Let's be honest - we all have experience with professions where we have either seen brilliant professionals or low-impact underperformance. Therefore Leaning & Development can easily be the old school very meaningless money-spending function of "I will book a trainer for some generic topics, order snacks and send the team to some after drinks to help them "develop". At the same time, if done right, it can be a transformational function inside your People & Culture (HR) team that offers splendid support to Managers and Team Leads in upskilling, offering career growth and crafting an experience that makes employees want to be part of.

What is really causing business challenges?

• High-performing learning organizations are two times more likely to report achieving improved sustainability & profitability, including improving customer satisfaction (61%) and overall organizational performance (47%). Driving Performance & Productivity. Towards Maturity Report 2018.

• Organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to innovate and 52% more productive, 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services, and 17% more profitable than their peers. Deloitte 2015.

• On average, there is a 24% increase in productivity and performance as a result of learning done well. The Transformation Curve. Towards Maturity Learning Benchmark Report 2018.

• 86% of professionals would change jobs if a new company offered them more opportunities for professional development. Hiring Outlook Report. Execu 2019.

• 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Workplace Learning Report. LinkedIn Learning.

• The third most crucial reason for resigning from a job is not having opportunities to discuss with the manager about career development, learning and promotion opportunities. Great Attrition' or Great Attraction. Mckinsey 2021.

• Having opportunities to learn and grow is now the number 1 factor that people say defines an exceptional work environment. Employee Wellbeing Report. Glint 2021.

Clash of mentalities

Raise your hand if anyone in your organisation has come to you (L&D professional) and said "people are experiencing X and we need you to offer a training on topic Y". Or maybe you find familiar a conversation with a leader along the lines "I have problems with person Z, they do not seem to be successful in their manager role. Sign them up to manager training".

What is wrong with either of the situations? Isn't trainings supposed to.., you know, ..train people? Well, no growth takes place in a magical incubator. Personal and professional development does not happen only during courses and trainings.

And there is no 1 cure to make people learn. I do not have the power to initiate growth in a person just as no one can summon me to expand my skills, and knowledge and change behaviour. We need to talk more about the difference between having access to knowledge (for example going to a training) and learning. 

High-Impact Learning Culture (HILC) starts from..

There’s a huge role that organizations play in setting the context and the culture for learning. And there are a few different elements to this. Like so many things, it starts at the top, and it starts with having a CEO or a senior leader who actually values learning and talk about it very actively. That to me is honestly table stakes. Because if people don’t see it as something that’s valued in the organization, they’re much less likely to do it.

But I don’t think that’s enough. Number two, is there a culture or an expectation that people are actually going to take time out to learn? Because you do a lot of learning in the flow of your work. But you actually do from time to time need to step out of the flow and invest in taking time for mentoring, peer-coaching or studying something on your own.

The third aspect of agile learner-centric HILC is a combination of (self-) identifying learning needs, setting goals and establishing outcomes with the ability to do self-reflection. When learners themselves understand that the only person driving their growth and development is themselves, it is a game-changer. Manager initiated "You want to take this communication course?" scheduled training versus self-reflected understanding and determined decision to work on ones individual development goal are two worlds apart. And to be frank, I do not want to live in the first world, where people need others to tell them what learning initiatives they should take. Why?

#1 Not targeted nor impactful

#2 No ownership

By reading a book to someone, you take their drive to learn to read

My advice to a manager, People Partner, and L&D specialist is not to try and bury yourself into trying to understand the growth need of the person. I know, sounds like very odd advice. Instead, start with assessing if there is a motivation for growth and development. And if there is, then what is the motivator for them? Only the learner themselves can be responsible for their own development.

Let's walk through an example. You have a manager in your team that you see displaying behaviours that a manager should not. What happens if you go and sign them up for manager training? Some possible outcomes could be either:

1. They might or might not take part,

2. one possibility is that their unwillingness to understand why they are there makes it a complete waste of time,

3. maybe they are open to taking part and some conversations and information spark new ideas that over time get forgotten,

4. or they get very engaged and gather a lot of new ideas and develop new behaviour that they bring to their every day.

All of that is in that situation just a gamble. How to make it a targeted performance engineering?

How to get one to read a book by themself?

Never mind this complicated sub-title. What I mean is to help Learning & Development be more than booking random "Hey, no one from my team wants to present in meetings. Can we send them to a 4-week public speaking bootcamp?"-initiated training, we need the organization understand the real underlying performance issues and struggles.

Here are 9 example questions to start to understand the problem and nudge development-focused self-directed learners and their training-minded managers to the right track.

👉 What are we trying to solve?

👉 Describe the ideal situation. What should the behaviour look like?

👉 Why is this important?

👉 Do you have any data on that?

👉 What’s your evidence?

👉 How will you measure x?

👉 What’s your evidence?

👉 What’s your metric of success?

👉 What exists today?

👉 Are your audience aware of x problem?

And after you have supported in identifying the need, the second step would be for the learner to set for themselves a development goal.

Voila! You are one step further from old-school training management and lightyears closer to performance engineering.