Last Friday, the SEWI ATD chapter shared a great discussion about building learning cultures.
The starting point for the session was an article from organizational development consultant Stephen Gill on the differences between a training culture and a learning culture. In short, a training culture places the responsibility for development on training programs; the focus is on formal events, delivery methods, and work by the instructional staff. By contrast, a learning culture treats learning as a continuous process that is unique to each individual. Managers and individual contributors have a key role because they are the ones that ultimately drive learning experiences and link those experiences to business results.
Most organizations suffer from a gap between these cultures. The personalized, continuous, and results-oriented characteristics of a learning culture are critical to success in today’s work environment. Unfortunately, the way that these organizations think about learning and development is firmly rooted in a training culture, with assumptions like “training is HR’s responsibility” or “training means sending people away to classes.”
Our ATD chapter meeting discussed strategies that our members found helpful for promoting learning cultures in our organizations. I’ve summarized some of the strategies below.
- Gaining executive sponsorship: several members shared techniques for executives to communicate their buy-in, including leaders recording selfie videos promoting training to their teams and leaders making appearances at training kickoff events
- Providing follow-on support: many members used reinforcement techniques to follow up training after several days or weeks
- Making training a reward: a couple of members made training opportunities valuable by requiring nominations or making training into a form of recognition
I want to share one of my own case studies in the hopes that my experience will be valuable for others. Briefly, I led a leadership development program for Naval Air Systems Command. NAV-AIR is essentially the civilian workforce for the Navy; we worked with a group of about 10,000 logisticians responsible for maintaining the aircraft on naval carriers.
NAV-AIR is almost a perfect example of a training culture. Everyone is required to take 80 hours of training within a two-year cycle. The focus on hours as well as the need for documentation of those hours push people to see training as a standalone event. Individuals sign up for classes on their training calendar, and frequently their boss doesn’t know what topics their people are learning. On the back end, there is no accountability for results from the training; if you showed up, you’ve earned your hours regardless of whether or not those hours resulted in improved performance.
When we designed our program, we started by focusing on specific behaviors that we wanted participants to demonstrate in the workplace. Instead of creating a training session on a topic like “communication skills,” we built sessions focused on specific communication behaviors like identifying the audience’s perspectives and beliefs, establishing a shared purpose, and selecting communication channels based on the type of message.
With these behaviors in mind, we could design the sessions to build those specific skills. Every minute of class time was valuable to the participants because it all contributed to concrete behavioral performances. We drove home the focus on behavioral change by having the participants create individual action plans for what they would do to implement those skills when they returned to the workplace.
One of the unique elements of our program was that we integrated one-on-one coaching into the development experience. Throughout the class, participants would work with a coach that could give them individualized feedback on how their skills were developing.
We leveraged our coaches after the class in order to build a learning culture. First, the coaches followed up with their participants to verify that their action plans were completed successfully. Following up created accountability. We set the expectation that training had to result in workplace results—one of the key elements of a learning culture—and we were successful, with 93% of our participants implementing their new behaviors on the job.
Second, the coaches also helped transfer responsibility for learning from the training staff to the participants and their managers. For instance, our coaches worked with their participants to script and practice a conversation with their manager in which the participant would describe what they learned, offer suggestions for how they could continue to use that skill on the job, and ask for specific support resources from their manager in order to continue their growth. The individual ownership of learning is another critical element of learning cultures.
What we found was that, when we gave participants the scaffolding to have those ownership conversations with their managers, their rate of learning took off. Our client representative reported significant improvements in engagement surveys, retention statistics, and even promotion rates. In conversations with the coaches, the participants explicitly connected these results with their new attitudes towards learning. Many of them remarked that they now felt like they were in control of their skill development, and they used that sense of autonomy to further their careers by asking for additional responsibilities, seeking out stretch assignments, and confronting challenges that had previously held them back.