Are you sometimes disheartened that despite your best efforts to provide those learning opportunities, your team just isn’t learning at the rate you expect?
Have you tried…
training courses, webinars, workshops, presentations, team events, 1-to-1’s
…and yet your team is still floundering?
Do you dream of having a more engaged team that has an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge and brims with the creativity and innovation needed to make a real difference?
If any of this sounds familiar, and you really want to help your team make a step-change, it might be time to start looking a little closer to home for a solution.
Where does learning really happen?
It’s important to remember that not all learning happens in the training room. In fact, according to the 70:20:10 model, only 10% of learning occurs in formal training events. 20% of learning occurs when interacting with others, and the remaining 70% comes from real-life job-related experience.
So if you’re sending your team away to be trained and then find yourself back to square one within days, weeks and months of the training, you can pretty much guarantee that there’s something awry in the job-related experience and the interactions they’re having at work.
Remember, the mere existence of skills is not enough for those skills to transfer effectively into the workplace, they also need an environment in which they can flourish, and this is where you can really make a difference.
The way you engage with your team has a huge impact on the quality of the learning environment you create.
For example, if you spend too much time in ‘tell mode’ your team will quickly become accustomed to relying on you for answers, expecting you to solve problems, and consequently have very little ownership of solutions.
Alternatively, if you spend more of your time in a coaching mode – using powerful questions to stimulate insights from your team – you’ll soon see changes in the way they engage with you and their work, and the frequency and speed at which they learn.
Because when you ask someone a question, the onus for the insight development is with them. They have to think and construct new ideas which could help them answer the question and take ownership of solutions.
When you repeat this process over and over as part of your everyday leadership style, you’ll help your team to develop new neural pathways (or habits) that will change their usual responses to difficult or unfamiliar situations, help them take action, and consolidate their learning.
Just like learning, coaching doesn’t have to happen behind closed doors, it can live and breathe in everyday operational situations – you just need to acquire Operational CoachingTM skills.
Operational CoachingTM is a proven way to free coaching from the confines of the meeting room and unleash its potential on a much wider scale. Rather than focus on the coachee, the STAR® model is about helping you change YOUR behaviour as a manager, in a split second, so that you can create a moment where growth can occur. By using an Operational CoachingTM approach, on-the-fly, in the hub of operational life, you can create endless opportunities for learning to take place.
Now extrapolate this over the next 12 months… your number equates to the MINIMUM number of opportunities you’ll have to take a STAR® Operational CoachingTM approach over a one year period.
Imagine what your team could learn as a consequence of hundreds of Operational CoachingTM conversations and what they could achieve if you’re coaching approach gave them the capacity to communicate and collaborate, the responsibility to problem solve, the authority to make decisions, and the opportunity to undertake interesting and challenging work that is closely aligned to the results they see.
If you’d like to turn this vision into a reality, and you want to leverage learning in a way that drives better outcomes for everyone, let learning flourish and stop robbing your team of their opportunities to learn by finding out how you can incorporate Operational CoachingTM into your everyday leadership style.
