Effective Learning and Development with Tom Bailey [PODCAST]

Tom:
And individuals don’t really care about the stuff that organisations want them to teach them on. They want to do a good job. There is, like a Venn diagram, there is some sweet spot in the middle. But there’s a whole lot of things that individuals care about.

Phil:
Yeah.

Tom:
There’s a whole lot of things that organisations care about.

And so, Part of an L & D role in organisations is trying to find ways to get people to connect to the stuff that organisations care about.

Phil:
Welcome to the Inclusion at Work podcast. My name’s Phil cross. I’m one of the co-founders of leaders for good today. I am very lucky to be joined by Tom Bailey, who is head of capability at black Moors group. And we’re gonna be diving into a topic, or I don’t know if it’s just gonna be one topic. Knowing you and I, it’s probably gonna be many topics, uh, but that are near and dear to both of our hearts, which is how do we make learning and development more effective in our organisations?

So, Tom, firstly, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. For the audience, why don’t we kick off with a little about you? How do you find yourself doing the work that you do now?

Tom:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I am very passionate about L&D, so I’m glad this is what we’re talking about.

Yeah, it’s been a journey. So I started out in sales and marketing in commercial teams, and, I just had a real itch to do something else after an amount of time. And there were two areas that she was quite interested in. One was sustainability, and one was about how do you get people better at doing stuff?

And it was I explored. It turns out that a lot of sustainability is procurement, and that just wasn’t for me. so Yeah, so it was my partners in sustainability, and I can confirm that there is some procurement involved there. So whilst I’m very passionate about sustainability, I’m less passionate about procurement.

So about what lights me up, I guess, is seeing people develop. And as someone who has led people and managed people previously, I mean, that was the satisfaction, the satisfaction of seeing people get better, seeing people progress and move forward. I just just, I just find it. enormously energising. And I used to work for a business which allowed me to make that transition and I will be eternally grateful for them or to them, for, for allowing me to move across into, into this space.

Phil:
Amazing. Maybe just for the audience at home. Learning and development can be a bit of a broad and a bit of an abstract area, I think, sometimes and can conjure up different things for different people. And I know a lot of our listeners are HR, L&D, people in culture, uh, professionals. But how do you think about learning and development in an organisation?

How would you, how would you define that?

Tom:
Yes, again, a really good question. And it is such a broad church, right? It’s so many things to so many people. You think about academia, you think about organisational development, you think about trainers and facilitators, so many aspects to it. So for me, I’m going to give you a really simple definition that I use, and I’ve already mentioned it once.

It’s getting people better at stuff they need to be good at. And in doing so, there’s elements of wellness in there. But whatever you’re doing, whatever element you’re working in, even in education and academia, you really want people to get better at something in organisations. For me, I guess it’s more around, it’s less about adult education. It’s more about how do you support the people to do a really great job? Because we always talk about learning. It’s interesting learning and development, right? We talk about learning, but you can’t make someone learn. I mean, you could try, it would be a painful process, but you don’t just probably take you back to school, maybe.

But you can’t always make someone learn, but you can help them and support them at those moments that they need. And for me, that’s really what L&D is in organisations. It’s providing tools, it’s tips, it’s providing the things that people need when they need it. Yeah. For me, that’s effective L&D. And yes, there’s elements of training in there, but there’s also elements of, of coaching in there.

There’s elements of learning through others. There’s guides, there’s coaching. content, lots of other things, but it boils down to how do I help Phil navigate the things that Phil needs to do? What are those pivot points where he can really drive his performance and get better and feel better about himself as well?

And you know, if he learned something as a result of that, great. Amazing. The contrast, I guess, is organisations want people to learn stuff that they don’t care about, broadly speaking. Right. And individuals don’t care. Don’t really care about the stuff that organisations want them to teach them on.

They want to do a good job. There is like a Venn diagram. There is some sweet spot in the middle, but there’s a whole lot of things that individuals care about. And there’s a whole lot of things that organisations care about. and so part of an L&D role in organisations is trying to find ways to get people to connect to the stuff that organisations care about.

Phil:
Such a good point. And I think when we’re talking about things that people care about and tell me what you think of this, I think sometimes with organisations, it’s connecting the dots between the thing they’re selling and the actual outcome for the individuals in the teams. So emotional intelligence.

Okay, we’re gonna run a program on emotional intelligence. You’re gonna love it unless I’m already there. Unless I’ve read the books and been on the courses, I might not really connect how that’s going to help me, how that’s going to help me connect with people, how that’s going to help me achieve outcomes or whatever, whatever my particular goal is as an individual.

So I think sometimes it’s a selling and a communication problem as much as it is a

Tom:
such a good point because we do ram stuff down people’s throats in organisations that I don’t care about.

Phil:
Yeah,

Tom:
And I guess my role in L&D, as with everyone’s role, who’s managing some sort of L&D agenda in organisations is how do I push back on the stuff or help knit it together?

So it actually makes sense because I’m sure this is indicative of a lot of organisations where someone senior goes, I read a book or I saw an article or my neighbour told me that inclusive leadership is the thing or resilience. If we’re all more resilient, we’ll be better, right? And so we need to run some resilience training.

It’s like, okay, well, yes, arbitrarily. Resilience is great. No one’s gonna say resilience is useless, right? Everyone’s got a busy life. They’ve got busy jobs. Do we need to drag them into a training room to learn how to be more resilient? How does that tie that then into their role? And also the whole approach of a broad scale, everyone, a sheep dip, that’s the phrase.

Phil:
A sheep dip, yeah.

Tom:
Everyone’s good at resilience is a bit of a misnomer because it’s more about looking at the individuals and what they, again, going back to what I said at the start, what do they need to do effectively and when do they need to do it? How do we help them? Some of it is about learning, and some of it’s just helping them do a better job when they need it.

Phil:
That just in time when they need it is absolutely key. Hey, the resiliency training. So you think of an organisation.

Tom:
I have to say, there’s nothing wrong with resilience training. Resilience is very important.

Phil:
Absolutely. I once did some work with a psychologist. She had some feelings about resiliency training, that it’s sometimes, sometimes used as a bit of a, we’ll just put people through resiliency training and then we can continue having bad processes and stuff.

But, that aside, I think resilience is a good thing. But is it a good thing when the organisation is on the up and everything’s going great and they’re expanding, they’re hiring, there’s, there’s, you know, there’s the parties, there’s the awards and everything’s going great because that’s typically the time when people invest most in learning and development because because there’s the money in the money.

So yeah. but how useful is it then as opposed to just in time when okay, we’re going through a restructure, we’re going through a significant e expansion into a different location. Sales are down, sales are down. Yep. That’s the time when you need it. It’s the time when you probably think you have the least time to do it, but that’s the time when it’s the most valuable and you can actually get the most out of it.

And it goes to, I think, the thing you said right at the top, which is how do we think about L&D as a support for our people in terms of what they, what they need to do as opposed to. Here’s your resilience training and you will like it.

Tom:
You just made me think of something. I was at a conference, working for an unknown, an unnamed company and someone senior in marketing stood up and I’m an ex marketeer so I love comms and I love branding and they stood up and they said, right, what is the number one thing that our company, our biggest asset, number one thing for our company, what’s our number one asset?

And I’m like, Oh, here we go. Yeah. Yeah. People. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Our brand. And I’m like, what? What? What? No, it’s not. No fight the injustice. So, and, and it’s interesting. Obviously it’s all about perspective on which area you work in the business, but sure. Fundamentally, and I will happily argue this with anyone, our biggest asset is our people, right?

It’s a crass point of view. It’s typically the biggest expense, is your salary. But more than that, you don’t have a company without people. You still have a brand. It might not be a very good brand, but you still have a brand. But without people, you don’t have an organisation. unless it’s all AI run and we have to get the AI tick in there first, but, but you don’t, you need people.

And the biggest opportunity for any business, it’s a broad statement for a lot of businesses is improving our people and developing people because they are the biggest asset and they are the, it’s the biggest, point of difference that you could make. The biggest change you can make is how people work, whether they’re in I.T. and they’re working on systems, whether they’re in marketing, working on the brand and innovation, whether in sales and actually selling the product. And this goes on.

Phil:
If I think back to good old Dan Pink’s model of motivation, the autonomy, mastery and purpose, mastery being a big component there. How are we helping people to get better at what they do and have a sense of that and have a sense of achievement?

Because, obviously, there are some people who are happy to come to work and punch the clock and they’re there for a paycheck and not interested in anything else. But, the majority of people want some kind of sense of achievement from coming to work and doing what they do. And again, how do we help that?

How do we, how do we support them in that? And again, not give them something that There’s either a spurious or unclear connection back to back to what they’re, what they’re looking to achieve as a, as an individual.

Tom:
Yes. And that’s, that’s really key because you’re right. The majority of people, people get disgruntled, people get upset, there’s injustice.

Nothing’s perfect. Sure. But the majority of people I really believe want to be part of a good organisation that is moving forward. That is a positive force, right? Right. And so how do you unlock that? How do you work with that? And I know we’re touching on, uh, cultural development here, but learning and development has a big part to play within that.

Mature organisations do have both a coaching culture and a learning culture, and that’s indicative of what they are. They problem solve. You know, you and I are both coaches. We know what it takes to be a coach. I often think the coaching methodology is the present and the future way in which organisations work.

You know, the old, the old days of command and conquer, you know, industrial revolution or a cotton mill. Go on, Jimmy, work faster. Yeah. Those days hopefully are gone. I’m sure there are one or two organisations that still work. I’m certain there are. But the more we can empower people through co coaching methodologies by saying, what do you think you need to do about this?

There are exceptions. Obviously, if there’s a fire, you don’t coach people through that. But broadly speaking, if people can find their solutions and problem solve and get used to that, that’s where you start getting a mature organisation.

Phil:
100 percent what is it? What is it specifically about? Because some people will be more, you know, more familiar than others with What we mean by coaching, they’ll have heard the word.

But I think unless you’ve had a deep experience of either being a coach or being coached, you might not actually connect the dots between what a coaching methodology looks like, an organisational perspective from thinking about learning and development. Maybe you can unpack that a little bit.

Tom:
No, that’s a really good watch out, actually. So when we think about coaching, some people are going to really roll their eyes at this and go, come on, Tom, this is so basic, but maybe there’s some people who aren’t really clear on it. And certainly working organisations here in Oz, there’s people I’ve come across who immediately go to little league football, right?

You know, Peewee, basketball, whatever. So when we talk about coaching, it’s not the classic football law. Coach on the sidelines. It’s a methodology. And I think you and I both have been or are members of the International Federation of coaching, and they set out a very clear standard. They are not for profit.

And I guess I base everything I think from there. Coaching is simply helping other people to explore their problems and find their own solutions. There’s the old classic, which most people I think will, will know, which is the grow model, which I love the grow model. Yeah. Look it up. I’m sure we could put some notes in there.

You, you won’t fail to find the grow model. It’s all over Google. You just put it in. Probably the first thing that comes up at its core is rapport. And I always really love that. I love that there’s always rapport at the centre of the coaching model because it is so important that someone trusts you.

There is trust in the relationship. and there’s a real relationship between the two parties so that there is possible development. So to boil down coaching, I would say in my very humble definition, it is the process of helping someone work through their obstacles and challenges or opportunities and helping them to find their path rather than telling them what to do.

It’s a kind of Paul development exercise rather than a push. Yes. And so as a coach, I would be actively listening. I would be challenging at the right times. I’d be nudging them on their thinking, but I wouldn’t be telling them what to do. I’d be getting them to reflect. Think about it. Yeah. What is it you think?

What have you tried before? What would you what’s your ideal outcome here? Yeah. How will you get to it? What was other people? Yeah, there’s millions of questions that you could ask, but it’s all about focusing back on as an individual. What is it I need to do better? Why? Why is it that Kathy hates me or whatever it is, whatever the situation is.

The beauty for me in coaching is that it allows the individual to self soothe and to identify and get used to that problem solving mindset. It really is a growth mindset at its origins. I hope that, I hope I haven’t waffled too much, right?

Phil:
That’s clear. Perfect. I just want to pull out one really important nugget there, which you sort of mentioned at the start, which is that rapport is at the heart of the coaching relationship.

So you’re never going to open up to and work with a coach that you don’t feel a sense of trust and rapport with. Absolutely. And I think we can take a lesson from that as learning and development professionals in an organisation. So we don’t often have a one on one. If you, if you think of somebody who’s an internal L&D or people in culture, a professional, they might not have a one on one relationship with everybody in the organisation, but how are they going about building trust and rapport with those people so much that when there’s a suggestion that you might enjoy a certain development track or a certain program or a certain opportunity, Or a question that comes up which prompts somebody to get there.

Yes. The listening is a rope that people, uh, people are leaning in going, okay, well, well, if, you know, if Jane’s suggesting that, then, then maybe that’s maybe I do want to look into that as opposed to, Oh, I’ve got another email from HR. you know, goes into the special, special folder in Outlook. So I think I think that’s an interesting question.

Tom:
It’s a really good observation, and it kind of gets me to thinking about one of my favourite topics, which is performance management, which we haven’t actually talked about talking about, but I’ve just randomly come into my head. Amazing. Go for it. So a guy called Nigel Harrison is probably my favourite.

We can put some notes in the thing, but there are many performance management approaches out there. And what you’re talking about is that value add almost, you know, having not always worked in HR, One of the challenges about being a cost to the business rather than being a, uh, an income generator is that it is harder to cut through, you know, everything you do is going to cost money to the business.

So he’s got to be bang on taking that coaching approach, that, that kind of, that coaching approach really builds credibility. It’s amazing how many people just want to be listened to. Really, and they’ll give you credit for listening to them. That’s like, top tip. Just listen to people.

Phil:
but actively listen to them.

I’ve had that, when I first started coaching, that was, that was the number one piece of feedback, actually, I got from people that really cemented that view. I’ve just not been listened to like that. I just don’t have anybody in my life, which is kind of sad for folk. Like we all go through phases in our life where we maybe don’t have that person who’s going to spend time and listen to us like that.

But yeah, I agree. I think that feedback really hammered that home. Yeah.

Tom:
Yeah. So if you then take that onto the next level, if you’re building credibility by actively listening and getting people to focus back, and I mean, senior leaders that you’re working with, and you’re in the HR space or L&D space, if you then start adding elements of performance management to it. Your credibility, you are the best business partner. You could be, you are strategic. You are seriously adding value rather than that reactive HR role that nobody wants that we’re all trying to fight against, whether whatever, whether we’re in a specialism or a generalist, we’re always trying to break free of that kind of order taking.

And it’s really prevalent in L&D obviously as well. but we’re trying to break free of that. So, performance management is a great way to do that. And there’s elements of coaching in there, but it’s literally asking the right questions and actively listening. It’s nothing. There’s no dark arts outside of that.

There’s no magic. There’s no rabbits out of hats. There’s no dressing up like a magician.

Phil:
Yeah. Although you feel free to dress like a magician if it makes you happy. Yeah. The L&D Tom, the L&D magic. You’ve got your new branding there, mate. Go for it. Yeah. Love it. Top hat. So what is it? You’ve named a few.

Are there any other specific challenges around effective learning and development in organisations that you want to highlight? Because I think we can’t start to think differently about things we can’t. You know, as you know, we’d like our sort of prompt about thinking differently and looking at problems from from different angles.

But what are some of the challenges? What are some of the things that get in the way of really making this tick.

Tom:
100 percent. Number one? You know what, what do you think the number one is? I’ve just thrown it back on you.

Phil:
It’s my podcast. I’ll say it.

Tom:
Yeah, I know. We can edit that out if you want.

Phil:
No, no, no. This is great. What do I think the number one challenge is? For effective L&D? Motivation. Motivation. Motivation is the, the, the top of the list. Because again, it’s not that people don’t have time, it’s that people don’t value, don’t, people don’t see the Individuals and organisations don’t see the value in the thing that you’re trying to do.

So there’s not a clear connection back to strategy, back to organisational goals, back to current challenges. And that goes for the org at a high level. And it goes for the individuals who you’re suggesting go on this program or workshop. So motivation. Yeah.

Tom:
In L&D, there’s this virtuous circle, right? Or a virtuous triangle, which I don’t think works, but I’m going to make it work because the triangle is not a circle, but let’s pretend that it is.

And, and it’s, it’s really interesting. So what happens is, and all organisations have different maturity levels, but the, the, I guess the, base level that I try and fight against the kind of crusader element is this virtuous circle where an individual, let’s say a line manager or a leader comes to you and says, Oh, hey, Tom, we, let’s go back to resilience.

Uh, my team, uh, they’re great. They’re performing really well, but I heard that you did some, some training with Phil the other day and Phil’s team on resilience. We want to do that too. Oh, great. Okay. So what do you want to get out of it? Well, we just want resilience training like you gave Phil. So just do that.

Now the virtuous circle is if I then run that training, they’ll love it. They’ll all, all the Kirkpatrick level one. They’ll all go. Yep. I loved it. The food was great. Oh, Tom was really great. He was inspirational. He gave us sweets. He was divvy. He raised his voice. He lowered his voice. I was, it was really good.

It was like a theatrical operation. the leader gets that tick box. Oh, great. Yeah. We ran training. I’ve given my people training and people get the four hours, which I stole from an excellent lady at sky, uh, on a different podcast, but they get the four hours they get rest. They get, uh, they get, sorry, they get rest.

They get a reward. They get a bit of a relationship with their friends and they get some time out and, and. I think it’s sorry. Recognition is the fourth one. I was going to say timeouts. No, not recognition. You’ve done really well. I’ve served in training. So everyone gets a little bit of something from that and they all feel good about it.

What nobody gets is development. Nobody moves forward in that situation, but everyone feels great. They’ve all ticked a box. There was a stat the other day, which I saw, which was from the festival of, of learning festival of work with the Charles Institute for Personal Development, which said 45 billion, sorry, 45 billion pounds.

I think it was spent on learning and development programs. Only 12 percent of it. actually going to change behaviour. I can believe that. Yeah. And that’s a sad indictment, really. 12 percent is going to change behaviour. The rest is just for fun. Now we never call it for fun. Can you imagine going to your senior leaders, right, we’re not, we’re not going to do Resilience Train.

No, we’re going to go and build a kayak or we’re going to go to an escape room and we’re going to call it team building. The worst two words, if you want to kill off any idea, call it team building. Because immediately we’ll go Waste of money. We don’t want it. Yeah. But if we could be authentic about it and go, well, no, the people are really struggling.

They just want some fun together. They want to build those relationships. Yeah, just call it what it is. Don’t don’t don’t pretend it’s a job in half an hour to about negotiation just to call it negotiation training because it won’t change. So That virtuous circle I’m talking about breaking that down.

Yeah. Motivation is a big one. Mindset is equally a massive one. How do you change that mindset? And that’s for me, the biggest challenge in L&D and effective L&D is changing the mindset and cover the whole gambit of things, whether it’s well, I expect you, Phil, to run training next week on this topic because I’ve told you it.

And I’m a human, so I’m an expert. And I’m also really a good expert because I went on training 20 years ago and I got the blue ring binder from it and it was great. And so I know about this stuff. Can you imagine going to finance and going, yeah, guys, uh, I’ve got a bank account. So all of this stuff you’re doing around accounts, it’s just weak.

Let me, let me tell you what you need to do. Uh, get rid of that cost centre. That’s rubbish. It just wouldn’t happen. No, but yet everyone’s an expert on L&D. Yes. So the big challenge is how do you influence goes back to performance management and coaching. How do you influence them to change that mindset so you can really have impact.

Phil:
So the, so the unhooking the I guess the fixed mindset around, you mentioned it before, the sort of fixed versus growth mindset here, so that fixed mindset around, I’ve got this sorted, I guess what came into my mind, because I love the, I love the graph, but it’s the cognitive bias, but the Dunning Kruger effect, you know, a little bit of exposure to something makes people an expert in their own mind, and it’s not until they actually encounter what expertise looks like or a challenge they can’t surmise.

I remember just personally

Tom:
from grace,

Phil:
isn’t it? Down that graph. I remember having this distinctly though when I, when I first started coaching, like I’d come out of my coach training and I thought I’m hot stuff. You know what I mean? I got this, I got these models down. I was great in those sessions.

And then you encounter some leaders with real challenges or whatever it was. And I’m like, I I’ve, I’ve got a, I’ve got a, I’ve got a hill to climb

Tom:
here. I’m sure people watching this, if you are a coach. you will identify pretty much everyone in coaching at some point has had imposter syndrome. A hundred percent.

It’s just par for the course. You probably should. You probably should at some point. Otherwise you’re probably not coaching. Yeah,

Phil:
yeah, yeah. It’s, uh, everyone goes through that. That’s a hard thing. That’s a hard how. So moving into sort of solution or suggestion or ideation mode there. How do you think about that mindset shift?

Then how do you point to practise or what have you seen working in terms of shifting that?

Tom:
So the number one thing is not order taking on. It reminds me of, um Really random example. But, when I used to work in commercial, I used to work with, uh, supermarkets, you know, like Coles and Woolies.

I didn’t work with Coles and Woolies, but like them. and what you would do is you would talk to your buyer. But they weren’t the decision makers. So you’re always talking through them. So you’re trying to give them all the ammunition so that they can then take it back to their bosses and create that compelling argument.

Phil:
Yeah.

Tom:
And the same is kind of true in, in, in L&D the person you’re talking to is not always the final decision maker, but you’ve got to get them on board. You’ve got to get them understanding. And, and, and the real acid test is when they start using your language. That’s when you know, you’re doing good stuff.

But the simple number one thing I would do to get away from order taking. And get towards value adding. Is that active listening piece? I mean practically, just try it. Just stop talking for a bit, listen, and then think, okay, what’s my number one question that I’ve got for these people? What generally happens in L&D?

I mean generally, every time a line manager comes to you, you’re like, It’s a solution they’re giving you. It’s like going to the doctor and saying, yeah, look, uh, you don’t need to look at me. I need to cut my leg off. I’ve got a headache. You wouldn’t do that. But yet in L&D this happens all the time.

People will come to you and go, we need this, we need this, we need this. And if you really want to be effective, You’ve got to challenge it in a really nice and friendly and good and positive way. You’ve got to understand their motivations. You’ve got to show them a better way. And that takes time. It takes experience and it takes a real flexing of your, stakeholder management and that, that, that interaction.

Right. And a bit of

Phil:
bravery for some as well. Definitely. It’s a really good point. Bravery, for sure. Yeah, especially in organisations where people are habituated towards, okay, the order taking, like you say, Oh, my team needs this. And, and, oh, well, you know, Jim, the previous L&D person would just, would just go and roll it out.

Like, why have I got to

Tom:
The thing, right? Because Jim, hypothetically, or whoever, there’s a lot of L&D people who are pre conditioned to love facilitating. And so they go, brilliant. Oh yeah, next week. I love it. Oh, it’s going to be, I’m going to get on my stage and I’m going to deliver it. And there’s nothing wrong with facilitating.

It’s brilliant.

Phil:
I love it. I could definitely see falling into that rap.

Tom:
It just might not be the right solution because you haven’t, you haven’t checked it. You haven’t. Understood what the actual issue is that you’re trying to address, right? And so what happens is you default to, Hey, let’s run a face to face training.

Let’s get the team in. And the secret is baby steps. If your organisation is really not for this, they just expect you to deliver training all the time. Just move the needle a little bit. Just ask that extra question. So what the killer question is, what behaviour change do you expect to see?

I generally ask that at least three or four times in a first meeting with an L&D, with a line manager, because they won’t answer it.

They’ll waffle through it. That’s a red flag question. They’re not, I don’t care about that. What I care about is that we run this resilience, poor resilience. We keep picking on resilience training,

Phil:
Nothing wrong with resilience training.

Tom:
I was going to say once again, love for the resilience training.

Phil:
We should pick something else. Yeah.

Tom:
But, but for me, that’s the, that’s the piece. How, how do you just start asking a couple more questions? At the end of this, what do you want people to do differently? And in all honesty, if they say to you, we don’t want anyone to do anything differently, we just need to do this.

Okay, so that’s fine. That just means you’re dealing with compliance. And that’s a different ballgame. Yes. Compliance doesn’t pretend to develop people or move people on. No. It’s compliance. Yes. You have to do it. It’s a legal requirement. And that’s a different ballgame. Different equation to, we want to get people better at X, Y, Z.

100%.

Phil:
At Leaders for Good, we have a proven track record of helping clients from a wide range of different industries create lasting culture change. We achieve this by developing impactful diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, by delivering highly effective workshops and programs, and by leading change initiatives that work together.

truly work at scale. So if you’re enjoying this conversation and would like to talk to us about accelerating your organisations DEI efforts, please reach out at [email protected]. Perspectives there on the measurement piece as well, because obviously this is a, hot, hot, hot topic. And I think notably has been a hot topic forever, forever, around, around L&D.

But how do you, how do you think about that? What’s your, yeah, what, give us the answer, Tom. No pressure. Solve

Tom:
measurement in L&D for us, please. So I’d say that the first thing to do is measurement has to be at the start. You have to know what you want to measure before. What happens many times is you get to the end and go, Oh, uh, what do we measure?

Uh, how do we measure this? Happy sheets. Yeah, happy sheets. Uh, John said it was great. Mary was, Mary said it was really good. and, and you default back to whatever you can find. there’s a couple of people out there who I’d recommend checking out. but what I would, and I’ll, I’ll mention them. Uh, but before I do, I think the thing to remember is always start with your measurement in mind.

So it goes back to those questions, you know, where I said, what behaviour change are you expecting? That’s where you’re, where your measurement comes in. The other tip I would have is matching it to the business language or the functional language that you’re talking to. So for example, if it’s sales, you talk about net sales, trade spend, whatever, you know, that’s their language.

If it’s marketing, it also might be spent, but it might be something else. It might be, I don’t know, AMP spend. It might be, it might be net sales. It might be reach. It might be awareness and attitude studies. It really depends, but identify that. it could be broader business. It’s, it’s the business strategy.

And then you said it right at the start, you know, how do you link to the business strategy? How do you link into what the business wants to get done? And that’s critical. Those would be my top tips. there’s a couple of people out there who I’d probably recommend. There’s a guy who’s the L&D detective.

Phil:
yeah. We pair the L&D detective up with the L&D wizard and like we’ve got a sitcom. I like this. I can’t remember his

Tom:
name. We’ll put his name in the notes. Yeah, sure, yeah. You can give it to me after. He’s uh, he does a great job. He basically, he does the thing that we’re all pretty poor at in L&D and in HR, which is, and I’m pretty a broad statement there, but data, he brings in data.

So, he really identifies those data sources that you want to use, and does it in a really good way, just keeps pushing it front of mind. But that’s, that’s really the focus. You, you really need to have that thought process upfront. And that’s why performance management is great because it allows you to identify what that is.

Phil:
Any thoughts on the philosophy? And I know some organisations have taken this approach of just really canning measurement around learning and development. They’ve gone, actually, you know what? Drawing a bright line back is too difficult. We’re going to stop pretending that we’re doing that because I think there are theatrics of measurement that happen in a lot of organisations and not real any big, not really any meaningful measurement. Yeah, so they’ve just gone. We’re just, we trust the process. We, we, we, we, we’ve made this as relevant and as timely as we can for our people and as high quality as we can. And we’re just trusting that this is going to have a downstream impact.

Tom:
So true. I’ve worked at an organisation where they did that at a global level.

They said, right, no more ROI. Yeah, it’s banned. Banned words. And I get it. I understand where that comes from, because we spend so much time then measuring ROI, it, it, you then don’t really do quality work or your resource heavy on the, on the, on the return piece. So I get the philosophy. What I would say is, I’m a big believer in the old school Kirkpatrick model.

I’ve mentioned it already once, and it’s got four levels. You want to be aiming at level three and level four. Now, if you really don’t measure that, It’s not the end of the world. That’s some, at some stage you need to be thinking it. So even if you’re not actively measuring ROI, you still need to be thinking how will this change behaviour?

The danger is if you say, right, gloves are off. No one put those numbers down. We’re not doing, you end up with just pie in the sky. You go back to the virtuous circle. You just put stuff on. People eat it up or don’t eat it up. Nothing changes. So that’s the danger of not recording it. I still think an L&D professional, by extension, HR professionals need to keep an eye on that data.

They need to have an idea as to what it is they’re trying to do. And level three and four on Kirkpatrick model is where you need to be aiming at. Not, not happy sheets. Not an MPS is a big one too, which I’m not going to

Phil:
raise. And I completely agree. I think you need a signal. From what you’re doing, you need some feedback loops.

And I actually think happy, happy sheet. So we like to think of, uh, this in sort of learning, leading and lagging indicators. And happy cheats are a useful tool just to know, did you run an engaging session? And as long as that’s what we’re using them for, it’s like, did the people have a good time in the room?

Because if they didn’t, That’s a signal too. Definitely. So, if you get your happy sheets back and it’s everyone’s a sort of three out of five. Something’s not right because

Tom:
There’s always a bounce in happy sheets. That’s why they’re called happy sheets. That’s right. You’re never going to get a one across the board unless you, Oh, you’d have to do something.

Yeah. I mean, because there’s always a bit of a bump that they give you for happy sheets.

Phil:
Yeah. And so that’s a, that’s a signal, but, but it can’t be the only signal.

Tom:
no, it’s, it’s an input and that’s all it is. Now, as you said, it’s good, and it’s useful for people to understand. Did that particular session work?

But in the grand scheme of things, if we’re trying to change behaviour and we’re trying to impact business performance or individuals ability to perform business, at its most successful rate, Then the people loving the lunch or enjoying the facilitation sure isn’t going to change that that’s why it’s level one

Phil:
Yeah,

Tom:
It’s still on a level.

I mean, it’s not zero. No, no, of course, but so I agree with you Accepting that it is level one. Great. Yeah, and it’s a good sense for us as professionals to go. It’s more what do we tweak? It’s more of the

Phil:
facilitator and just the session design than anything else. But, yeah, I completely agree. Bringing, bringing this topic back around to something that I know our audience cares about, which is inclusion.

so the whole DEIB conversation. what do you think about that when you’re thinking about learning and development? What’s your experience there? What angles do you take when you’re thinking about creating more inclusive experiences?

Tom:
Yeah, yeah. And we all need to be aware of how we are appealing to everybody.

it’s such an important area from my perspective. I’m a big believer in individual, individualised learning experiences. I’m avoiding the word pathways because that’s got connotations of certain things. So what I mean by that is that people are able to choose self select. And to take responsibility for their own learning.

It’s like the coaching methodology. It’s the same, same philosophy. You know, it’s, it’s that people are empowered to, to, to make those actions. And the way you do that is by appealing to them and engaging them. You don’t disengage people or development and expect them to move forward somehow. So some of the things that I would advocate, and let’s start off with the really practical things.

So things like the use of language, I was trying to learn in a second language. That’s hard yards. I mean, that’s really difficult. Trying to learn it in your mother tongue is difficult enough. Trying to get people to learn a second language is really hard. So I make a conscious point of always translating the things that we do.

And there’s a cost associated with that, but it’s really important that people are able to read and understand and listen in, in a, in a, in a language that they’re really comfortable with. I feel like a no brainer, but I do know organisations that kind of missed that. So that’s really important. And then culturally being culturally sensitive, which means so many different things in so many different places.

But if I give you an example where obviously we’re here in Oz, And a lot of companies deal across the region. So you’ve got a number of countries in Southeast Asia, that, that companies operate in and Australian companies operate in. How are you appealing as an organisation to them? How, if you’re running development programs, how are you changing it for them?

And there are, I’d say there’re countries where they still want that traditional face to face training element. and there’s nothing, nothing wrong with that. But that’s what they used to. That’s what they’re trained in. So it’s training in training. Is that an oxymoron? Is that a worm eating a worm? I don’t know.

But, they are trained in training. So almost like they’re not going to understand. There’s gonna be more questions asked if you try and run them soon. It’s a sort of hybrid sprint model as opposed to giving them a face to face training in plenary. So, you’ve got to be really mindful of that. And it sounds really obvious, but it’s getting into those weeds and that detail that really makes a difference.

Also, again, really obvious, but thinking about local trainers, thinking about how you bring it to life locally in the country, how do you utilise people? Now I’m only talking at the moment about cross country. Cross communities. We could just talk about doing it in Australia and having diverse workforces.

How do we cultivate diverse workforces? And we do that with little touch points everywhere. You do that by intentionally making slight little changes so that is inclusive. And to use a really crap phrase, check yourself before you wreck yourself. But, you know, making sure that your, uh, your bias, your unconscious bias is kept in check.

And that’s hard to do. If you’re standalone, you need other

Phil:
people around you. Yeah, Absolutely. I think it’s the number one thing we can do because we’ve all got our, you know, we’ve all got our blind spots. We all come at things from a certain perspective, and it often, and it’s with intention. We can all sit and think about, okay, for certain individuals and certain groups, how might this work or not work?

And we can do that. That’s a really good point. But we’re still probably gonna

Tom:
miss something. Yeah, because I could go, Hey, Thailand, we’re gonna run this training. It’s gonna be face to face. You know, you love face to face training. Are they actually going to tell me what they think about something? Or are they just gonna take what I’m pushing at them?

Or do I take a different approach and empower them locally? To work out what they need, give them the tools to go, right. Okay. So we need to understand what the problem is and then we need to address it. And, and this is the spend we’ve got, this is how we might do it. And that’s a wholly different approach to that top down hierarchical.

Let me tell you.

Phil:
Yeah. Yeah. And just the asking like the look, what do you need to make this work for you? And just simple things, accessible documents. Can you provide the materials ahead of time for certain individuals? because it helps with their learning. It helps with their processing. The suite of things we consider is pretty broad, but the magic question is, what do you need, to all the participants, and then doing something with that information. Because it might, you know, you might not need to do a lot, or it might be significant.

Tom:
The thing that unifies everyone, and I mean everyone, Is that we’re all humans unless you’re training dogs or cats, which I think you’re doing a different job to what I was going to say that

Phil:
might be, it might be slightly different.

Tom:
Yeah, but, everyone’s a human. And so the principles of human centred design are a really great starting point. Yeah. And, and, and I’m a huge advocate of that because what, what we, we go back to the sheep dip exercise. It’s that broad brush. Everyone gets the same. We’re all lumped in the same. Whereas a human centred design is actually taking into account how people will want to use it.

That, that consumer experience, how do people want to consume it? When do they need to consume it? Yeah. and, or do they need to consume it? Do they need to, just need to have a look at it? Yeah. That, for me, the principles of human centred design are really the starting point, I think.

Phil:
Yeah, amazing. I’m mindful of time, so I’ll sort of start to steer us towards the end of this conversation.

Yeah, exactly. anything else that you want to leave the audience with? We’ll get into some, uh, we’ll get into some getting to know you questions in a second, but anything that we didn’t touch on that you were hoping to share?

Tom:
No, I think One thing, innovation. We haven’t really talked about innovation in L&D.

And it’s not that I need to say anything about innovation other than just innovation. And I don’t just mean AI. I know we’ve only mentioned it once, so we probably should spend half an hour talking about it. Yeah, let’s go. Let’s not say we did. But, innovation is really important. and, and. Without innovating, you’re not, not innovating for the sake of innovation sake, but innovating to make sure that you are on the front foot of what’s going on, that you are thinking broadly, that you’re talking to leaders for good about what’s going on.

Maybe you’re talking to the Sprouter network. Maybe you’re talking to other people that you know, other professionals. It’s so important to keep, and obviously there’s millions of other sources of information you can access, but it’s so important to keep us moving forward and to keep thinking and challenging.

Got to keep challenging. Why are we doing this? Why are we, if we didn’t challenge, we would all be doing face to face training endlessly and seeing very little change. And I feel it sounds like I’m beating up on, uh, slight resilience training all over again. I’m not. The one thing that I fundamentally believe is face-to- face training in general is one of the tools that we’ve got in our toolkit, right?

Let’s say it’s a screwdriver. Yeah, but we just try and hammer it with that screwdriver. We try and, uh, try and do every possible task with that screw job. It’s ridiculous. Sure. It’s great for doing what it does. But it’s not great for everything. No. So have an innovative approach. Look at what’s out there. and, like I said, take a human sense design.

Phil:
And I think it’s part of that is keeping the fire burning. I think as, because I think most L&D professionals come at this challenge and come at this, this, this. this topic with a passion for learning and development. Absolutely. You know, sort of my experience, and I’m sure yours as well was falling in love with developing people and developing ourselves.

So we’re naturally interested in what’s next and what’s new and how can we do things differently? But you can also see the organisational pressure when, again, you’re taking orders, when you’re being told how we do things around here, and all of your new fangled ideas keep getting pushed back that you could fall into a pattern of, okay, fine, I’ll just run the workshops.

Yeah, I think it’s incumbent on us then to keep pushing the baby steps. How can I sneak some vegetables in with the sauce in terms of doing things differently?

Tom:
Hide the peas! It is, and that’s where, and it’s funny, we’re coming back to resilience now. But it is where you need the resilience. That’s right.

But you do need resilience. And I would dare say that you need a really strong network. So, you know, if you’re listening to this, who’s in your team, right? Who’s supporting you? Yeah. What, what people do you have in, you know, In your professional network who you can go to other companies, agencies, whatever.

Who can you go to? Can you pick up, do people still pick up the phone? I dunno. Who can you email , go for a coffee with who?

Phil:
Can, who can you tweet at? Yeah. I don’t even tweet anymore.

Tom:
Yeah, no, they don’t. But, but who can you contact, to sound check and go, Hey, look, this is what I’m struggling with.

Yeah. Where am I at? And that’s where coaching plays a great role. We have literally done full circle back to resilience and coaching.

Phil:
I love it. I love it. I think that’s a great place to start rounding it out. Couple of getting to know you questions if that’s all right. What outside of, outside of thinking about learning and or development, what, what do you do for fun?

Tom:
Travel, love travel. I know it’s a bit of, it’s a bit naughty because you’ve got to be careful with your carbon footprint, obviously, but there’s plenty of great travel in Oz. It’s a massive place. It’s quite big. And there’s so much to see and so much to do.

So for me, travel is really important. Obviously, relationships are super important for me. and I just wish I read more. Yeah, I’m an aspirational reader. Never really get into it, but aspirationally, I’d love to read more.

Phil:
Two kids at home, make it, make it a real challenge to sit down with books at the moment.

I’d like audio books, audio books, or if it wasn’t for audio books, I don’t think I’d have read anything in the last 12 months.

Tom:
You know, with the whole, the whole, hybrid working piece, which again, we’re not going to get onto, but the whole hybrid, the thing that I really love is, is a commute still, you know, good, if you get a good hour, maybe somewhere between 45 minutes an hour, it’s really good for a podcast or to listen to something.

Fantastic. Without that. It’s a struggle.

Phil:
Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. In terms of organisations that you think are having a positive impact or that you admire for whatever reason, actually, like we can, we can broaden that out. But what are some organisations that you think are doing good work out there?

Tom:
So look, this is gonna really divide the team. And I think you know what I’m going to say. But, I previously worked at Nestle, which doesn’t always have the strongest brand out there. and has been known for stuff that is less good. I’m a big fan of the company because they really invested. They have a real focus on next generation talent and what I saw when I was there was they were a force for good in so much as they were thinking about their footprint in the world.

Given this is a massive, largest food manufacturer in the world, it is a big organisation. So with that comes great responsibility. And I felt working that they really took that seriously. That, along with the way in which they respected people and really helped develop people, for me, made them a standout business, which I know is controversial.

Phil:
Yeah, yeah.

Tom:
Secondly, I would probably pick anyone who’s a cooperative. I just think the whole idea of a cooperative business is, why don’t we have more co-ops, Phil?

Phil:
Yeah, it’s true.

Tom:
Well, I mean, just, it’s such a better business model. Yeah. I know there’s downsides.

Phil:
Sure.

Tom:
But, but it seems a lot better than the shareholder model.

Phil:
A lot of challenges with the shareholder model. And yeah, I agree. I’d agree on the co op front.

Tom:
Just the way in which they reward individuals who are part of it. And I’m conscious of someone like a John Lewis in the UK, John Lewis partnership, the co-operative, which I mean, across Europe. across parts of the world, there are cooperatives that are supermarkets and retailers.

I just think that’s a great model of shared value.

Phil:
Yeah, love it. Yeah. And the interesting point about Nestle as well. And obviously, you know, some high profile, high profile stuff there that went on. But We don’t know the full story about organisations and the impact that they have, especially that big scale.

So it’s always interesting to hear when people share those examples of actually, you know what? Some really good stuff happened here. that’s that’s that’s nice to hear. halo and horns effect going back to cognitive biases. It’s easy to it’s easy to see an organisation and there to be one or two Scandals and not excusing those things at all, but then to paint the entire operation forever with, you know, with, Uber is a good example, like some really, you know, questionable stuff there from the leadership in the early days, but they’ve moved on.

They’ve changed, you know, and it’s a different business now than it was. So

Tom:
It goes back to what we said earlier about, you know, being a force for good, right? As I said earlier, I think it’s true. Most people want to work for a business that’s doing good in the world. There’s not many people who want to work for like some sort of mega bond villain or gonna, you know, the ones with a big Scorpio.

Yeah, they got, they got the big blow felt. They got big tanks and you were in those jumpsuits and you got a machine gun. Not many people want to work for those organisations. If you really believe that the organisation you’re working for is, I don’t know, Actively killing people or, or, you know, supporting something really bad, the chances are you’re probably gonna leave or you’re looking for something better unless you’re really stuck there.

We are motivated to be part of that force for good. I believe anyway,

Phil:
I agree. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. Just sort of do amazing mental images of , like working it in a supervillain, like being a henchman for henchman number three. Henchman number three for a on the death star. Yeah.

Tom:
Stormtrooper? Who wants to be a stormtrooper? .

Phil:
Our office is called the Death Star. Might want to question that. Oh, I love it.

Books, movies, TV shows, anything, uh, work related or otherwise that stands out as something, as a recommendation?

Tom:
I think, look, TV shows, any comedy, pretty much TV shows.

I like the old stuff, so it’s probably not appropriate anymore, but, but I always loved, both, Father Ted in the old days, so dated now, or, or the IT crowds, just, I mean, if you’ve never watched it, just go and watch it. It’s phenomenal. British comedy of that generation.

Phil:
I think you and I, yeah, share that. Share that. There’s some gold there.

And from a professional point of view, I think I’ve given you the recommendation before. I should get a kickback from Nick Shackleton Jones. Yeah, yeah, you should. there is a book by a guy called Nick Shackleton Jones. It’s called How People Learn, and it is the number one book that anyone should read who’s interested in development.

Phil:
Agree.

Tom:
It’s just great. It’s all about the emotional connection that people make. And that’s how they learned. Herman Ebbinghaus and his lovely forgetting curve. Mm hmm. All of that is in there and it’s so easy to read. Anyone who has given them a book just loves it and it really does breed a change in behaviour.

So that would be my number one. The other shout out is Dr. Jen Fran who’s here in Australia. and she does a lot around, uh, change and transformation and she’s got a couple of books, which, which I’d recommend, or we can put in the notes, but yeah, really good.

Phil:
How people learn as well. That was the one number one thing that struck me because I took your recommendation to grab that book. But just how fun and well written it is easy to read, because it comes across when you first look at it as like, okay, this is going to be some textbook time. And it’s not that. So I recommend it.

Yeah, we’ll definitely put that in the show notes.

Last question. Worst leadership advice you’ve ever been given.

Tom:
Oh, so good. So when I left university a long, long time ago, I got into a graduate scheme, which wasn’t really a graduate scheme. And it was, I’ll name and shame.

Phil:
Supervillain training.

Tom:
Hedgman number five. So it was with an organisation in the UK called Enterprise Rent A Car. American organisation. Yeah. Rent cars. Nothing wrong with the business model. Organisation is great. But they basically took graduates and you buy a cheap suit and wash, wash cars and sell insurance and whatever. And I remember my, my leader at the time, who I won’t name, turned to me and said, Tom, do as I say, not as I do. And I’ll never forget that guy because he literally lived that philosophy.

He would sit there with his feet up, get you to do all of the jobs, never tell you why, never explain it. But because he was your boss, that was the perk.

It was, it was just old school. I mean, you could kind of look at it and go, that’s great in a kind of awful way. There’s something, there’s something, something like a bit of a parody in that, which is entertaining.

But he was serious. This was his style of leadership. You can’t even call it leadership.

Phil:
Pure positional power.

Tom:
I think it’s, I think it’s called classical feedback in, is what it’s traditionally called, but it’s, it’s command and conquer. Sure. Yeah. I don’t sully myself with the work, you do it. I tell you what to do.

I never lead by example because that’s not my job.

Phil:
Amazing. Amazing.

Tom:
Does that still exist? I don’t know. I’m sure somewhere.

Phil:
Leave a comment. If your boss or you.

Tom:
Don’t name names.

Phil:
Yeah. Yeah. No, please. amazing.

Tom, thank you so much. so If you’ve got thoughts or feelings, acknowledging our, we’re two middle aged white men from the UK as well.

So we have our particular lens on the world and it is definitely not the only lens. So if you as the audience have thoughts, feelings, feedback, uh, questions, get in touch with us. There’ll be links to obviously us at Leaders for Good and where we can find, where we can find Tom, in the show notes.

So please do reach out and, uh, start a conversation. If you’ve got value from the episode, share it with a friend. That’s probably the number one thing you can do to help us grow. Help us interview more interesting people like Tom. You know, five stars on iTunes. All the rest of it is often obviously welcome.

And if you want to reach out for a conversation about leadership, about DEI, Or anything in the above, [email protected].

Thank you so much for watching and all listening. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Inclusion at Work Podcast.

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