What Is 70-20-10?
In talent development, the 70-20-10 ratio articulates the relative importance of different sources of learning. The ratio stems from Morgan McCall’s work at the Center for Creative Leadership, published in The Lessons of Experience, and followup research by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger that led to The Leadership Machine.
These researchers identified three major sources of development: formal learning activities, interactions with others, and on-the-job work. They found a consistent pattern in the development of successful executives. Formal training activities made up a surprisingly small percentage of successful leaders’ development. Only 10% of their growth could be attributed to the classroom. Another 20% of their learning came from interactions with others; mentoring, professional organizations, and peer learning are good examples of this kind of development. The vast majority of their professional learning—70% of their development—came from job-related experiences.
The 70-20-10 model captures the ratio of development experiences for successful leaders. The numbers are approximations, but the conclusion is clear: on-the-job development is by far the most important tool in career growth.
Learning in Your Job
There’s an old quip that a lot of people say they have twenty years of experience, when what they really have is one year of experience repeated twenty times. The joke is funny because we all know people who go through the motions at work but never get better at what they do. Unfortunately, when it comes to 70-20-10 development, there’s nothing funny about wasting the most important learning experience available.
Learning through on-the-job development is different than just doing your work. Learning from job-related experiences should mean that specific development goals are essential outcomes of the work. Just like you can be held accountable for a project budget and deadline, you should be held accountable for learning specific skills in the process of doing the work.
Most organizations don’t create accountability for learning on the job, and as a result they lose a huge opportunity to develop their people. Worse, when organizations don’t treat development as a first-class priority, it negatively affects the culture. Growth becomes something external to the work, rather than an essential part of it, and so people don’t look for ways to learn on the job. In the most toxic environments, growth can even be a threat because the risk of making a mistake while learning is seen as a weakness in performance. It doesn’t take long for such a culture to become stagnant and calcified, afraid of change and terrified of taking risks.
It’s not hard to see the consequences of a failure to prioritize development on the job. Because people aren’t growing as fast, performance over time will suffer. Development is one of the prime drivers of engagement, especially for Millenials, so employee engagement and morale will decline. The organization is also likely to see antagonism between managers and people responsible for training, since managers see training time as taking people away from their “real” responsibilities. Finally, the company as a whole is likely to see a poor ROI from training, both because the 10% of classroom learning is expected to carry all of the development weight and because what happens in the classroom is not reinforced on the job.
Making On-The-Job Learning Happen
Employees, managers, L&D partners, and senior leaders all have roles to play in creating an organization where on-the-job learning occurs. If you are a manager, the good news is that you have a lot of power to encourage on-the-job development with your direct reports, even if you are not getting support from your leadership team.
The steps below are concrete actions you can take to promote on-the-job learning in your team. By taking these actions, you’ll not only improve your rapport with your direct reports. You’ll also improve the performance of your work group.
- Identify development objectives for key assignments. The simplest change you can make is to create learning goals. When assigning tasks, describe the goals for both business outcomes and learning “deliverables.”
- Create accountability for development work. After you assign learning deliverables, follow up just like you would for a regular assignment. Check in to make sure the development goals are moving forward, ask your direct reports what kind of support they need from you, and provide feedback on their learning tasks.
- Create a safe-to-learn environment. Developing new skills always involves a stretch beyond what is comfortable, so create an environment that supports your employees when they stretch instead of punishing them for mistakes. Encourage smart risk taking, debrief both good and bad experiences for lessons learned, and find low-stakes situations to try new skills.
These steps don’t have to take much time. If you focus on taking small steps, each learning experience can require just a few minutes of your time to work with your direct reports, and less than an hour of their time to practice and try out the new skill. By making a small investment of time, you can consistently improve the performance and engagement of your employees.