You're making bets and don't even realize it
Every L&D decision is a prediction, so stack the odds in your favor.
If you work in Learning and Development, you’re in the business of making predictions. You roll out training on leadership, compliance and product knowledge in the belief that doing so is going to lead to better outcomes for your organization.
But you don’t know for certain that these outcomes are going to materialize.
So, in this week’s L&D Dispatch, I want to look at how we can stack the odds in our favor.
🎰How we bet in work and in life
We make bets constantly in our life. Our choice of job, partner and home are all essentially bets, where we’re seeking to optimize our health, wealth and happiness.
At work, we make bets on which projects to initiate, which products to build, which initiatives to run.
We choose to work on one thing rather than another based on what we think is going to lead to our most desired outcome.
But a bet is not the same as a ‘guess’.
A bet is informed by our past experiences, our insights, and by what others have done.
When we eat fruit or go to the gym, we’re making bets. We’re betting that these choices will lead to better health outcomes than the alternative.
And every bet comes with a cost. Fruit is not as immediately rewarding as cake. The gym is more difficult than sitting on the couch.
Economists refer to these losses as the ‘opportunity cost’ of decisions.
If you make a decision to live in the UK’s most northern city (as I’ve done), you gain a quieter lifestyle, access to the outdoors, and a more closely knit community. But you lose out on the variety, cultural events and access to travel that living somewhere like London affords.
Often in life, we have no real idea if we’ve made the ‘right’ decision, where ‘right’ means ‘the biggest contribution to overall enjoyment’. We make bets, and hope they were the right ones.
♣️ Red or black?
This same principle applies to how we choose what to develop in our teams.
To give just one example, our Manager Skills Framework, and corresponding diagnostic tool and Skills Builder, target 12 key skills for managers. But why these skills?
Why empathy, delegation and coaching, but not decision-making, change management or conflict resolution?
We’re making a bet.
You cannot provide training on everything. You have to pick areas of focus, and you have to accept an opportunity cost.
When I ask clients how they determine areas of focus, often it’s based on what managers have asked for, what senior leaders have told them to do, or what they think is important based on a hunch.
In our case, we picked our 12 skills based on research from our Insights team.
They completed a literature review of hundreds of academic papers, spoke to dozens of managers and L&D leaders, and surveyed 2,000+ managers across sectors. They then aggregated these results and published them as our ‘Building Better Managers’ report. The results are not a secret.
Each skill was selected because they have been shown to lead to improved individual, team or organizational performance.
Is building trust, recognizing others and active listening going to guarantee positive outcomes for the managers on our programs? No, but eating fruit, exercising and limiting alcohol intake don’t guarantee longevity.
Instead, these are educated bets for what we think will have the biggest impact.
💸 What’s the payout?
We’re rarely certain whether the bets in our personal life have paid off. Was there a better option? What was down the road not travelled?
But, at work, we can measure the impact of our programs.
By making informed bets upfront (for example, by using research insights to inform our designs), we maximize the likelihood of a successful outcome.
And by measuring the impact afterwards, we can quantify those results.
In this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share how we’ve stacked the odds with our research into managers. How we then measure those results will be covered in my next newsletter!
📊 Read the full ‘Building Better Managers’ report.
📩 Want to measure and develop your managers? Reply to this email or contact custom@mindtools.com
🎧 On the podcast
Effective marketers have an uncanny way of knowing what we want and convincing us to click ‘Like’, add to Checkout and in under 20 seconds, buy their thing. Clever.
Meanwhile, over in L&D, we find it more difficult to motivate someone to take action or change their behaviour. So, what does marketing do that we don’t?
In last week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, I was joined by Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor, authors of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro: Strategies to Ignite Learning. We discussed:
the intersection of marketing and learning principles
the techniques marketing professionals use to grab attention and nudge action
how L&D can bring these strategies into their work
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website.
📖 Deep dive — Manager Skills Framework (8 of 12)
What are the characteristics of an effective coach?
In 2005, McLean and colleagues conducted an extensive literature review to answer this question, with a focus on the foundational coaching skills that equipm anagers to build strong and authentic relationships.
They found that the most impactful coaches:
1. Valued people over tasks
2. Encouraged collaboration
3. Communicated openly
4. Embraced new ideas
5. Facilitated learning
Coaching = learning = commitment
In 2021, the research team regrouped to explore the direct effect of these coaching skills on employees in a top global tech company in the U.S.
They discovered that managerial coaching positively influenced employee learning, which, in turn, positively influenced how committed employees were to the business.
And commitment matters: It increases productivity, boosts team morale, and reduces absenteeism.
How much impact does coaching have here?
To find out, the researchers explored the differences between:
1. Employees who learned and employees who didn’t;
2. Employees who were committed and employees who weren’t;
They discovered that managerial coaching skills explained around 41% of the variance between these groups. This means that of the factors impacting somebody’s learning and commitment – and there are many of them – a manager’s ability to coach is one of the most significant.
Source: Park, S., McLean, G. N., & Yang, B. (2021). Impact of managerial coaching skills on employee commitment: The role of personal learning. European Journal of Training and Development, 45(8/9), 814–831.
You can use our Manager Skills Assessment to assess how effective your people are at coaching, and our Manager Skills Builder to drive improvement. Coaching is just one of 12 skills we target, so get in touch if you want to find out more!
👹 Missing links
Usually in this section, we pull together articles, podcasts and posts that we think you’ll find interesting. But I was just off for two weeks, and spent much of that time panicking about the coming AI-pocalypse. So here’s three views I found interesting, with varying levels of reassurance packed therein.
🥰 Opinion one: You’ll be absolutely fine, humans have always extended cognition via AI
Jonathan Boymal shares a paper from Andy Clark, discussing the concept of the ‘extended mind’. This is the idea that human cognition is not confined to the brain, but instead includes external tools as well. For example, when we write something down to offload the cognitive effort of remembering, or use a GPS to navigate instead of remembering directions.
😮💨 Opinion two: The threat of AI to jobs is overblown
A common observation is that AI is hitting white collar jobs particularly hard, especially entry level jobs. The Economist argues that there’s little evidence for this claim. Unemployment is higher for recent graduates than the average worker, but that’s been on the rise since 2009 - long before generative AI. In general, unemployment remains low, and the share of employment in white-collar work has actually risen slightly. Breathe out, we’re going to be fine.
😱 Opinion three: AI offers catastrophic risks that we’re all blind to
Then there’s the other take: ‘Godfather of artificial intelligence’ Yoshua Bengion gave a recent TED talk where he argued that the commercial incentives to create ever-more-powerful AIs are dangerous, and that we need to take a more thoughtful approach.
I hate to be cynical, but arguing against commercial pressures hasn’t typically worked in the past.
👋 And finally…
Here’s an old insight, but a good one. Sent to me in a group chat from Nick Shackleton-Jones, it’s high praise for kids and admin assistants who take the ‘marshmallow challenge’.
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This is based on Tom Wujec’s TED talk from 15 years ago.
👍 Thanks!
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