A Leader’s Mandate : Help Others LearnThe power of learning-focused leadership

Karen Hebert-Maccaro

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To learn is to adapt. And adaptability is arguably one of the most critical capabilities you can have on your team or in your organization today, particularly since technological and business change is happening at a rate never before seen. This pace of change has profound implications for both organizations and individuals. The average shelf life of a skill is now less than five years,1 and some estimates suggest that as much as 50% of subject knowledge gained during year one of a four-year technical degree may be outdated by the time the student crosses the stage for graduation.2

Recruiting new employees to quickly meet the continuously changing skill needs—even if possible in a competitive talent landscape—is obviously not the single solution. And with the cost to replace an employee estimated at between six and nine months of the position’s salary, retaining good employees is a cost-efficient practice.3

But if retention is paramount, so too is upskilling and reskilling.

To be successful, an organization must find the most efficient and effective manner of upskilling and reskilling its workforce. The most effective leaders know this and take steps to affirm a culture and practice of continuous learning on their teams.

1 https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/ pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf2 http://reports.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-2016/skills-stability/3 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-kantor/ high-turnover-costs-way-more-than-you-think_b_9197238.html 4 https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/ pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf

“To be successful, an organization must find the most efficient and effective manner of upskilling and reskilling its workforce.”

A challenge: Organizational disconnectToo many leaders simply defer to their human resources (HR) or learning and development (L&D) colleagues to address their teams’ needs to grow and develop. This is an abdication of one of the most important responsibilities of a leader — and it invariably fails to satisfy the needs of the team. Of course, partnering with HR and L&D is a prudent way to develop a culture and practice of continuous learning on your team, but relying on those colleagues exclusively is problematic for several reasons.

First, no one knows your business and your team members better than you. As a leader, you’re in a unique position to understand the skills and competencies required for your team’s success as well as the strengths and gaps of your individual team members.

Second, while partnering with HR and L&D should provide important knowledge of learning science and curriculum design, their involvement will invariably be episodic, whereas you’re in the position to reinforce learning-oriented behaviors day in and day out.

Third, despite some shifts in this area, many L&D organiza-tions are still primarily focused on traditional classroom learning. A recent study suggests 50 – 63% of L&D efforts are focused on this method,4 which takes employees out of their workflows and into learning environments (physical or digital) rather than providing learning tools that can be used within the workflow or adjacent to it. While this type of learning is critical, it isn’t optimized for efficiency and therefore must be occasional. You can’t have your entire team off the road or out of the office in a class-room for days on end.

Finally, in most organizations, L&D and HR resources serve more than one team or perhaps even an entire organization through a centralized structure, which means resource allocation decisions are made based on the “greatest good to be done” approach (i.e., a company determines which tools and programs to buy or develop based on their applicability to the largest number of employees or the company’s most strategic priorities). This may mean that you find yourself with support for only some of your team’s learning goals.

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“Leaders must share the responsibility for developing their employees by building a culture and practice of learning on their teams.”

The results of a recent study appear to suggest some of the above challenges may be resulting in poor satisfaction when leaders rely exclusively on HR and L&D programming. It concluded that the most important thing leaders want from their L&D programs are business impact (#1) and ROI (#2), and yet only 8% of leaders say they see business impact, and only 4% say they see ROI.5 While this may, in part, be attributable to disconnects in how to measure impact and ROI, the results are still telling. However, the blame for these disappointing outcomes does not rest with HR and L&D alone. Leaders must share the responsibility for developing their employees by building a culture and practice of learning on their teams.

Create a culture and practice of learningBoth a culture and a practice of learning are necessary to encourage team members to embrace adaptability and learning as a core competency. Culture provides the psychological safety and commitment to the ideas, while practice supports the application — the actions and behaviors that allow for adaptability and learning to be key attributes of any team. Let’s take each in turn.

What is a culture of learning, and how do you build one? A corporate culture of learning supports open mindedness, independent thinking, knowledge seeking, and shared learning with a focus on the goals of the organization. Such a culture is rare (found in only around 1 in 10 companies by some estimates) but has been linked to real business impact. In fact, according to research conducted by Josh Bersin, the

founder of Bersin by Deloitte, “The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture.” 6 Don’t let the rarity of such a culture discourage you; building one in a team isn’t impossible, and that team’s success can impact the organization as a whole.

While there are many ways a leader can build a culture of learning among his or her team, here are a few ways to start.

Embrace failure routinely

First, let’s get something out of the way. Embracing and even celebrating failure without learning from it is a mistake. However, embracing failure as a learning experience results in growth — the foundation of learning. But doing so requires an observable commitment to the principle that failure is a part of work, that open discussion of failure will not lead to blame, and that a responsibility to highlight, dissect, and derive meaning from failure exists at all levels of the team. Starting first with you as the team leader.

It’s important to share the lessons learned from your own failures and make it clear that failing (as a result of some-thing other than egregious behavior) will not be penalized. Being a “failure tolerant” 7 leader doesn’t mean you can’t hold individuals accountable, but it does mean that your team believes you will see excusable failures as part of good risk taking, innovation, and growth — and an opportunity to become better.

Encourage debate and dissent

Another contributing factor to building a culture of learning is encouraging healthy debate and dissent. In fact, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, Bill Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company, says leaders must adopt what he calls the “obligation to dissent.” 8 This obligation is crucial to a learning culture because it creates, among other things, a freedom for anyone, regardless of rank or role, to create and share ideas without fear of these ideas being dismissed or ridiculed.

When it’s known that excusable failures and debate and dissent are welcomed as methods for individual and team growth, adaptability, and success, you increase the odds of your team members engaging, contributing, and delivering on their full potential.

5 https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/ pdfs/lil-workplace-learning-report.pdf 6 https://blog.bersin.com/how-to-build-a-high-impact-learning-culture/7 https://hbr.org/2002/08/the-failure-tolerant-leader8 https://hbr.org/2017/01/true-leaders-believe-dissent-is-an-obligation

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What is a practice of learning, and how do you build one? The practice of learning is comprised of the actions, systems, and behavior you, as a leader, can build and promote as part of a learning-oriented leadership approach. You must establish the trust that is inherent in a learning culture discussed above to ensure your team welcomes and engages in these activities and behaviors themselves.

Build a learning agenda

Lots of leaders pay lip service to encouraging and valuing learning but fail to activate the practice inside their own teams. A good way to start is to build a team learning agenda. The steps are relatively simple, but the discussion that such an activity produces can be extraordinarily valuable.

First, lay out your team’s strategy and major priorities or initiatives. Then work with the team to identify the skills required to achieve those initiatives and inventory those that are covered by existing skills on the team and those that are not. Discuss the team’s personal development goals. This step may be best for one-on-one discussion. Combining these individual and team gaps and aspirations gives you your comprehensive learning agenda, which you can then use to devise strategies for development. Sharing this agenda with your L&D and HR colleagues, if you have them, can be a great way to begin. Regularly using the agenda to discuss progress and celebrate milestones is a tangible way to exhibit your commitment to a learning culture, employee development, and team success.

Promote performance-adjacent learning

Performance-adjacent learning is essentially learning that occurs in the course of work, which is often nonlinear in approach. This learning method addresses the need to diversify learning beyond traditional classroom instruction, helps meet your employees where they are, and provides learning that is most relevant to the unique challenges and needs of your team.

For example, a software developer in your firm is working on a particularly challenging piece of code for a new product feature. She finds herself stuck and unable to proceed. She asks a few members of her team but gets no satisfactory resolution. So she turns to your learning tool, searches for a term that describes her problem, and is directed to the precise section of a course, book, or video that addresses the issue. She finds an answer and returns to work within 10 minutes of her first entrance

into your digital ecosystem. The problem is solved. By her own estimates that 10-minute investment saved her at least an hour of additional work. Pretty good return on investment, right?

The key here is to design or buy learning tools that enable such behavior. You’ll need tools that enable precision search, have a robust and relevant body of content, and offer a range of formats to address the need for variety in learning.

At O’Reilly, we explored learning behavior on our online learning platform during Q3 of 2017. By examining approxi-mately 195,000 unique learning activities by learners across a range of industries, we found that fully 42% were nonlinear or conducted in a performance-adjacent manner. In Q3 of 2018, we surveyed just under 7,000 (6,852 to be exact) of our learners and found that 44.2% self-report that they use the learning platform in a performance-adjacent manner, confirming our nonlinear finding from 2017.

Your employees want to learn in an efficient manner at the point of need. You can help encourage this type of continuous and seamlessly integrated learning by working to provide or advocate for solutions and tools that enable performance adjacency.

Be a learning-oriented leader

It’s simple, but there is still so much truth to leading by example. As a leader, your willingness to share your own learning processes, skills you’re seeking to master, and experiences you’d like to develop emphasizes to your team that learning is valued and valuable. Partner with any available HR and L&D experts in this area, but don’t abdicate your own responsibility.

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The leader’s mandateThe need for adaptability has never been greater and the competition for talent never stiffer. Success requires commitment to being a learning-oriented leader and developing both a culture and a practice of learning on your team. Whether you have an HR or L&D team to rely on or not, you must engage fully in creating the culture and practice of learning on your team, because without it you miss the chance to help your team members realize their full potential and positively impact the organization’s success. Focusing on building a learning culture and learning practice may be among the most direct ways to impact your own success as well.

“Success requires commitment to being a learning-oriented leader and developing both a culture and a practice of learning on your team.”