Reskilling in real time: How to accelerate learning across your workforce

Author’s Note: This weekly column delivers real-time, easily digestible leadership actions you can take to build a better workplace, become a highly-productive, future-ready leader and improve your leadership impact right now, today. Stay tuned to WRAL Techwire each Wednesday for the next edition, as lessons build atop each other. Last week, we talked about connecting vision with strategy and implementation.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Two major disruptions in the past two years have brought learning and development to the forefront of leadership conversations: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation. Where organization-wide learning used to be a nice benefit for interested employees, it has now become clear that, for any business to remain relevant and competitive, leaders must invest in integrated, organization-wide learning as a strategic imperative. In this era of perpetual change and uncertainty, leaders who insist on competitive learning as a cultural expectation improve their organizational agility and their capacity for innovation, essentially reskilling their workforce in real time.

Another benefit of better learning programs is that, in a tight talent market like the one we’re facing now, you don’t need to hire new team members for your organization to improve its capacities. This is a leadership lesson I learned from my dad, who coached college football for most of his life.

Donald Thompson

How do you increase the range and depth of skills on your team but don’t have time or money to recruit a new player? You cross-train. For instance, teach your running back to play linebacker too. Sure, that won’t be their single best position, but when you’re in a bind and some else is injured or sick, you’re not stuck because you’ve cross-trained multiple players to have the skills you need.

In business, cross-training might mean teaching your sales team about best practices for speaking engagements, or having your marketing team cross-train each other on foundational skills, like SEO and social media strategy. Cross-training not only improves your capabilities but also sets the cultural expectation for constant improvement and growth, thereby setting the stage for easier digital transformation, change management, and more.

Put bluntly, you need to build a culture of learning. “Most people spend their time in performance mode,” writes McKinsey and Company, “trying to demonstrate ‘This is what I know and this is my expertise,’ rather than in a learning mode, asking ‘What do I need to learn to improve myself and deliver?’” Your job as a leader is to help them break that habit by breaking down “a culture of learning” into granular, daily behaviors they can emulate.

As an executive coach with two decades of experience growing and leading businesses from the C-suite, here are my top tips for better learning across your organization in 2022:

MAKE LEARNING A CORE VALUE. Tie your expectations for continued learning to your organization’s mission, vision, or values. If your published values are already set in stone, think about other ways “learning” might be phrased – for instance, as flexibility, growth, curiosity, hustle, or more. Then, integrate learning throughout the employee lifecycle by including it in job descriptions, testing for it in your hiring process, and making professional development conversations part of every week. By talking about professional growth at regular intervals, you set the tone that learning and ambition are not only safe but also expected and will be rewarded.
TIE LEARNING GOALS TO BUSINESS GOALS. Connect your expectations for individual employees with strategic objectives for the organization and help each person see how their professional development will contribute to the team’s success. Get people on board by communicating what’s in it for them. How will learning new skills and absorbing new information improve their daily work? How will their personal development impact their team’s ability to meet its goals? Will their learning make collaboration easier or daily rhythms more enjoyable? You may even think about connecting professional development with career advancement, compensation, or more.
LIVE THE STANDARD. I cannot say this often enough. Your team is watching, and they’ll respond to what you do, so it’s important that you model the language and actions that you want your employees to emulate. This is how you shift culture from the top down. And remember, living the standard for excellence doesn’t mean you always need to be perfect. Instead, it means you need to talk openly about your goals, what you’re learning and how you want to grow. Some simple ways to do this are by sharing things you’ve learned in Slack channels or by email with your team. A quick paragraph with a list of hyperlinks to learning resources takes almost no time to compose but can make a big impact on culture, as can phrases like “I didn’t know this, but I just learned….”
EMBRACE THE PERMANENT HYBRID WORKPLACE. In-person training sessions have quickly fallen by the wayside in favor of digital solutions. When you’re investing in learning platforms, look for ways to deliver content to your employees through the same channels and devices they are already using when they’re not at work. Mobile learning, app-based learning, and video learning make skill development more convenient, accessible and engaging. To be clear, I still believe there is unique value to in-person events, but not all training sessions need to be in-person and as a point of equity, I’m encouraged to see that most courses, certifications and workshops are now available by livestream or as on-demand videos afterward. The lesson for executives is this: to reach every member of your audience, you need to offer multiple channels for learning and skill development.
INTEGRATE LEARNING IN THE FLOW OF WORK. Last but perhaps most important of all is that hour- and day-long training sessions are being replaced by 2-10 minute lessons that fit into the flow of each employee’s work day. This is called microlearning. If you haven’t already heard of it, “microlearning is an organizational training method that delivers short bursts of on-demand content for learners to study at their convenience,” as BetterUp defines it, and it increases long-term knowledge retention by almost 80%. My own firm offers a microlearning platform for DEI education – MicroVideos by The Diversity Movement – and has heard great feedback from clients who tell us that its greatest strengths are that it’s always on and can fit into the small moments of each person’s day. By fitting in the flow of work, microlearning helps time-crunched professionals see daily learning as something to look forward to, not just another thing they have to fit and manage.

As executives, we cannot underestimate the power of our personal example. Share your own learning and growth journeys with your team. Continue to cultivate relationships with your employees by actively seeking to understand what you can learn from them. Regularly engage in their day-to-day activities.

When we hold the expectation for continued growth at the center of our company cultures, we help employees break the habit of always working in ‘performance mode’ and help them move into ‘learning mode’ instead. Over time, we all benefit from a culture of learning – not just the individual employee but also their team, the organization, and ourselves as leaders.

About the Author

Donald Thompson is co-founder and CEO of The Diversity Movement, which offers an employee-experience product suite that personalizes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) through data, technology, and expert-curated content. His autobiography, Underestimated: A CEO’s Unlikely Path to Success, is available for pre-order now. With two decades of experience growing and leading firms, Donald is a thought leader on goal achievement, influencing company culture and driving exponential growth. An entrepreneur, public speaker, author, podcaster, Certified Diversity Executive (CDE) and executive coach, Donald also serves as a board member for several organizations in marketing, healthcare, banking, technology and sports. Connect with him on Linkedin or at donaldthompson.com to learn more about MicroVideos by The Diversity Movement.