These are my
live-blogged notes from the opening keynote at this week’s ATD Core 4 happening
this week in New Orleans. Forgive any typos or incoherencies.
Why Learning is the New Work
Melissa Daimler, Head of Learning & Development, Twitter
@mdaimler
Work IS a learning lab and the daily experiences are the
curriculum.
To create a great learning lab at work, we need to focus on
3 things:
- Design more iteratively
- Lead more holistically
- Learn more intentionally
1. Design more
iteratively
We’re all familiar with ADDIE; part of our DNA. It’s a very
sequential process. How can we take a more agile approach to design – to take
more of a Design Thinking approach.
Design Thinking – the 5 Steps:
- Empathize (with your stakeholders)
- Define the problem
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Testing
There are critical differences and nuances between ADDIE and
Design Thinking:
- Empathy – about connecting with our stakeholders, focusing on the person. It’s a more human-centered approach. Don’t just fix the problem, also focus on how people feel.
- Co-creation – how do we together, with our stakeholders, come up with a solution. “Go where the people are” – figure out with them as you go.
- Rapid Prototyping – instead of planning and then six months later you launch, you iterate as you go.
Focusing on these 3 aspects of design thinking = better
solution, less time, more buy-in
Feedback.
Feedback has gotten a really bad rap lately. It’s not
feedback that needs to go away and that’s dead – it’s the feedback process. How
can we reframe feedback as something more useful.
So they talked to a lot of people at Twitter about what they
were experiencing and how they were feeling. We asked employees things like
“how do you learn? How do you develop? When have you gotten really good
feedback that you can use?”
(When you ask really good questions, you get much better
input).
We asked managers, “what kind of information do you need?”
(A lot of companies are throwing out their performance ratings and numbers –
and that’s daunting, because leaders are so used to having those numbers.
Worked with a lot of stakeholders, asked good questions,
understood what they felt.
Identified a lot of shifts they wanted to make (there were
about 15) – and they wanted to narrow that down to the top 3.
So it’s a shift –
- From Performance TO Development + Performance
- From 2 x Year Review TO Always Feedback (in the moment)
- From Manager Led TO Employee-Driven
Focus on progress vs. perfection.
They came up with a prototype of a feedback dashboard –
- What I’m good at…what I’m working on.
- What I’m less good at…How I’m working on it
- What I care about…what I’ve done (stuff I’ve shipped)
Today it’s called “Our portfolio” – it’s an internally
developed online hub.
- Portfolio: give, get, develop.
- You can give and get comments.
- It’s based on their 17 behavioral org skills.
- Manager can see how their team is doing – what types of comments they’ve gotten, the number of comments.
- It’s 360 feedback
- Now they’re seeing people giving a lot more feedback face to face and then following it up with comments on the portfolio
Metrics they track: they want people to give/get at least 2
comments per month. After you receive a comment, individuals rate how useful a
comment was to them (a rating tool from 1-7) – this addresses one of the ways
that feedback hasn’t been useful in the past. They provide modeling about how to give good feedback – the
anatomy of a comment.
How does this apply
to program design?
They had a lot of green managers at Twitter. This was one of
Melissa’s key focus areas. And she was interested in all the ways to help
people, except classroom training.
She met with a new manager – was an engineer who had just
been promoted. She shared all these great ideas she had about using technology
and twitter and other tools. And he said, “that sounds really cool, but are we
going to have any classes on how to do a one-on-one?”
When people come to us and say “this is what we want” but we
know it’s not really what they need.
A lot of managers were asking for classroom training. The
irony of this at a tech company. But they wanted to come together with others
like them and get validation and connect and practice in a safe environment.
They created a management development program that is more
classroom based.
She believes the classroom won’t go away. What we DO in the
classroom needs to transform.
Created #TC5. 5 Week program. They came for two hours a
week. There were about 5 slides. It was role plays and discussion. And then
next week they would come back and talk through their experiences during the
previous week.
The program design is always iterating, always in beta. As
the company continued to evolve, they needed to make sure the conversations
were still relevant for managers. (Don’t iterate just to iterate. Iterate
because we want to make sure we’re aligned to what the business is
experiencing).
Decision-making was a big conversation as the organization
grew to a more matrixed one. The decision-making process changed a bit.
What project are you
working on right now?
- How can you apply more empathy to your stakeholders?
- How could you co-create with your stakeholders?
- How can you get to a prototype faster?
2. How do we lead
more holistically?
“Business and human
endeavors are systems…we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the
system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.” ~ Peter
Senge
Instead of doing a project post-mortem, they do “retros”
(restrospectives).
- What do we want to keep?
- What do we want to quit?
- What do we want to cultivate?
These questions have now become integrated into the org and
made a huge impact.
They also created 17 org skills – what are the actual skills
you need to have to be successful? They wanted to understand what made up a
successful employee? They met with stakeholders, they asked questions (how can
you best be successful?).
They came up with 3 primary buckets:
- be a team player,
- be execution focused,
- be forward thinking.
How do you then create reinforcing mechanisms to help these
org skills stick? Wanted to make sure that these skills were anchored against
all of the processes.
So the Our Portfolio comment/feedback systems includes these
org skills as drop down lists.
“I’d like to give you
some feedback.” – those words bring butterflies to our stomach as the
person who says them then leads into telling you all the things you’ve done
wrong.
If our feedback/comments are more focused and aligned on
core skills…
Be execution focused: Prioritizes appropriately to delivery
high quality results
“When what we’re
trying to learn is connected to a system to support that learning….learning
happens naturally.”
3. Learn more
intentionally
To have a more meaningful learning experience, both the
teacher and the learner have to be present.
We are overwhelmed all the time. The world is becoming more
dynamic. (Josh Bersin wrote an article that said 2/3 of employees are
overwhelmed.) We have shorter attention spans; we check our phones XX times a
day.
As learning professionals, we need to make sure we take care
of ourselves.
WE are the
intervention. We are the ones who come into the room and bring the energy
(or NOT). And we can immediately shift the conversation. We have good days, we
have bad days. So critical that we pause and take care of ourselves.
If we’re not doing our own work to improve ourselves, we not
only give up our own learning experience, but we give up someone else’s.
We’ve become this DOING machine. If our calendars are not
full, we think we’re doing something wrong. But the people who get the most
done, have space on their calendars.
- Keep at least a one hour unscheduled block every day with NO meetings.
- Have one day with nothing scheduled.
- As learning professionals, make sure you’re finding time to learn, grow, discover – both personally and professionally. Give yourself time for forced reflection.
- Fill up, stay fresh, make space for yourself so you can continue to be intentional.
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