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Hugh Booth

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It is readily understood that teams can have more affect in the workplace than a single individual. Similarly, there’s a certain synergy unleashed when participants from the same organization come together for L&D. That’s why teams from companies around the world are attending the Association for Talent Development’s five-day Virtual Conference.For many teams, collective learning experiences such as this are an opportunity to recalibrate, strategize, and discover the latest trends and solutions to further corporate learning objectives. However, as advocates of lifelong learning, talent development professionals are not off the hook and can’t neglect cultivating their own professional growth.ATD’s Virtual Conference has 100 on-demand sessions and 35 live sessions that will equip TD professionals with skills to help others learn. But TD pros can also apply the new knowledge to their own professional journey.Several sessions center on the power of teams in the workplace:“Acoustic Leadership: Developing a Leadership Culture That Resonates”“Bonding Without Borders: Fostering Engagement Within a Global Team”“Building the Learning Enterprise”“Building A Workplace Culture of Connection”“Developing Your Organization’s Digital Inclusion Habits”“Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Digital Age”“Driving Employee Engagement Through Learning”“Learning in the Pandemic: Shifts, Disruptions, Empathy and Reskilling”“Standout Teams—How to Build Strong Teams Through Strengths”“Microlearning—Short and Sweet: Making Microlearning Work In Your Organization”“The Neuroscience of Creating High Performance Cultures”All conference participants are encouraged to take full advantage of the Virtual Conference platform’s functionality, which enables real-time communication with colleagues regardless of location. Knowing that many attendees have committed to taking in as much information and learning as possible during this virtual learning experience, the networking function makes it easy for teams from the same organization to debrief and strategize while the learning is fresh and top of mind.Explore an ATD Enterprise MembershipATD offers the Enterprise Membership for organizations with five or more talent development professionals. The membership provides a more customized and consultative approach to helping teams accomplish their organization’s learning objectives.Additional resources available to Enterprise-level members include private instruction opportunities and access to senior-level resources, such as the ATD Forum and CTDO Next. Moreover, ATD extends special discounts on books, workshops, and events to Enterprise members throughout the year.Individuals work better together, and they learn better together. ATD wants to partner with teams and connect them with the resources they need to thrive. Visit the ATD Central virtual booth during the Virtual Conference or email enterprisemembership@td.org to learn how ATD’s Enterprise Membership consultants can help your L&D team make a greater organizational impact.Share your ATD Virtual Conference experience on social media. #ATDVirtualConference

Enterprise Solutions: Unleash the Power of Team Learning

Keep up with learning demand by building a robust system for building user-generated content that’s both high quality and easy for our team to support

Getting Ahead of Demand

How can you develop far-sighted leaders throughout your enterprise? How do you find the inner voice of strategic leadership? We’ve been researching these questions, drawing on insights from neuroscience, organizational learning, social psychology, coaching, and the study of values. There are two types of leadership common today at all levels of an enterprise: transactional (making deals, solving problems, pleasing customers and your boss) and strategic (challenging existing ways of thinking, accomplishing things that others consider impossible, galvanizing people around the organization to transcend limits). Each is linked to a different pattern of mental activity and an associated brain circuit—transactional to the low ground of the mind and brain and strategic to the high ground. Both are habit-forming. Both are necessary for the leaders of today and tomorrow. By focusing your attention, you can become more effective at both. A great leader balances the low ground and high ground, moving by choice between expedience (solving problems) and strategy (making a better world). With this practice, you draw on the wise advocate within your mind. This is the inner voice of strategic leadership: seeing yourself as others might see you, with full compassion and care for your success. Calling on the wise advocate changes people; it helps them become more capable leaders, speaking with that voice in the organization around them. This helps them overcome the deceptive messages that travel through an organization’s culture and hold everyone back. With enough people embodying the inner voice of strategic leadership, an organization can take on a wise advocate role in society at large.
Learning to draw on your wise advocate will provide you with three things:
1) the ability to balance the low ground and high ground by moving between expedience (solving problems) and strategy (making a better world)
2) the emotional intelligence to see yourself as others may see you, with full compassion and care for your success
3) the confidence to help overcome deceptive messages traveling through an organization’s culture holding everyone back.
 

DEMO: Developing Your Wise Advocate

Coaches understand that many top performers are committed and dedicated to their work but pay little attention to their careers. Coaching these employees around focusing on and developing their careers, then, not only benefits them but their organizations.
These high performers are also often reluctant to self-promote, which can lead to a lack of recognition for all they accomplish and contribute. Organizations want their best people to rise through the ranks, but it isn’t always easy to identify them if they don’t know how to get noticed.
This webcast will cover stories from High Potentials’ Boot Camp: The Ultimate Playbook for Winning at Work to demonstrate how, by leveraging a few simple career development strategies, coaches can encourage clients to make even more substantial contributions to their enterprises without feeling as if they are playing a political game or have no integrity.
Attendees will learn how to:

Coach those who do great work and never mention it.
Guide those who allow others to minimize their contributions.
Encourage those who feel challenged by specific career-limiting behaviors and attitudes.
Lead those who need to focus on career development and promotion.
Mentor those who don’t understand that developing their careers is part of their job.
Help leaders recognize talent who may be “flying below the radar.”


If Your  Career Were a Houseplant, It Might Be Dead by Now

What is microlearning? Well, it depends on who you ask.Most people agree microlearning involves learning in short bursts. Some say four minutes or less. Others say up to an hour. Sharon Boller suggests bite-sized content only works for short-term training and reinforcement, but Will Thalheimer believes you can successfully teach course-like material in five-minute chunks.Still others think microlearning isn’t even about short content—that it’s about cramming lots of learning into a short amount of time. And plenty have condemned it as a shiny buzzword, an unserious approach, some kind of flimflam.More than a fuzzy label or iron-clad model, microlearning is a philosophy—one that says thinking small is the best chance we have for overcoming the huge challenges facing both L&D leaders and the greater 21st century workforce. A Better Way to Think About MicrolearningThe broadest and most useful definition of microlearning is "learning, and applying what one has learned, in small, focused steps.” Ideally, each of these microlearning steps is:self-contained, with its own learning objectivea small win on the way to a larger goal (for example, learning to make eye contact is a step toward becoming a competent presenter)as short as possible, but as extensive as necessary.These self-contained steps can take many forms, from short videos explaining a concept, to a quiz helping to recall it, to a short practice task in which you apply it, to an email that reinforces it. Again, this is not a hard and fast prescription. But it’s a way of thinking that focuses on what people really need to do their jobs, and helps build learning around those application points in a way that’s easily personalized.Right now, learners are bogged down with bloated content and one-size-fits-all lectures that provide too much inert information—all at once, and out of context. We must eliminate the cruft that has accumulated around learning, and a micro approach might be the best way to do it.Microlearning Is More Than MomentsIt’s easy to get hung up on the time factor of microlearning, as in: “anything over a few minutes isn’t microlearning.” It’s true, units of microlearning tend to be short—a step along a particular learning path might take the form of a single image. But, more importantly, the micro perspective isn’t just about small content; it’s about taking a small-scale approach to many factors that influence learning.Cognitive load. Learners are routinely overburdened by unfocused, information-heavy content. Microlearning aims to reduce cognitive load, making it easier for learners to process and put to use.Space. Since smaller content takes up less digital space, you can avoid bandwidth problems that come with storing and managing large media files—especially on mobile devices.Scope. Micro content is more focused in scope, making it easier for a learner to tie what they learn directly to specific on-the-job actions.Cost. Short content is cheaper and faster to produce and update, so you can continually test and experiment, even on the tightest budgets.Perspective. Microlearning forces us to consider the small learning moments and opportunities that happen continuously throughout an employee’s day.Like microeconomics, which is concerned less with small transactions than it is with small segments of the entire economy, microlearning is less concerned with small content than it is with small segments of the much broader organizational learning picture.The Big Picture of MicrolearningThe tiny pins in the above image are arranged to form a picture of a face. But they could very easily be rearranged to take the shape of an apple or a hand. Likewise, the tiny pieces of a microlearning program afford flexibility that traditional learning systems do not.Here’s an example of what I mean: We know from research that spacing and repetition are powerful best practices for successful learning. We also know that increasing variation, interleaving assessments, and staggering practice are also tremendously effective ways to help people learn.But these things—repetition, spacing, variation, interleaving—are very hard to do at scale unless the units you’re dealing with are small. (Just imagine trying to repeatedly space a one-hour lecture.) Plus, today’s organizations need to be able to quickly update content, swap media in and out, and cater to increasingly personalized needs. To do this for hundreds or thousands of employees in dozens of constantly changing areas of concern, while being asked to show ROI, is nearly impossible without the kind of nimbleness a microlearning approach provides.Small Step for Learning, Giant Leap For L&DThere’s no easy solution to the many problems we’re facing around 21st century learning and development. Widening skills gaps…sprawling logistical challenges brought on by increasing decentralization…perennially unstable budgets…the list goes on. Microlearning can’t solve these challenges overnight. But by addressing inefficiencies at the small level, we can set ourselves up to tackle problems at the macro level that would be insurmountable otherwise. Whether you’re a fierce advocate of microlearning, a staunch dissenter, or you haven’t yet made up your mind, one thing remains clear: companies need to start thinking small when it comes to organizational learning. And that philosophy of thinking small, more than any other debate around labels, models, or semantics is really what microlearning is all about.Please keep the conversation going and share your thoughts on microlearning in the Comments.

Will the Real Microlearning Please Stand Up?

Wayne Luke is managing partner of the not-for-profit practice of the executive search firm Witt/Kieffer. With more than two decades of executive search and leadership development experience, he has successfully partnered with a wide variety of world class, high impact organizations—both in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, helping to drive their efforts to identify and hire game-changing, senior leaders. He is based in Witt/Kieffer’s Atlanta office.

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