without hunting for content.  In addition, learners can play online games with other learners; complete certification assessments; engage in role play and coaching interactions with their managers; and have online discussions with their colleagues.  The platform also supports instructor-led training, providing polling and other interactive features that you can incorporate into live training events.  With Scrimmage, you can create your own media- and interactivity-rich learning ecosystem.

A learning ecosystem should also include mentors and certified experts who can act as resources, spreading home-grown know-how and lessons learned throughout the organization.  With a mentor selection and interaction system like eMentorConnect, you can create a pool of mentors and experts that is plugged into your ecosystem. 

Of no lesser importance is the availability of experiential learning experiences that offer some degree of supporting structure.  Secondments, job rotations, cross-training, temporary assignments, and special projects should be supported through this ecosystem.  After all, when you need to develop new skills quickly, there is no better way to do so than through experiential learning. 

With an interactive, online learning plan like the platform offered by OnboardGuru, you can break down a series of development activities and pull in supporting resources as needed.  Employees, their mentors, and their managers can track progress as experiential learning assignments are completed.  Currently being used by NFL teams to onboard new players in the off-season, it's a great tool not only for corporate onboarding programs but also for highly experiential professional and leadership development programs.

Blaze the Trail

Of course, simply assembling and making all of these learning resources available isn't enough.  Imagine walking into a museum where everything is just thrown about at random.  Museum curators organize and even sequence the selected resources in a logical way that helps visitors internalize and remember what they're learning.  In a learning ecosystem, you would be able to search on different categories, organized by competencies perhaps, to find what's most relevant for you. 

Taking it a step further, curators might sequence a series of learning resources and activities to form a curriculum, or pathway.  This way, if someone, for example, wanted to develop their business acumen or executive presence, they could jump right into an already-established curriculum.  This type of scaffolding makes it easier, faster, and less intimidating for learners to start engaging with their ecosystem. 

As I've described in previous posts, the Degreed platform offers tremendous advantages in assembling a wide variety of learning resources--including formal and informal ones as well as internal, third-party, and public content--and in organizing them into pre-established pathways that speed up the process for the learner.

Results Matter

Although sourcing, evaluating, selecting, and organizing content resources are essential functions for a curator, the factor that will differentiate a great ecosystem from a so-so one is the curator's ability to tell stories in an engaging, interactive, and impactful way.  The most popular museums today are full of interactive displays and experiential activities to stimulate learning, retention, and application.  Likewise, your learning ecosystem will only be considered a success if workers are expanding their competencies and applying their new competencies on the job.  In order to accomplish that, the curricula, or pathways, that you design must engage and immerse learners and provide them with relevant opportunities to practice, reflect on feedback, and apply those skills on the job (aka, "far transfer).  Otherwise, it's all just a big waste of time, money, and effort.

Must-Have #3. Guidance

The Pull approach assumes that learners are at least somewhat self-directed.  Unfortunately, being a self-directed learner requires a set of attributes and skills that most of us don't have in abundance. Attributes include self-awareness, openness to change, plasticity, and confidence--which fuels self-efficacy, risk-taking, openness to criticism, and persistence in the face of failure.  Skills include the ability to seek out feedback, reflect on it critically, course-correct, locate appropriate supporting resources, and apply ideas to new and different contexts. 

Look around your organization.  If you're lucky, one of out ten colleagues might have those traits.  They're able to see a situation, figure out what they don't know, fill the knowledge gap quickly with the right resources, and move on to the next challenge.  They are rare individuals, and frankly they don't need much help from you.  It's the other ~90% that you really need to worry most about in terms of your support, the ones who aren't yet self-directed learners.  They need a great deal of guidance throughout the development process, at least the first time they go through it.

What specifically do they need?

Learners need guidance upfront to establish self-awareness and define their most critical development needs.  They need help identifying the right learning resources and activities as well as chunking, sequencing, and scheduling them.  In other words, they need help with diagnostics and planning.  After that, they need help finding and accessing the right resources (e.g., getting the right mentor, registering for a course).  They need help establishing feedback loops and using feedback effectively to course-correct.  They need encouragement, reinforcement, and accountability to ensure follow-through. 

Managers: "You expect me to do what now?!"

Traditionally, managers were expected to fill that coaching role and provide their employees with developmental guidance.  This is where I often get funny looks in conversations with leaders.  It's understandable.  They're swamped; things are constantly changing; and they're not getting much development from their leaders.  You can't blame managers for being cynical about taking on development responsibilities that have been ignored for years.  And yet, developing the competencies of employees is a core management function.  Ignoring development--much like ignoring your own personal health--leads to all sorts of organizational ills, including poor performance, low morale, low productivity, high turnover, weak bench strength, high human capital costs, slow growth, and low profitability. 

Even understanding intellectually the importance of development, the added time and effort required can be a difficult pill to swallow for many managers. With that in mind, you should consider the readiness and willingness of your managers to invest time into developing their people.  I've found that clearly articulated expectations from the top, modeling, change management, training, incentives, job aids, and persistence are all needed to get managers into this mode.  Consider also where you can provide support that either offsets or augments what the managers are doing--remember that they're learning too.  Check out this Harvard Business Review article, which offers six ways to turn managers into coaches.

Make Contact, Not Paperwork

Last but not least, avoid burdening managers with complexity and administrivia.  Help them focus on making contact; that is, having the right conversations with their employees; creating feedback loops; and leveraging the ecosystem you've created.  Forms, software applications, and other hard infrastructure can be added later, once managers and employees are engaged in the process.  Many HR professionals make the mistake of focusing too much on hard systems, paper trails, and automation upfront.  That can stifle the manager-employee development conversations and take the wind out of your change management efforts.  First and foremost, focus on the conversations.  Without those conversations, don't expect to see any change in terms of development, performance, morale, retention, engagement, etc.

Development--whether it's educational, technical or leadership development--is by necessity a contact sport, where learning by doing and interaction with others are required in order to shape attitudes, apply behaviors, and develop an appreciation for the myriad of details that lead to success.  Reading (books, articles), viewing (videos, presentations), and listening (lectures, podcasts) can support and accelerate development, but they are no substitute for mindful practice, ongoing feedback, and insightful guidance. If you want the organizational benefits that come with a highly skilled, motivated, and engaged workforce, everyone needs to do their part, make the time investment, and make contact...no excuses.

I love to hear from colleagues, so please like, share, and/or comment if this post strikes a chord with you, even if it's a dissonant one.

Gus Prestera, PhD

• For more on learning ecosystems, check out Dr. Catherine Lombardozzi's work: Lombardozzi, C. (2015). Scaffolding Learning in the Ecosystem: Helping People Thrive.

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