Ben was working in sales for a very well-known company. He always knew he was a slow reader, but didn’t know why. When his daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia, he realized that he also had dyslexia. He saw that she experienced the same struggles that he dealt with when he was in school. It never occurred to him that he might have a learning disability.

He was successful at hiding his learning disability for decades until his company shifted toward a learning management system (LMS) to deliver information about new products more quickly. The new LMS required employees to take computerized tests in order to be certified to sell the new products.

As Ben was taking these tests, the numbers and letters were flipping, turning backwards. When he brought the issue to senior management, begging for alternative learning options, he was turned away.

As a result, after being one of the top performing sales reps for years, he got a less-than-stellar performance review. These tests cast a glaring light on his dyslexia.

A Missed Opportunity

Eventually, he felt he had no choice but to find another job with a company that was more flexible and willing to work with him despite his learning disability. His now former company, one that was spearheading an initiative to hire neurodivergent employees, let one of their top-performing neurodivergent sales reps go out the door. What a senseless loss to the company and to the employee!

Learning disabilities are more common than one might think: Some studies suggest that over 10% of adults have been diagnosed with some form of learning disability. Many more struggle all their lives undiagnosed. Learning disabilities follow individuals from school to work. This matters because when companies fail to recognize that the path to learning is not the same for everyone, they lose valuable employees, even their top performers. Worse, they often lose seasoned employees and decades worth of acquired institutional knowledge because of a system change that requires upskilling.

It’s very expensive for a company to find and replace talent. Companies which don’t recognize that there are many ways to teach their employees will continue to lose great talent.

Pay Attention to People, Not Numbers

Sadly, companies often embrace initiatives like LMS in an effort to save money by bringing in systems that use algorithms and artificial intelligence to determine whether an employee is hitting the mark. When salespeople pitch these systems they glorify numbers that present a picture of substantial savings.

However, what is often missing from that colorful pie chart is the cost of replacing hard-working, loyal employees lost due to the lack of personalization, human understanding, and people-centered problem solving in their LMS metrics.

The cliche that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing might be appropriate here. So often, companies make decisions in silos. Ben’s manager saw his value. She knew that he was one of their top performing sales reps. Yet, because of policies regarding how people were certified to sell the new products, her hands were tied. She knew he could sell the product better than anybody else in the department. He just could not demonstrate his understanding on a standardized test.

The number crunchers, who were purely looking at the test scores, didn’t see Ben as a human being who was bringing profit to the company. They only saw him as a number on a spreadsheet.

Finding the Person in the Middle

So, what’s the solution? That answer, unfortunately, is not simple. And the larger the corporation, the more complicated it gets. Possibly, it starts with a company culture that is more people-centered and less numbers-centered. Yes, profit is important, however, “It doesn’t take long before the employee is seen and treated as a cog in the machine. They feel like second class citizens — not unique, creative beings capable of great things.” writes Jeb Banner, in Four Ingredients for a People-Centered Workplace.

For Ben, the only solution available to him was to leave a company that he loved and that had profited from his hard work for years. He took his talent, his experience, his knowledge of the company, and his sales contacts and went to work for a competitor. That is not the scenario any company hopes for when they implement an LMS or some other performance-measurement initiative.

Has your company experienced this issue? Are you wrestling with the problem of good employees walking out the door because of a policy change or new performance initiative? Tell me about it in the response section.

If you liked this article, you might also like My Employee is Both a High Performer and Under Performer! (And How That Can Happen)

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The post The Human Cost of Poorly Implemented LMS appeared first on Susan Fitzell.

Upskill employees to close the “learning gap” and maximize talent within your company

Ready. Set. Go! The race for organizations to stay competitive has opened the gates to the market of learning solutions. Management has unlimited training choices including learning management systems (LMS), online learning platforms, and consultants that bring customized training into companies.

One would think that keeping up with the rate of change, onboarding new employees, and planning to re-skilling or upskill employees would be a trivial matter. It is not. It’s often frustrating and overwhelming.

How can managers zero in on the right learning solutions to get the best out of their people? What is the best way to provide growth opportunities to retain top performers? And how do you provide the right learning solution to upskill employees who are hardworking but seem to struggle with training?

Identifying the Learning Gap

Buying into learning solutions without understanding the learning process of your employees is wasteful. Training that is incorrectly targeted will be lost on many of the employees who sit through it.

Here’s how experts who guide training and management initiatives typically work: They look at the structure and process of current training. They advise managers to provide coaching and mentoring to employees. They assume that employees are able to learn on their own and consequently recommend formal training and online platforms.

This is fine for most employees, as the solutions these experts provide will help employees keep up with the rate of change, encourage retention by providing meaningful growth opportunities, and maximize the skill set of longstanding employees.

But they tend to miss one critical element: the learning gap.

Today’s training structure focuses on integrating knowledge between the learning platform and the information it delivers, but not so much on HOW the employee learns.

The Biggest Blind Spot in Hiring

Consultants — and managers within some organizations — are aware of the learning gap and think that by hiring agile learners, they can avoid it. That means excluding applicants who don’t fit the agile metric. That’s right: HR departments assess potential hires to derive an agility score and eliminate candidates who score low. They make the assumption that if someone isn’t currently an agile learner, they can never become one.

That’s a huge blind spot for an organization.

There could be a brilliant mind out there ready for you to hire that could develop the next innovation and give your company a competitive advantage. But if those in charge of hiring are cherry-picking the agile learners and leaving out those who may struggle with more formal learning settings,what is that costing a company?

A solid percentage of the workforce struggles or has struggled with learning. It’s not known exactly how big that percentage is because even those who know they have a learning disability are reluctant to disclose it to their employers. A 2008 survey found that only 55% of adults diagnosed with a learning disability were confident enough to reveal their struggle to employers, and only 12% requested accommodation.
(https://www.verywellfamily.com/learning-disabled-adults-in-the-workplace-2161950)

But workers who have struggled with learning in a formal environment for their entire lives have often developed strong skills in other areas. They can be resourceful, creative problem solvers. Some have higher emotional intelligence because they’ve had to look for cues from the person speaking to them to know when they need to pay attention to certain information. They may be much more empathetic to others because of their struggles.

These are things that an agile metric may not pick up on.

And remember, it’s not that an employee who has difficulty learning the traditional way can’t learn anything new. They just haven’t learned how they learn. And if they have struggled for many years — especially if they are undiagnosed — they may be telling themselves, “I’m not good at learning.”

With the right learning techniques and metacognitive strategies, that mindset can be changed to one of confidence, hope and growth, enabling the employee to learn.

Tap Into Motivation

Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton conducted 850,000 surveys in their research assessment at Culture Works, titled “What Motivates Me.” They discovered that employees who don’t seem to be motivated actually have different motivation drivers and identities. When a manager or trainer taps into their true motivation it can spur an employee to learn, to do well in their job, and to explore new skill sets.

But even Gostick and Elton missed a key piece: empowering employees to learn.

I know this because, as a teacher, I have seen this pattern through my entire career. If an employee believes they cannot learn, they won’t be motivated to do so. They may feel hopeless, that they have limits on what they’re capable of. If we cannot change that belief, they will never realize and maximize their talent.

To change an employee’s outlook, managers must:

• Stay open-minded
• Learn the employee’s true skill set
• Stop making assumptions about their capabilities based on past experiences
• Test different strategies to see what works for them and what doesn’t work

Organizations assume that students graduate from high school and college knowing how they learn. In a perfect world, students would have self-awareness, self-knowledge, and realize the individual ways that they learn. However, schools today are focused on getting students to pass tests. That means teaching them to conform and only to study what’s necessary — never beyond. They don’t learn to discover their own strengths and passions. They only do enough to pass.

Until we change that educational paradigm, organizations are stuck doing the work that was supposed to be done in the primary educational system.

A Prescription For Leaders

What does that mean for your organization? It means making a few adjustments to the training systems and consultants you use. Here’s how:

1. Work with managers to help them figure out the motivation drivers for employees on their respective teams. The best tool out there is The Motivators Assessment, developed by The Culture Works.
2. Re-evaluate the employee training consultants you’re working with. Are the consultants experienced and qualified to address varying learning rates? Are they willing to incorporate the assessment results above and adjust their training methods to meet employee needs?
3. Evaluate the LMS the company is using. Is it adjustable to the capabilities of the employee? Is there room for customization?

Leaders have the capability and the resources to help all of their employees learn and grow. They can be directly responsible for changing an individual’s mindset, confidence, and career trajectory. And they can develop motivated employees who may become true innovators for the company.

When making a plan to upskill employees, it’s worth the work involved to help them learn what kind of learners they are.

The post Don’t Leave Them Behind: Upskill and Re-Skill ALL Your Employees appeared first on Susan Fitzell.

A reality that many employees face is that the company has already invested in a LMS, or platform, like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, etc., and that’s where the training resides. Consequently, employees must work with the chosen corporate platform in order to upskill, reskill, or learn new material. There’s a gap!

This distance between the Learning Management System (LMS) and the learner is the Organizational Learning Gap (OLG). We need to bridge this gap.

Employees may be really interested in the topic, but they can’t get through the material because the nature of the training doesn’t fit their learning preferences or talents. Consequently, they get bored. The worst thing someone can do is to sit there and endure a boring course without learning anything from it. That’s a complete waste of their time. What does an employee do when they are faced with that situation?

Tackle the Course in Small Chunks

One option is to chunk information into five or 10 minute pieces. For example, you turn on the learning management system course and:

1. You start to watch it,
2. Maybe you read the agenda and the syllabus,
3. You have the option of reading the full text,
4. Or the option to listen to it (unless that puts you to sleep).
5. Watch the video for no more than 10 minutes. In that time, look for a nugget of information. Something that you didn’t know. Something that might pique your curiosity.

Now you’ve got a nugget.

Expand Your Understanding of the Nugget with Online Resources

Here’s another secret to successfully bridging the OLG: There’s absolutely no reason why you have to stick with that platform and acquire all the learning from just one source!

Find the information you’re looking for by digging deeper to discover more interesting presentations of the knowledge you’re trying to acquire. The process of looking for more information solidifies your understanding of the nugget. With the availability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), platforms like iTunes University, multiple “how to” and informational videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and other video platforms, there are many sources to choose from.

Look for the Helpers in Your Corporate Neighborhood

Mr. Rogers used to introduce the people in his “neighborhood” to teach kids about different professions and how they relate to a kids’ world. We’ve all grown up, but looking for help from our “neighbors” within the company is still a great way to tap into valuable resources.

There are people who love to provide information to others because it’s fulfilling and satisfying to them. And there is almost always another way to learn.

Consider finding someone you work with who has the skill set that you’re trying to acquire. Ask them to show you how that chunk of information works for them. How do they use the information? Have them explain it to you in a way that is more meaningful to the work that you’re actually doing, or want to do.

Most people are willing, if you can be flexible with the timing, and gracious with how you request information. The key is being respectful of that person’s time and energy and actually showing that you are going to act on what they teach you so as not to waste their time.

Here’s an example: I asked one of my colleagues, who is known to be a non-traditional learner, how he went about learning in the workplace. He said, “I seek out someone in the organization who has the skill I need. And I ask them three things:

• to explain what I need to know,
• to show me how to do it,
• and to share their acquired insight.

Take the Next Step Back to the Beginning

Now that you have built upon that nugget of information, you can return to the LMS with a deeper understanding of what you’re trying to learn.
It’s time to go back to the material and get the next nugget of information.

1. Go back to the learning platform and listen to another 5 to 10 minutes of the content.
2. Ask a question of the material. Think of something you might be curious about, how you might take the information further, or where would you go to get a better understanding,
3. Take it upon yourself to go find more information, just as you did with the first chunk.

Don’t be a passive learner held victim by the boring platitudes that are coming from the robotic voice on the screen. Choose the other option and find a nugget that you’re curious about. Take charge of your learning.

With this approach, you will learn what the platform is teaching, and you will go beyond, learning even more in a way that’s based on your interest, your curiosity, and your learning preferences.

Now you’ve got the right tools to learn successfully, break out of ineffective learning patterns, and bridge the organizational learning gap.

References:
Michael Allen, “Training: An Awesome Responsibility”, Training Magazine, trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/training-awesome-responsibility/

Massive Open Online Courses – http://mooc.org/

The post How To Learn Depressingly Boring Information: Your LMS is Not Enough appeared first on Susan Fitzell.