Mind the Skills Gap
Mind the Skills Gap
The Future of Learning #4: Why you shouldn't be doing leadership training right now
Amanda Nolen and Stella Collins talk about developing the skills that organisations need to stay relevant and keep people employed and it's not leadership. If leaders aren't already leading right now it's too late for that.
Welcome to the Stellar labs podcast. Future learning today. At Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable, engaging training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts, you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training. They'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future. With you. Keep listening to start your future learning here today. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the stellar labs podcast. Today I'm talking to Amanda Nolen of NilesNolen and they're specialists on advising large organizations on digital transformation and learning strategy. Amanda, welcome.
Amanda:Hi Stella. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome.
Stella:Amanda, just tell us a little bit about what you do in NilesNolen.
Amanda:Well, as you said, we advise global organizations that are trying to do learning differently to be more impactful and typically that has a digital transformation component to it.
Stella:Right, and we've met online very much. In fact, we only met for the first time, I think in January at learning tech. But we've had lots and lots of conversations online. You're currently locked down in Spain and I'm locked down in Belgium. We're all facing similar challenges at the moment, but I think, what I'm really interested to know, Amanda is, is what's kind of really on your mind right now? What's important to you right now?
Amanda:Okay. Well, honestly, before Covid hit, you know, the pace of change was already exponential in the world. And the halflife of skills was shrinking really fast and now this whole Corona virus thing has just accelerated that beyond belief. And I guess what keeps me up at night is I don't feel that L&D leaders are responding in the right way. They're not thinking about business strategy or how their learning strategy aligns to that. And as a result, that's going to lead to more redundancies and organizations that won't survive if they don't change the way they work.
Stella:Okay. So that sounds like quite a serious message for people in L&D, the senior people. So what do you think they're doing now that they shouldn't be doing and perhaps what ought they be doing?
Amanda:So what I've heard and what I've seen, there's been a few studies that have been put out recently as well. What they say is that most learning leaders are rushing to convert their face to face courses into online and digital training as fast as possible. Many times that's leadership development courses, which is also a concern for me because honestly, if those leaders aren't leading already right now, I don't know if now's the time to be diverting all of our resources to try to scramble and get them online. What we also see is lots of courses on Covid and remote working, which in my mind is the last thing that leaders should be investing in right now. First of all, a Covid course, it's out of date by the time you build it. You know how to work remotely, honestly. Do people need to take a course to do that? I think it would be much better just to show them how to use the tools that they're already using. Maybe like Microsoft teams for example. But most importantly really thinking about what is the plan for re- skilling and up-skilling people. So they will be developing the skills that the organization will need to stay relevant and keep their jobs in the process.
Stella:So really looking less away from the leadership development that, you know, there's a lot of investment in. That big company spend a lot of money on leadership. And in my experience, a lot of them end up saying:"well, we're not really sure what we got out of it". You're suggesting almost at the opposite end of the spectrum and give people the skills they need to actually do their jobs.
Amanda:Absolutely. And across the board and all the different industries and countries where we work around the world, we see this over and over again. There's a disproportionate amount of money spent in leadership training with no real demonstrable ROI. And honestly, it just drives me insane. There was a study put out by Harvard called:"the great training robbery", If you listeners want to Google that. That shows, you know, that there is a huge waste in most cases. And it's a smaller group at the top of the pyramid of executives that typically get sent to the spa for a week and they have a great time and they get to network. But is that really developing our leaders? And this is quite controversial because leadership training has its advocates, but we truly believe that it's most of the time a waste.
Stella:And I think a lot of the skills that you need to be a really good leader are probably skills that you should be learning much earlier in your career. So by the time you get to be a leader, they are really, really homed.
Amanda:Precisely and a lot of the soft skills. I would include things like communication skills and empathy. But, you know, speaking of that empathy, leadership training, a lot of times I think it's a bandaid for culture problem. So if you have a bunch of jerks, will any amount of leadership development make them good people? Do you have a rotten culture as a company? Those are questions that I think a lot of organizations are afraid to ask.
Stella:Yeah. And I think that happens a lot that people see some behavior they don't like the look of and they say, right, let's throw some training at it. But actually it comes from somewhere much more fundamentally deeper in the organization. I'm interested in y ou talking about people throwing everything online as fast as possible. W e just made a decision to put some of what we're doing online, but we really looked hard at some of our programs and said we don't think those can go online. There's too much complexity within them a nd there's too much requirement for partly to have that kind of physical presence of somebody actually reassure you. And I know that sounds a little bit strange, but the combination of elements has made us decide that it's not a sensible program to put online. So it's a very in depth cybersecurity program. Whereas t he other things I think we can do online, I think they'll work just as well online as face to face. So other things that you think can go online and can't go online or wh at a r e y our views on that?
Amanda:Honestly, I think with the right technology and the right learning experience design, just about anything can be done virtually and digitally. However, what really bothers me is seeing bad content, bad training to begin with. Now there's a rush to convert it to digital, right? So if the content wasn't relevant and it wasn't good to begin with and it wasn't designed well, it's not going to be good digitally, virtually either.
Stella:And I totally agree with that. You definitely can't make a sow's purse out of a pig's ear or whatever the phrase is.
Amanda:Yeah, no. As face to face might still be ideal in some, in some cases, but right now that's just not an option. So if there's a critical skills gap that needs to be closed, I think we need to use the technology available to us to try to do our best virtually and digitally. But it's not about, you know, spending too much time or effort into the design or overarchitecturing. It's more about thinking about, you know, what is the gap? Making it relevant for people and you know, just getting it out there.
Stella:And I think, there are some things where you kind of need the experience. I had an interesting conversation with somebody the other day. We were talking about how the current crisis is an experience for many people. They've not done online before and now they're doing online. They're spending all their meetings online rather than face to face. They're not traveling as much. So you know their experience has changed. One of the things I'm rather interested in is whether that experience will turn into longterm learning or whether it will merely be an experience that they had and they can look back on, but they may never actually turn that into changed behaviors, changed attitudes or even changed skills.
Amanda:Yeah, absolutely. I think honestly right now a lot of people are experimenting with remote working for the first time, with digital and online learning for the first time. It's an opportunity, but there's also a danger there. The opportunity is, if that's a good experience and people realize, Oh, I can do a lot of stuff from home, I can be just as productive. Maybe they'll continue to do it after Covid. But let's honest, most of us are dealing with managing children at home or maybe concerned about our health or other people's health, making sure we have the refrigerator stocked. It's not normal times, so it's not fair to compare is what I'm saying. And in terms of online learning, my fear is if people's first experience with online learning is a bad eLearning module with an avatar and a clipboard, that's not going to be a good experience and they'll want to go back to their face to face training.
Stella:You know, I'm a huge advocate of blended training. I think face to face has a huge importance that is quite hard to quantify in some ways. I had somebody talking the other day about the cognitive dissonance we get when we're working on video because our kind of conscious brain is saying, yes, I'm having a sensible conversation with a real person. But our unconscious brain is saying, there's nobody else there. You know, I can't smell them. I can't touch them. They're flat, they're not real. And this is apparently causing us to be quite tired. So I can imagine that with a lot of online learning, people can't do what they can do within a face to face context where our bodies have been evolved and our brains have been evolved to deal with that real context.
Amanda:Yeah. Well you're the brain lady. Honestly, I think I saw the same article in the BBC. And I would love to know if there's real science behind that. If it's true that we're getting zoom fatigue as they say or not.
Stella:I approached the person who wrote the article the other day to ask them what the difference was, so I'll keep you posted on that one.
Amanda:Good. That's a good subject for another podcast I think. But in the meantime, lots of talk about zoom fatigue, but are we just having really ineffective meetings virtually, just like we had ineffective and unproductive meetings face to face before. And the same goes for learning, right?
Stella:Absolutely. You can't turn what was poor before into something better because it's online
Amanda:and you can't blame it on the technology either.
Stella:Absolutely not. So what's your vision for the future for keeping people employed, for up-skilling them and you know, hopefully change will accelerate quite as rapidly as it has over the last few months, but I guess change is going to keep being very fast and incrementally quick.
Amanda:Wow. I wish I had a magic wand or a crystal ball and I knew the answer. I think it's going to be a combination of things, right? Skills are really at the cornerstone of that probably. It involves aligning business strategy with learning strategy and also having a plan for developing the skills in an organization is going to need to stay competitive and then giving individuals the access and enabling them to develop those skills. But within organizations it's also going to require more mobility. So internal talent marketplaces. I think we'll start to see more and more of those, or at least I hope we will. And then from company to company too. So we're looking now because of Covid, there's been some interesting initiatives. Reskilling, for example, Sana labs is working on a project to reskill flight attendants to be hospital workers, right? So you have a whole industry that right now has been shut down, air travel, but an increased demand for hospital workers. And it turns out that flight attendants already know quite a bit about dealing with emergencies, CPR, that kind of thing. Dealing with the public that are stressed out and they make great candidates for that reskilling initiative. So I really hope we see more of that.
Stella:That's a really, really interesting concept, isn't it? That we need to learn skills and behaviors that are very transferable.
Amanda:Right? And another thing I would point out, and this is a hard one to put our finger on and how do you develop this? but it's a learnability, right? So as people, how can we develop that learning muscle, if you will, and that curiosity so that we're always looking to develop new skills and evolve and stay relevant.
Stella:So you've just spoken to my heart there because for me, you know, the skill of learning successfully and effectively is just one of the skills that; if you get that skill right, all the other ones become so much easier to learn. And yet that is just not taught at school. I can remember my children the week before their GCCS were given a learn to learn course and they both said, why do we have that now? They should ha ve h ad it probably in primary school, let alone in senior school.
Amanda:And what I wonder, and maybe you know the answer to this question, but it's the nature nurture question, is curiosity, learnability,... are those things that we're born with or can they be developed?
Stella:Learnability? And if by that you mean the ability to learn better, can definitely be developed. And that's one of the programs that we're actually currently running. And I totally know that can be developed. And I've worked with people in the past too, you know, said they have considerably improved their ability to learn new things with just some fairly simple insights very often and being more conscious about it. We know we've been not very conscious about how we learn because we kind of think we do it naturally. We think it's nature, but actually there's a lot of nurture in there.
Amanda:Hmm. Yeah. I guess what I'm thinking about for me learnability also includes curiosity, right? You have to be curious to grow in new directions or have some motivation there. Maybe that's not how you define it, but I'm wondering if that part is something you can teach people.
Stella:For me, the curiosity is the very first piece of learning. If you get curious people, they will learn. Whether they learn really, really well or really well or really badly, they will want to learn. They are keen to learn. So you can then teach them additional skills after that. Curiosity, I think some people are highly curious by nature and that's probably a blend of nature and nurture, but I think that's part of organizational and learning people's role is to help make people curious, you know, give them the need, give them the inclination to want to explore, get them a requirement to want to explore, rather than sending them on training courses, which still happens. You know, just give a problem to solve. And by trying to solve the problem they'll get, as long as it's relevant to them, they will become curious about how do I solve this problem? You know, in our daily lives, we're often curious about things that Google wouldn't exist if we weren't curious.
Amanda:Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I know I was born, my mother said the first word out of my mouth was: why? And I haven't stopped asking since, you know, and so I'm definitely, I think curious by nature, but maybe if some of that is something we're born with, right? Maybe if organizations are at least more clear about where they're going and you know, they communicate to their employees, what's in it for them? Why is it important for you to learn this? At least that way they might have more success in motivating people.
Stella:and also Amanda, potentially your mother dealt with your curiosity well and therefore you know you got a reward from that curiosity. So when naturally when we're curious, we get a dopamine release, which as we know is as rewarding. If at the same time you get your curiosity answered and somebody says, wow, that was a great question. Or why don't we go and explore this together? Then that also builds on that, you know, that desire for you the next time to be more curious. If instead when you were continuously asking"why" as a small child, your mother said, you know, shut up, don't ask stupid questions, you might stop asking questions.
Amanda:That's funny. I definitely recall my mother just telling me: because I said so. I hope she's not listening to this podcast.
Stella:And I'm quite sure she probably occasionally said that, but probably most of the time she indulged you in helping you find the answer to your questions. I suspect she did because actually I had exactly the same withmy mother I was constantly asking why.
Amanda:Well, one thing my mother did do, is she took me to the library just about every day. So I'll give her that.
Stella:That's satisfying your curiosity. So I think probably some people are born slightly more curious, but then I think how the world treats them has an impact on how curious they then may, and I guess organizations have a role in that. You know, if you're curious and you're exploring and you're coming up with creative ideas and the organization says, great, let's run with that, you're likely to want to do it again. Yeah. And especially if you're supported in learning from doing it.
Amanda:Right. And I think organizations, the problem is that curiosity is not really endorsed in most cases. you know, asking questions sometimes means asking uncomfortable questions or thinking outside the box or beyond your a rraignment. You know, and most companies that I know don't encourage that kind of behavior really when it comes down to it, it's just lip service.
Stella:Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, it's kind of like we want people to be creative but we don't want them to do anything different.
Amanda:Yes. Or don't do anything that's beyond your job description. Just to keep your nose down.
Stella:So let's not diss all organizations cause there are lots of them doing great jobs out there. So for the long term then we think we need people to be more curious. We want to encourage that. And you're talking about up-skilling perhaps more at the grassroots level, in the sort of the ground level, as opposed to spending and investing a lot in leadership.
Amanda:Yes. I think that it's time to stop spending so much money on leadership development and thinking about and the broader workforce. Definitely.
Stella:I've really enjoyed the conversation. Amanda, is there anything else you'd like to share with us before we finish? It's been really interesting and I look forward to talking to you again and good luck.
Amanda:Not really, but it's been a great chat. I've enjoyed it as well. Thank you. Bye
Stella:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Please share it with your friends and colleagues and visit our website, stellarlabs.EU to learn more about what we do and how we do it. Tune into the next episode.
