It's a changing and dynamic world at the minute and you might be wondering if it's the right time to invest in growing and developing your people.
In turbulent times you need to consider a number of factors to help you make the best development decisions:
How ready to learn are your team, and how enthusiastic are they about learning and development?
You need to ensure that your team are in the right, physical, emotional, and mental space to make the most of time and money invested in any kind of development. So, to help you clarify this, ask yourself these three key questions – do they:
Have time to apply the learning quickly?
Have support to embed the training and development?
Have operational space for the development?
The biggest challenge we see is organisations not planning for the embedding phase. Many organisations don’t have the resources or tools to coach, challenge and support a team who are developing and implementing a new range of tools and skills. We always recommend coaching training (or a refresher in coaching) for leaders, partners, managers, and supervisors. These coaching skills can be used to help everyone engage in the learning over a longer period and ensure it is fully embedded. Having a plan to take, actions, ideas and new skills forward is key. We recommend you think about a three to six month plan for embedding any new development programmes.
One other key area to consider, involves pausing to think about timescales. Specifically the timescales over which you and your team will learn and develop. Are you wanting to achieve too much in too short a period of time? Think about when you were learning a new skill. You don’t go to an art class once, you don’t take one class on welding and you certainly wouldn’t take just a single Spanish lesson. You progressively learn with a degree of stretch, and you have purposeful practice and accountability. Can you imagine only taking one driving lesson, practicing once then heading off for your test? You just wouldn’t do it, so stand back and fully understand the development gap and the time and effort involved to help you achieve your goals.
From our perspective, organisations operational time and space constraints have shaped the type of development we are delivering. No surprises here, but we aren’t delivering week long courses at the minute. You might be like lots of our clients wanting half day workshops, eLearning, online sessions, Lunch and Learn sessions or micro and bitesize videos and audio clips (often less than five minutes). There are multiple ways to learn something new, and making the most of smaller chunks of learning can be really beneficial to your team. This can really help you fit significant training and development programmes around the day to day needs of your organisation. Being creative in the delivery methods can make the difference between an ok and a brilliant development programme.
Try a top down and bottom up programme at the same time to help you get buy in, and to embed any new training and development. Training the most senior people in your organisation and making great training available to all your teams is critical. This approach speaks volumes about the learning and development culture you have. Where everyone in your organisation is immersed in training and development it becomes the fabric of your day-to-day activities. This approach needs less energy to engage everyone as there is a peer support network (and peer challenge) for those who might be tempted to shy away from learning and development.
For me, every day is a school day, but then I run a training business, so you would expect that. The best organisations we work with think in the same way, every day is an opportunity to learn, grow and develop. How and what works best for you and your team needs to be carefully explored and you need to find a delivery programme that suits your individual needs.