We are experiencing a learn-it-all revolution. Much to the delight of learning and development executives, Carol Dweck’s research and insights inspired an emphasis on a growth mindset, commonly understood as the belief that our abilities are not fixed, but can be developed. Calls to cultivate a growth mindset are now heard in spaces ranging from my first grade daughter’s school to high-performing corporate teams at Microsoft, and beyond.
This belief system has been a guiding principle for many of us. But even those steeped in a growth mindset could not have imagined how it could operate in a global pandemic. In an instant, many learning environments at work transformed. It’s time to recreate our learn-it-all culture.
Let’s put this shift into context. Pre-pandemic, many learning leaders carefully curated experiences for every stage, from the onboarding journey to executive leadership readiness. These learning experiences were often in-person moments, replete with shared coffee breaks and human-to-human relationship-building activities. Feedback could be immediate, bolstered by informal exchanges in the hallway.
The pandemic forced many leaders to radically alter or suspend this scaffolded learning process of real-time reinforcement. Consequently, many employees may feel adrift, not seeing a clear path to career development or advancement.
As we emerge from isolation, many work environments will soon include a combination of both onsite and remote workers who enjoy greater flexibility and autonomy over when, how and with whom they work. This puts chief learning officers and learning leaders in the unique position to redesign that learning experience, as well as the surrounding culture that supports it. As the Great Resignation compounds an already painful talent shortage, people and talent leaders may need to rethink their game plan.
Make it personal
Customizing the workplace learning experience is the first step to rethinking the strategy. While we have been actively integrating more diverse cultures, backgrounds and generations into workplace strategies for some time, we now have the added complexity of considering where and when work is getting done. Seeing these new variables as opportunities rather than obstacles can increase the effectiveness of the overall learning matrix within an organization and personalize the job growth experience.
“For me, personalization is apropos because I work in the world of career performance,” says Sean Cain, director of career performance at Walt Disney General Entertainment Content. “We frame our verbiage around career growth as a career journey. We understand that everyone’s journey is unique to them. What we try to provide is a lattice versus a ladder mentality and meet people where they are.”
One way to personalize the career journey is with new HR technologies designed to address individual learning preferences. Democratized coaching platforms are transforming customized learning at all levels across the organization. Through a mix of assessments, one-on-one coaching conversations and microlearning opportunities, these platforms empower employees hungry for development to unlock their own personal and professional growth.
Mentoring relationships also help create a personalized learning experience. At DGE, a new tech-enabled mentorship program aims to connect employees across vast and diverse business assets to support the development of relationships. In the two months they’ve piloted the program, they’ve matched close to 1,300 people and enabled 2,100 hours of conversation.
Compared to static coursework, these new, more dynamic methods for encouraging professional growth enable remote and in-office team members alike to develop relationships. These bonds would likely be far more challenging to achieve through purely digital approaches. In a hybrid world, it becomes distinctly important to meet diverse learning needs with a personalized, human touch.
Engage storytelling
Do you recall when some leaders thought storytelling was best left to the marketing department? Nowadays most acknowledge that regardless of where you sit within the organization, being an effective storyteller is an essential skill. It unlocks the power to motivate employees, inspire ideas and drive business forward. In a hybrid environment, we are called to embrace technology tools and virtual opportunities to share compelling stories at work.
With a background in the performing arts, I started my career in storytelling. The craft involved connecting with an audience and fellow cast members to communicate a narrative. The same skills translate to business. We can only drive operational change when we first capture the hearts and minds of our diverse stakeholders.
“A great story is built on overcoming and demonstrating resilience,” Cain says. “Leveraging their own internal resilience and grit, building upon that — why they do what they do rather than what they do. That speaks volumes.”
Jonathan Mueller, co-CEO of Ascend Behavior Partners, agrees: “A leader needs to practice two things to be an effective storyteller: one, draw from personal experience (authenticity) and two, understand the audiences’ needs (emotional resonance). This is something I’m constantly trying to improve.”
Mueller uses storytelling to reinforce Ascend’s organizational values. He shares and encourages stories of specific behaviors and team interactions that demonstrate their guiding principles in action. It’s a way to bring core values to life.
In the work I now do with clients, storytelling has been a central practice to help leaders align to their company purpose, mission and values and deepen human relationships — especially across distributed teams. High-impact stories are usually personal, include metaphor or imagery, and link emotion between the storyteller and the audience. These stories build lasting connections.
The good news is there’s an abundance of opportunities for storytelling, including:
- The interview and hiring process.
- Onboarding.
- Quarterly all-hands meetings.
- One-on-one coaching conversations.
- The goal setting process.
Corina Kolbe, vice president of learning and development at Zillow Group, says that her team is focusing on developing an internal speakers’ bureau to develop public speaking skills among its leaders.
“Given everything is virtual, every team meeting is an opportunity to share a story, give more context and help people understand the why of what we are doing,” she says.
Encouraging more why and less how helps us reconcile fragmented team experiences in a hybrid environment. By communicating the “why” of business objectives, we can bring our north star into sharper focus. Teams then have the creative freedom to select the how based on where they sit in the organization, how they learn and work best, as well as their preferred way to get the job done. The story of why becomes the driving and unifying force.
Celebrate risk-taking
No organizations actively seek out failure — in fact, it’s advised to try to avoid it! However, creating a safe workplace environment where teams can experiment (and, yes, fail) can lead to greater opportunities for shared learning experiences. And, after storytelling is ingrained as a regular business practice, teams will be more comfortable sharing what’s not working, as well as what is.
“People realize that failure can lead to success if we stop thinking myopically about what success looks like,” Cain says. “And I think that’s been one of the biggest cultural mind shifts for us. In an industry and company ripe with 100 years of success, we shouldn’t shun our failures and missteps, but instead think, ‘What did they teach us?’ They help us become better versions of ourselves.”
Celebrating learning from failure certainly isn’t a new idea, but it’s worth revisiting in our new hybrid environment. Companies can explore:
- Rewarding people for killing a project if it’s doomed to fail.
- Driving innovation by destigmatizing failure and creating a space to talk more openly about it.
- Examining what tasks and workflows are optimally performed in-office, and what work is more suited for remote work — and then sharing examples of what’s worked and what hasn’t.
- Launching team-wide competitions to experiment with hybrid work structures and learning from failure.
“One of our core values is ‘Think Big, Move Fast.’” Kolbe says. “We’re a company of bold thinkers with courage to try things that have never been done before. We reward and recognize pioneering spirit, even if ideas and first attempts fail.”
By demonstrating the vulnerability and humility required to share their failures and the lessons those failures taught, leaders build trust. Publicly recognizing that risk-taking and effort are crucial for success, but don’t guarantee it, inspires others to take the next risk that could lead to a big payoff. As our workforce transforms, this practice reduces a fear of missteps during an inevitably bumpy period of change and recalibration.
Create synchronous and asynchronous learning moments
I’ll admit it: I miss the energy of a room full of people learning together. The shared “a-ha” of gaining a new tool or insight within a community is rewarding. But our workplace environment, including where and when we connect with our colleagues, is changing. Today, we can build learning moments that are experienced and shared in real time, as well as discovered asynchronously. Hybrid work environments can be used to our advantage. Inspiration can strike while walking the dog or exercising on the elliptical just as easily as in a mentoring conversation or feedback after a client interaction. We can make space for both.
But how do we figure out what learning should be done together versus on demand? Recognizing they needed a mix of both options to enable employees to succeed, Kolbe identified key criteria for the choice at Zillow Group.
“We have kept a strong focus on synchronous learning for two areas: line of business onboarding and leadership development,” she says. “Both require learning new skills and applying them in small groups, role playing or discussions. Given this need we will continue to keep these types of courses synchronous.”
Learning leaders can still find creative ways to achieve the benefits of a real-time synchronous learning community, even for content that is now delivered asynchronously. Leaders may explore:
- Architecting learning content themes by month.
- Creating learning cohorts.
- Building social connection points.
- Augmenting live discussions with bite-sized on-demand learning.
These are ways of achieving the 70-20-10 learning model, refreshed for our new, modern work environment.
Whether synchronous or asynchronous, the details of the execution should all be in service of the greater learning purpose.
“There’s an experience, a takeaway and a community aspect. Everything we do should touch on all three of those components,” Cain says. “We’re just scratching the surface of what that’ll look like.”
Summing it up
Whether we like it or not, the rules of the game have changed. Relying on what has worked before won’t produce the learn-it-all culture that we now crave. These new-era learning strategies — personalizing learning journeys, modeling and developing storytelling among our leaders, celebrating learning from failure and enabling greater variety in learning experiences — can help us all play to win. And nowadays, if we want top talent to stay in the game, we may just need to change the playbook.
