I waited for things to come crashing down.
With all of the challenges that have come during the past few years, from the pandemic to the Great Resignation, I thought it was just a matter of time before my team would be unable to carry out our commitments for the year. Rightfully so, with so many challenges in front of us, it would have been unfair to expect performance to remain the same during such a difficult period.
But over time, even with the world holding its breath, waiting for a sign of what was to come, our team kept pushing forward — onboarding new employees, creating content, kicking off new initiatives — and seemingly without missing a beat.
Reflecting back now, I realize that we were able to press on in this way because of the steps we had taken to ensure our team could work well in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. We had become resilient.
Learning leaders agree that building skills related to resilience and adaptability is key for the organizations we support — but how do we build that within our teams? How had my team managed to keep moving forward even during such a challenging period?
Over time, we had taken five key steps:
- Reduced our operational risks.
- Fostered bidirectional transparency.
- Created a sense of community.
- Encouraged innovation.
- Created a way to detect early warning signs.
With these things in place, our superpower became not how well we were reacting to the changes and unknowns of the past two years, but how well we had prepared in the years prior.
Reducing operational risks
If a key player on your team went on an extended leave or left the organization, would someone else be able to easily take over running their programs? If your office lost power or internet for an extended period, would you still be able to onboard new employees?
The answers may seem obvious, but these are just a few of the questions we can ask ourselves to assess the operational risks we face as learning leaders.
The process of business continuity planning — analyzing possible organizational risks and determining recovery plans — is typically conducted among teams such as IT and technical support. However, I encourage learning leaders to go through this exercise as well.
While our team had not conducted formal continuity discussions, we had experienced smaller challenges that forced us to think about how we could reduce these risks. Over the years we had team members on extended leaves, technology outages, major storms and large organizational changes. Through those things we learned the value of having backup plans and slowly reduced some of our operational risks by doing things such as assigning multiple technical trainers to the same products, documenting our key processes, hosting mostly virtual instructor-led training and standardizing how we store files.
Learning leaders looking to reduce their operational risks can ask their teams:
- What programs, such as new-hire onboarding, are critical to the organization?
- What are the things that may impact our ability to host these programs?
- How can we delegate work in a way that will encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing, making it easier to transition projects during absences?
- What tools or technology are we reliant upon to facilitate our learning programs?
- What are alternative ways we can host these in the event of an outage or another major event?
While there will always be some risks that could prevent us from carrying out key programs, thinking through these areas can help mitigate the impact when issues do occur.
Fostering bidirectional transparency
When we think about transparency in the workplace, we often think of company leaders being open about the health of the organization and upcoming changes. To overcome the potential challenges of the future, I encourage learning leaders to think of ways to foster bidirectional transparency, both from leaders to their team and from employees to their leaders.
For my team, that included me sharing departmental and company updates regularly in our team meetings and providing opportunities for open dialogue on upcoming changes. For those on my team, it was demonstrated by their openness in 1-on-1s, sharing how the pandemic was impacting them and their families personally.
With that open communication, we were able to adjust plans as needed to ensure that we were considering both the personal and business needs of our team members. It also gave us the opportunity to reassure the team that their well-being was our top priority during that time and to connect them with resources that could assist them with any personal challenges they faced.
Creating a sense of community
While bidirectional transparency focuses on the trust and openness between leaders and employees, creating a community focuses on creating a sense of partnership and understanding among the overall team.
As leaders, we can ask ourselves:
- How well do members of the team understand each person’s role, their strengths and their goals?
- How comfortable are they reaching out for help or sharing honest feedback with each other?
In our team we fostered that sense of community through a variety of methods, including global team meetings, project show-and-tells and virtual team-building events. With employees distributed across several countries, these activities provided an opportunity to learn about each other, celebrate personal wins and highlight professional achievements. It was a proactive strategy to increase our team engagement, and having that cadence already in place made it much easier to keep relationships close as we all transitioned to working from home.
Encouraging innovation
Because we are unable to predict the future challenges we may face, having a team that is capable of creative problem-solving is also key. The ability to find solutions during challenging situations, or resourcefulness, was identified as a key attribute for resilient teams by the initiative Go Forward to Work.
In our team, innovation was encouraged by consistently considering how we could improve our programs and actioning feedback from participants. We also had quarterly Impact Awards that were used as a way to highlight the steps that members of the team had taken to improve one of our learning programs, our team operations or the larger department.
This article from Harvard Business School shares some great strategies for fostering innovation in teams, including focusing on problem-solving solutions, creating methods for testing and refining innovations, and creating a culture where mistakes are seen as a learning opportunity.
Detecting warning signs
Even with all of these things in place, there is still always the possibility that a company change or a world event may shake up your learning team. Because of this, it’s important to have ways to detect a rising issue before it is too late. After all, the timing of most crises doesn’t align well with our annual engagement surveys.
Going into the pandemic we were fortunate to already have a pulse survey cadence in place and time during our team meetings to ask questions and provide feedback. Through this feedback, both direct and anonymous, we were able to identify when members of the team were uncomfortable with a change or concerned about their work. It gave me the insight I needed as a leader to know when to pivot plans, provide reassurance and further acknowledge the progress of the team.
For your team, methods of detecting burgeoning issues could be through check-in questions during your 1-on-1s, virtual comment boxes or the monitoring of performance data. The goal in the early detection is to identify if there is a shift in individual engagement or performance before it starts to impact overall team morale, retention or the ability to achieve business goals.
As we move into the new year I encourage learning leaders to reflect with their teams on the challenges faced and lessons learned in 2020-2021. I also encourage them to think through how we can continue to make our teams more resilient so we can better weather the storms we may face in the future.
