Make sure you are exercising those empathy muscles. They’ll help you understand where everyone is trying to go, and they’ll help you care enough to want to help them get there. That’s learning and development in a nutshell to me.
Do we approach training from a “just in case” mindset, where we teach employees everything they might need to know before we get them started doing any productive work, or should we be approaching it from a “just in time” mindset, where they continuously learn new skills as they are needed?
Good employees want to learn new things and utilize technology to be more efficient, and that’s what we want from our employees. AI is all over the media right now. It’s the hot topic if every tech conference and a ton of legal tech webinars. According to this survey, they appear to be out there doing it on their own with little direction from their employer. That might become a problem, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. User have been finding creative ways to find the tools they need to get work done instead of waiting for the IT team and training to tell them they can. AI is just one more to add to that list, and one more that the talent development folks are going to have to play catch up on, quickly.
If you work somewhere that this is an issue, it might not be you. It could very well be the workplace. A workplace that can’t keep right on rolling when one of the team is on PTO is a workplace that hasn’t planned staffed or done talent development well. A workplace that is truly looking out for the well-being of its employees would not leave anyone in a situation where taking a break is more stressful than not taking one.
I’m Not a Doctor – How to Help My Team’s Mental Health– I love the idea of modeling the behavior and making it “explicitly acceptable to take breaks.” Updating IT and Custodian Interviews for Today’s Data Sources Organizational Developers: Becoming Trauma Informed Will Elevate How You Operate The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox…
She uses these stories as a jumping-off point to talk about goals and failure. When the goal is to finish the marathon, anything other than that is a failure. Despite the change in circumstances, the risk of doing more damage to themselves, and the fact that no one would find fault in them for stopping, they went on with this myopic focus on hitting their goal.
It got me thinking about OKRs. You know, those quarterly, semi-annual, or annual goals we set for employees during performance reviews, and then measure them solely on whether they hit those goals or not. As if the world doesn’t change in the middle of the time period and forces us to react in a way that might not be part of our stated goals.
It also got me thinking about company-wide goals like market share, revenue, etc.