In this video, Ricky shares five areas guaranteed to set you up for success. They provide a set of checks and balances that will inform you if you are on course or off course and enable you to course correct as you go.
You can also download our business challenge toolkit, which provides a host of templates, how-to videos, and a proven formula for success.
Download it here: Business Challenge eKit.
In this webinar, Ricky Muddimer and Graham Field discussed how trust is the invisible engine that drives high-performing teams. Without it, communication breaks down, innovation stalls, and performance falters. But with it? Teams collaborate seamlessly, make faster decisions, and achieve extraordinary results.
As a leader, how do you build and sustain trust in your team—especially in today’s fast-paced and often disconnected workplace? Watch ‘Trust: The Secret to High-Performing Teams,’ our final webinar of 2024, and discover why trust is the most critical factor in unlocking your team’s full potential.
This isn’t just another webinar—it’s your opportunity to gain actionable insights to set you and your team up for success.
Low trust doesn’t just create tension—it impacts results. In this highly practical session, we’ll explore:
If you’re ready to tackle the barriers holding your team back and learn proven techniques to unlock their potential, this webinar is for you.
As a leader of large teams and departments, you will know that leadership isn’t just about hitting targets and managing people. It’s about unlocking the potential within your teams and, just as importantly, within yourself. In an environment where the only constant is change, how you lead makes all the difference between just surviving and truly thriving. That’s why I’m excited to share our Leadership Blueprint—a powerful tool designed to help leaders like you break through the barriers that often hold you back and drive real, meaningful change.
In my experience working with organisations across various sectors, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is for leaders to get caught up in day-to-day operations, often at the expense of strategic growth and personal development. The pressures of managing large teams and hitting KPIs can sometimes overshadow the importance of continuous leadership evolution. But the truth is, if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating—and so are your teams.
Our Leadership Blueprint addresses this head-on. It’s not just another leadership guide. It’s a strategic tool designed to help leaders navigate the complexities of modern business while fostering an environment where individuals and teams can excel.
The Leadership Blueprint is for leaders like you— who oversee large teams and departments tasked with managing, inspiring, and driving transformation. Here’s what you can expect:
Self-Assessment Tools: Understand your current leadership strengths and areas for development with actionable insights focused on areas where you can grow.
Tailored Action Plans: Develop a personalised roadmap that aligns with your leadership aspirations and your organisation’s goals.
Insightful Case Studies: Learn from peers who have successfully implemented these strategies in real-world scenarios.
Continued Support: Access resources that keep you on track, ensuring your leadership journey is ongoing and adaptive to new challenges.
The Path Forward
Leadership is about more than maintaining the status quo, especially at the helm of large teams and departments. It’s about driving significant, positive change. Our Leadership Blueprint will support you, providing the tools and insights necessary to elevate your leadership game and, by extension, the performance of your entire team.
I encourage you to download the Leadership Blueprint today and discover how to unlock your leadership’s full potential.
This leadership blueprint is a powerful tool designed to help experienced leaders, those new to the role, and those aspiring to join the leadership ranks. It will help you break through the barriers that often hold you back and drive real, meaningful change. As a leader, you will know that leadership isn’t just about hitting targets and managing people. It’s about unlocking the potential within your teams and, just as importantly, within yourself. In an environment where the only constant is change, how you lead makes all the difference between just surviving and truly thriving.
Organisations often view training programs as quick fixes for performance issues, expecting immediate returns on investment. However, this perspective overlooks the complexities of learning and development. Training alone cannot address multifaceted organisational challenges without alignment with the organisation’s culture, systems, and leadership practices.
This article explores the limitations of relying solely on training as a solution and emphasises the need for a comprehensive approach that includes leadership involvement, ongoing support, and a culture that fosters continuous learning.
When we engage with learning and development teams in organisations, the most common question is, “How will you measure the impact of the intervention? To which we reply, “How do you measure it now?”
Learning & Development Teams are typically deferential to the major operational business units; they serve the company by understanding and closing the capability gap. The problem is that businesses like to measure impact, but measuring learning impact is far from easy.
Measuring ROI is understandable; of course, everyone wants to see their investment pay off, but the issue is when only Learning and Development are accountable, you leave the outcome to chance. Why? Because the puzzle is more complex.
When managers and leaders position training as the panacea for organisational challenges yet point fingers at these programs when performance falls short, they overlook a critical piece of the puzzle: their role in the learning transfer process.
This contradiction underscores a broader corporate culture issue, revealing misplaced expectations and a misunderstanding of how learning effectively translates into improved job performance.
Firstly, there’s an overarching tendency to overestimate what training can achieve in isolation. This optimism, while initially seeming beneficial, sets the stage for disappointment.
No matter how comprehensive, training can only singularly address multifaceted organisational issues by reinforcing post-training support. This support includes coaching and mentorship, opportunities for practical application, and a culture that encourages reflection and continuous learning.
I have been on many courses in my corporate life, and rarely, if ever, have I been sat down with before or after any intervention to ensure that the thousands invested in me will pay off.
When my manager didn’t take the time or, at its worst, even talk about the intervention, the message I got was that it wasn’t important and any post-learning activity was down to me. The manager effectively says it is unimportant or they don’t care. That is leaving the outcome to chance!
Moreover, the alignment—or lack thereof—between training programs and an organisation’s strategic goals can significantly impact their effectiveness.
Training initiatives not tailored to an organisation’s specific needs and culture are less likely to yield meaningful outcomes. Leaders play a crucial role in ensuring that training is not just a box-ticking exercise but is genuinely relevant and integrated into the organisational strategy.
The environment where employees apply their new skills also plays a crucial role. A supportive work climate and a clear understanding of the training’s relevance to their positions can significantly enhance the transfer of learning. Conversely, an environment that lacks these elements can stifle the application of new skills, no matter how excellent the training intervention.
Accountability and measurement are also often needed in the equation. With clear mechanisms to track the application of learning and its impact on performance, it’s easier to blame the training when expectations are unmet. This approach overlooks the necessity of a supportive infrastructure that facilitates the transfer of learning.
Lastly, the psychological aspect of cognitive dissonance, where leaders believe in the power of training but find it easier to blame it for failures, highlights a disconnect and, for me, deflection away from them. They absolve themselves and their crucial role in the learning transfer. It points to a need for a more nuanced understanding of how training, organisational culture, and leadership practices intersect to impact learning and performance.
The solution lies not in devaluing training but in recognising its place within a broader system of continuous learning and support. Leaders must shift their mindset from viewing training as a standalone solution to seeing it as part of a comprehensive strategy that includes their active involvement.
Leaders and learners need a shift in mindset; move away from viewing training as a one-off event, a tickbox. Everyone needs to see it as part of a continuous learning journey.
Learning is not or ever will be a silver bullet; it cannot be effective without alignment with the organisation’s culture, systems, and leadership practices.
Leaders and learners need to establish clear objectives for their training, understand how training aligns with organisational goals, provide ongoing support for learners, and implement mechanisms to measure and reinforce the application of new skills in the workplace.
Line managers should spend time with their people ahead of any development intervention to articulate:
Arguably, post-intervention clarity and support are most vital. Line managers should ask their people to reflect with purpose; this means reviewing to identify areas that might still need attention and having a call to action for how they will apply their learning. After all, if my boss is interested, this must be important!
I can hear managers and leaders raising their eyebrows as they read, shouting, “Does this guy not realise how much we have to do?” They will argue they don’t have the time to spend this time with their people. What they fail to realise is that they are already spending that time addressing the shortcomings and issues that arise from a lack of confidence or competence due to poor follow-through, practice, reflection and application.
Training ROI only comes if the employee, managers and learning teams combine with a unified approach.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 25th March 2024
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focus’ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.
Introduction
Social learning theory (SLT) shines a light on how we start to learn as children and continue to learn into adulthood; we mimic and model the behaviour of others. Also, we are adept at modifying our behaviour for varying situations and within the different social groups we spend time within.
If we do learn from others and our environment; then who are your people learning from? What are they actually learning? What or who is influencing their behaviour?
What interests me is how organisations can leverage social learning for better organisational outcomes in their performance and culture.
In 2017 Thinking Focus was challenged by a global automotive manufacturer to help them to develop soft skills in their frontline manager population. They had several requirements: the solution needed to be flexible and run in short sessions to suit their operation; have minimal preparation time and use in-house skills; and it needed to be interactive, fun and without the formality of academic and theoretical references.
Our research into a possible solution led us to consider many options and it became clear that the modelling of behaviour and the effect that peers had on each other’s approach to work was a significant factor. This led to extensive market research and the creation of a solution that we called ‘What Would you Do?’ (WWYD).
WWYD has been carefully engineered with a blend of mechanisms that inspire behavioural change. It incorporates gamification to engage and motivate participants to get involved and stay engaged. It creates a psychologically safe space where participants can be vulnerable and feel comfortable openly sharing their experiences; both the good and not so good. A facilitator manages the discussion, to probe and ask questions (coach) and to help the group understand the thought processes behind the actions. It uses everyday situations (scenarios) to enable the safe exploration of implications and consequences, all in a group forum. Sessions conclude with reflection and public commitment to underpin micro-changes in behaviours.
WWYD is a learning solution that adopts the same fundamental attributes of social learning that we have all been naturally doing all our lives.
What is social learning theory?
Social learning is doing what we see, modelling our behaviours on the behaviour of others and our environment. We are like chameleons; able to adapt our behaviours in different social contexts. We learn this through observing the behaviours of others whether that be home or work, friendship, sport or social groups.
Our ability to develop and adopt new social behaviours, attitudes and emotional reactions comes from imitating the behaviours of our parents or peers. Social learning is based on the behaviour modelling theory, where people learn new things by observing others.
The psychologist Albert Bandura is Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Bandura considers humans to be active information processors, able to think about the relationship between their behaviour and its consequences. Humans possess the ability to choose, to intervene without merely imitating the behaviour of others.
In the 1960s Bandura undertook a series of experiments to understand the effects of observational learning on children’s behaviour. His findings underpin his 1977 theory, where children learn social behaviour through the observation of others. Children draw their behaviours from a variety of sources: parents and family members, friends and teachers, even fictional characters. These behaviours are interchangeable between boys and girls; they are not limited by gender.
When children observe others, they encode (the way we store information) the behaviour. They may then reproduce that behaviour later. However, the likelihood of them later imitating the behaviour is influenced by several factors.
Children are influenced by people who they consider to be like themselves; this is a factor in them being more likely to imitate behaviour modelled by others of the same gender.
Children are also influenced by the reaction of the people around them. When they reproduce a specific behaviour, how they are rewarded or punished will affect their likelihood of repeating the behaviour. Reinforcement is an important factor in influencing behaviour; this can be positive or negative. Reinforcement can be internal; a feeling of warmth when you do something that makes you happy. Or externally, from the recognition of others. Significantly though, it usually leads to a change in a person’s behaviour.
Children also consider how others are treated before deciding to model their behaviour. If they see the person positively rewarded, they are more likely to model that behaviour. The opposite is also true; if they see an adverse reaction towards a person’s behaviour, they are unlikely to repeat it. A person learns by observing what happens to others (known as vicarious reinforcement).
Children are more likely to identify with a role model when they possess a quality they aspire to have. Identification is different from imitation; imitation usually involves copying a single behaviour. Identification, however, consists of the adoption of a number of behaviours, such as values, beliefs and attitudes of the person with whom they identify.
How does SLT work?
SLT is considered by many as the bridge between traditional learning theory (behaviourism) and the cognitive approach. SLT focuses on how mental (cognitive) factors are involved in learning.
While Bandura agreed that classical conditioning (think Pavlov and his dogs) and operant conditioning (learning through reward and punishment) impact learning greatly, he also contributed two other ideas; mediating processes occur between stimuli and responses, and behaviour influenced by the environment through the process of observation.
Mediating processes are the cognitive intervention, where observed behaviour is not routinely followed but where cognitive reasoning takes place. In other words, our imitation of behaviour is not automatic. This mental evaluation takes place between the observed behaviour (the stimulus) and the decision to copy (the response) or not.
Bandura proposed four mediational process:
WWYD was designed to meet all four mediational processes
Attention is captured in several ways:
• The format is group discussion – peers share experiences related to the debate.
• Scenarios are contextualised to the participant’s role- they are practical and not theoretical, presenting situations people can relate to.
• There is progress and jeopardy, which increases involvement. Tuning out, even briefly, could have consequences with a missed opportunity to score points or lose out entirely on the meaning of the discussion.
• Scenarios are set up to encourage debate; some have the added pressure of time constraints. An ‘against-the-clock’ feature causes cognitive conflict, self-doubt and the possible consequence of being frozen out of the round.
• The scoring range includes minus points – creating further jeopardy which increases concentration and engagement.
Strategies for retention:
• The socialising of experiences means that participants can use another’s experience to help prepare themselves for the model behaviour. They can learn from what their colleagues did well and where they struggled. Participants can also ask questions to develop their understanding further.
• The everyday situations are explored through debate. Participants test and probe ‘what if’ situations, their assumptions and biases and the implications of a course of action; as well as exploring what unintended consequences there might be.
• Each scenario offers up four options which are deliberately designed to be ‘imperfect’. This ambiguity causes cognitive conflict with the participant having to justify their choice.
Building capability for reproduction:
• Each scenario debated is concluded with a reflection step. Reflection is where the participants connect to the outcomes of the discussion. There is a debrief where participants determine what the desired behaviour should be. They are coached as a group by the facilitator, to consider the model behaviour for their organisation. The group decide what is and isn’t acceptable through reasoned argument.
Motivation: inspiration to learn and apply new behaviours
• The inclusion of gamification techniques both engages players to actively participate and it motivates them to stay the course. While scoring points is a factor, their main purpose is to keep participants focused and attentive. ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out) and the friendly competition makes for a high energy session.
• At the end of each WWYD session, participants are invited to personally reflect on what they have learnt, sharing any realisations they may have had.
• Each participant is invited to publicly commit to one change in their behaviour in front of their peers. This public commitment is a psychological connection, a cognitive reinforcement which increases the likelihood of follow-through.
Seven reasons why you should be more interested in SLT.
There are benefits for your people too.
What does it look like in practical terms?
Understanding the principles behind social learning is one thing; bringing it to life is entirely another. How leaders behave is crucial; your people are looking to you.
How you behave when things go wrong will set the tone. Because people learn through observation, employees will look at how you behave in every situation, and they will make a judgement. They are considering if your behaviour is what they want to copy, measuring it against their own values. How your behaviour makes them, or others, feel will impact their decision too. Your people will evaluate how others react and decide whether to model your behaviour or not. The challenge is that you, as a leader, are not in control of their thought process, or how they choose to interpret what they see. This means authenticity is vital, and the need to be a role-model is more important than perhaps any of us thought.
So, what could you do?
Build social learning into your meetings; allow for an opportunity to review your work with three questions:
• What have we learned?
• What should we be doing more of and why?
• What is stopping us from being the best we can be?
Consider how you make your sessions feel safe. Allow people to speak their minds and express their opinions – it clears the way to the problem-solving. It doesn’t matter whether you choose to run sessions face-to-face or online. Create a forum for the group to be open and to share. Invite people to commit to an action – a new, better way of doing something.
Coaching is a proven tool for developing people one-to-one. What if you could group coach? Imagine a one-to-many facilitated discussion with purpose. You could solve common problems, build soft skills through discussion of contextual situations and share experiences to develop a shared vision of what ‘good’ looks like.
Build social learning into your training interventions
Reinforcement is an essential factor for influencing behaviour. Consider what are you reinforcing, knowingly and unknowingly. Are you proactive in celebrating when people model the desired behaviours? No reaction at all can leave people unsure if they are doing the right thing. Positive feedback helps to reinforce behaviours. Similarly, when behaviours are below the expected standard, challenge and coach people to understand why the standard exists and the implications of falling below.
And I did say, coach, not tell! Coaching takes time; time you may feel you don’t have – but it will have longer-lasting effects. ‘Tell’ is just a reprimand, and we all know this has limited impact and doesn’t last.
Some of your people will have aspirations to grow and develop. Think carefully about their mentor or internal role-models. We know that people are more likely to model the behaviour of others when they aspire to gain the knowledge, skill or attributes of the other person. Who do you want them to model?
The final way to build social learning into your development portfolio is through simulation and gamification. The trend towards the use of gamification has been growing. When you combine relevance, context and simulation, it really does bring social learning theory to life. The primary aim of any intervention is to create behaviour change, making things fun and exciting alone won’t cut it. Learners need to feel a sense of reward for the right behaviours or consequences for inappropriate ones. Gamification can add progress and jeopardy aligned to the desired outcomes. Decisions can be tested and explored in a safe space; participants can project the effects of certain behaviours and see how the implications would play out.
Conclusion
Social learning is how we naturally develop. As small children we learn through observation to mimic the values, beliefs and behaviours of others. Social norms also impact on which models we choose and whether to adopt new behaviours or not. This poses several questions for business leaders and learning professionals:
• Who are your people modelling their behaviours on?
• What values, beliefs and attitudes are they adopting?
• Who has the most influence on your culture?
• Are your people adopting your desired values, attitudes and behaviours?
• How are you, and your leaders, modelling the way?
• How do you control the narrative and the observation process?
If you are not already, you should be influencing the social learning experience. How you approach people who fall below your expected standards will have a significant impact on whether they choose to model the desired behaviour, or not. What consequences do they observe others face when they fail to live up to the values? What reward mechanisms exist when they do model the way?
Your people expect consistency; this is how they measure your commitment to your behavioural standards. Your people managers need to model the way; they need to hold others accountable and celebrate those who live up to the expected behaviours, values and attitudes. You cannot condone or accept poor behaviours just because of their perceived business performance. When you do this, you are telling your people that behaviours don’t matter, they are now a weapon to use to engineer the outcomes you really want.
Challenge your people to own the issues but consider how you go about it. You must be prepared to equip and empower them properly.
For clarity, equipping means that people are given the tools to think and plan effectively, the targeted development they need, the resources they need to execute and access to decision makers to ensure that effort is not duplicated and plans and actions are aligned.
True empowerment means giving people the autonomy and permission to go fix things. Experience suggests that whenever leaders ‘pretend’ to empower, they don’t fully let go and, when they inevitably intervene, impose or cast judgement, it almost always ends in tears.
Your people are already modelling the behaviours of others. They are constantly making choices about which behaviours to follow. Remember that their motivation might not be primarily concerned with what is right for the organisation. Their choices might be for social cohesion and the benefit of the social group. They may not want to stray away from existing group norms for fear of being outcast, driven by the fear of not belonging.
Are you prepared to leave the values, behaviours and attitudes you want to see in your organisation to chance?
As organisations are starting to get people back into the workplace, or at least having these kind of conversations on the agenda, we have been keen to hear what some of our clients have been saying about this. At a recent round table discussion online, it’s clear that people are feeling a wide range of emotions about returning to their place of work. It is also clear that there are things that leaders can do to help ease the transition, and the concerns.
It is probably worth starting with a cautionary note about the language we use when talking about this topic. As our client ‘S’ pointed out when the question of ‘going back to work’ was raised “It’s something that we’ve been pulled up on because people get slightly agitated with it. When we say people are ‘going back to work’, people have been working and believe me, people get really, really annoyed with you when you say that they’ve got to go back to work.” So, a simple reminder when talking about this is to refer to ‘back to the office’ – this might help you start off on the right footing!
We recognise that what is about to happen for many people is a second, significant change in the way they work. In March, and almost overnight, there was a move for people to work from home, which presented a great number of challenges. What we’re seeing now is a reversal of that change to start to bring people back in to their ‘old’ working environment, although this time on a staggered basis for many organisations. As we start to ask people to break their ‘new routines’ and start to think about re-engaging with some older ways of working – creating ‘the new normal’ we keep hearing about – it’s worth noting that some people will be nervous about this, seeing this as ‘scary’, and in some instances even asking whether it is ‘dangerous’, but we’ll look more at this a little later!
So, what kind of things might be going through people’s minds as they consider the return to the workplace? What we’re hearing is that there will be wide range of thoughts, which probably comes as no great surprise. As leaders though, what approach should we take?
Many organisations have recognised that people will be curious about returning to the workplace: how different will it look, what will be the same and what will be different? The messaging to get everyone to switch to working from home back in March may have unintentionally created feelings that offices (as well as many other public spaces) are not safe. That feeling is going to linger for a while. People may be going back to an office that they have visited many times, but it is not really the same place anymore, with social distancing creating new rules and expectations on how we act within the space. This all creates a feeling of a familiar place being unfamiliar and people feeling unsure of how it will work or even if it is a safe space anymore. This is the challenge that, as leaders, we need to overcome.
And there are a number of ways our clients have already been dealing with this. ‘J’s organisation has been using technology to help them “We’ve consciously kept a communication line open to all of our teams to let them know exactly what’s going on every single step of the way. And we’ve done that by making videos to send to them – we’ve brought in some animation software so we can create some short snappy animations that talk through what’s happening, what’s changing. When it comes to moving back into the office, we’ve had a company do a virtual 4D scan of the entire building. This shows all the sanitizer stations and the one way signs, and they can walk around the office virtually through all of the areas and all the floors so they know what’s where and how it’s going to look when they come in. So they understand where their desk is, the way they have to go, where all their resources are. If you look at one of the kitchenettes, it will come up with a sign to say “only one person allowed in at a time”. So we’ve made them try and feel comfortable with the fact that we’ve done everything we possibly can, plus more. And that’s gone down really well in easing some of the anxiety that people have got.” 4D scans could be a great approach, but to counter this one client also mentioned that their approach was more basic, having stickers on desks that simply highlighted which ones could be sat at and which ones couldn’t – and this was proving to be equally useful.
Another common feature of returning to the workplace is staggering how to bring people back. Again ‘J’ commented “We’re going to be slowly bringing back teams, those are at the least risk will come back first. We’ll make sure they’re comfortable in the office and they’re up and running before we bring the next back and so on. We’ve already made that announcement to them, but also said that we’ve got no date in mind. This is what we’re doing to make it as comfortable for everybody, which seems to have gone down well.”
This may be working so well for companies that, right now, not everyone wants to come back to the workplace. As ‘H’ put it “We’ve probably got about 20% who can’t wait to get back, who were missing the social aspects. We probably then have another 20% who perhaps have health concerns or relatives who have health concerns and are very nervous about going back. And then probably a whole group in the middle where it’s quite a mixed bag.”
Similarly ‘S’ mentioned “We’ve done a ‘back to the office/ site’ guide, which explains everything we’ve done, about our one way system, about using the canteen and about having respect for others. We have a little bit at the beginning of the guide that says people are dealing with this differently, so consider having that mindfulness and appreciation for how people are. And when people are coming back, we’re getting their managers to give them an induction for coming back to the office so that they don’t just slip into their normal pace.”
So, it seems that having some type of re-onboarding process will be helpful in allowing people to process their emotions and feelings and start to think about getting back into some sort of routine.
As leaders, this is really important, as it bridges the rational elements of ‘let’s make arrangements, put a plan in place, communicate’ with the emotional elements of ‘feeling unsure, being insecure, feeling tentative and wanting re-assurance’.
This is why the ‘scary and/or dangerous’ concept was mentioned earlier.
Scary/Dangerous is based on two scales and allows us to use one of our favourite ‘explainer’ tools – the four-box grid!
We feel that our reactions to situations that we feel are dangerous are hardwired into us and are a protective measure – if we do something that is dangerous it could, ultimately, cost us everything. However, dangerous is rational calculation, one that we often get wrong, as there are so many cognitive biases that get in the way. On top of that you have the hardwired reaction, whether we see something as scary or not, which is an emotional response. Our emotional responses happen almost instantly, and rarely use the facts of the situation. When you start to consider these two side by side, we have four scenarios.
Let’s take something that we know is dangerous – for instance standing on a cliff edge, leaning over. We probably know that this is dangerous (admittedly with degrees of risk) but, sitting where you are right now reading this, does this feel scary to you? For most of us, it won’t. However, if we were there, at the cliff edge for most of us it definitely would be scary. Where things are dangerous and scary too, you would really have to ask yourself why would you do that? These things we place in the ‘Crazy Zone’!
Where something is dangerous, but we don’t perceive it as scary – and there may be some people reading this who are happy standing on the cliff edge – you still wouldn’t do this in a blasé way, would you, you’d still be careful. These things go in the ‘Caution Zone’. If you’re going to do them, take care!
Sat at home, reading this, being asked to think about being in a cliff edge is clearly not dangerous (you’re not really there) and for most isn’t scary, so you’re really comfortable with this analogy – hence these things go in your ‘Comfort Zone’.
The final box is where we know it isn’t dangerous, but we still have an emotional reaction telling us it is scary – here we are nervous but can be helped to move forward – this is the Change Zone, and our role as leaders in the current situation, and in helping people return to their place of work, is to help our people ‘come back’.
Linking this to COVID19 and how people may well be feeling is worth drawing out.
Why are things dangerous right now? We have a situation that has (as I write this) taken the lives of around 46,000 people in the UK, and over 667,000 worldwide. This clearly falls into the dangerous category. Yet, there are clear steps that we can take to reduce the risks and make things safer, even if we cannot get to zero risk. We do lots of things with some level of risk, from sports to driving; the difference is that we have normalised those risks and are not constantly reminded of them as we are with COVID19.
Why are people feeling scared right now? There’s the obvious link to the dangers presented by COVID19, but also most people have been secure in their own bubbles, most have stayed safe and kept themselves and their loved ones safe. The talk about leaving bubbles and returning to the workplace is a clear change from this. There are now a range of factors people can’t control – will work colleagues have exercised the same amount of care and followed the rules, or will they have been cavalier in their attitudes? What about getting to work, will they need to be on public transport with a number of strangers? The list could go on.
It is this feeling of scary that is holding people back, and the practical plans that make things safer may have very little impact on the emotional responses of a lot of people. Think about the 20-60-20 split mentioned by ‘H’, 20% don’t perceive this as scary, 20% think this is very scary, but 60% are not sure and are looking for leaders who can help them work this out. Our aim as leaders, therefore, is to help our people to see that we have done everything we can to remove as many of the dangers as possible, and it seems our clients, amongst many others, have some practical approaches to doing this. We also need to help people with their emotions, recognising that we all view ‘scary’ differently and will need different types of reassurance.
Social learning is about the way we learn, while the 70:20:10 model concerns where we get our learning from. Both are linked and relevant, we think, to the work that we do at Thinking Focus, so we thought we’d take a closer look at them.
The social learning theory first formulated by Albert Bandura in 1977 shows that we learn best by imitating the behaviour and actions of others. It’s all about people learning from each other; picking up new skills, ideas, opinions and experiences from those around them.
This applies equally to learning in the workplace. Think about it: where do you feel you have learnt most of what you know? During formal education? Or from your own experience and the insights of your colleagues?
Social learning in the workplace is about interacting with others through good communication, knowledge sharing, discussion, collaboration, and being transparent about what you’re doing and why. Colleagues can help each other, either explicitly or tacitly, to understand ideas, experiences, systems, methods and processes. Yet most of us come into work with the rules set that tells us to do exactly the opposite, work it out on your own, don’t share, don’t copy other people’s work. These are the learning rules that schools operate by.
Most L&D professionals are familiar with the 70:20:10 model proposed by Charles Jennings. In fact, it has become a standard part of discussion regarding learning and development processes in the workplace. The model evolved from a report in the 1980s which analysed a survey of 200 senior managers. It found that they reported that 70% of what they knew had been learnt on the job or through experience, 20% had come from social interaction with other people, and just 10% had been learnt through formal education.
Although there’s been some criticism of the 70:20:10 model, some of which we agree with, we nevertheless think it’s useful in showing the rough proportions of experience, social interaction and education needed for learning. It does broadly tell us is that, to meaningfully and effectively learn new things, your experience and the input and experience of people around you is the most important thing. Social learning does tend to fit into 90 per cent of this model.
It’s all a great starting point for reflecting on how individuals within your workforce learn and what the best ways therefore might be for their personal development. It can be used as the basis for a wider L&D strategy that can have far reaching effects on the culture and mindset of the organisation as a whole.
At Thinking Focus, we recognise that we essentially offer the 10 per cent ‘formalised learning’ part of the Jennings model, but we do so as the basis for encouraging people to behave in the 20 per cent of the Jennings model by interacting with people, and to share the 70 per cent, their experience and knowledge.
In our coaching sessions and training workshops, and through our learning resources such as the Strategy Wall and our management development board game What Would You Do?, we are encouraging behaviours that enhance social learning. We create environments where the group learn from other and teach each other, generating conversations and giving people the tools to go and do the 20 per cent in real life. We are highlighting the untapped knowledge and experience that people could access from their colleagues.
We encourage meaningful face-to-face discussion and debate. We offer formalised learning elements and use them to highlight, encourage and create social learning by developing skills and behaviours that cause peer-based learning and self-reflection.
Thinking Focus directors Ricky and Rob had a fantastic evening at the Learning Awards 2019, and were over the moon to pick up a Bronze award in the Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year category!
We are so proud to have been recognised alongside some of the very best L&D practitioners in the UK. Ed Monk, the CEO of the Learning Performance Institute, which runs the awards, said they’d received over 800 entries in total – so just to get to the shortlist means we were in the top 10 per cent!
Well done to all the finalists, and we would particularly like to congratulate VirtualSpeech, who won our category, and LearnBox, who scooped the Silver award.
Ricky said: “To have been nominated in such a competitive category is great recognition for what we have achieved in such a short space of time. We have a solid platform on which to build and grow our business in the future, so look out for new products and development soon.
“In less than three years, we have won 50 new clients, worked on assignments in 13 countries and across 28 sectors, and worked with well over 2,000 people. We’ve grown our team, produced a book and created a new L&D resource, the gamified learning product for managers called What Would You Do?, and a step-by-step process blueprint for developing team, department or organisational strategy – known as the ‘Strategy Wall’.”
The Learning Awards recognises and celebrates outstanding examples of high standards, best practice, innovation and excellence in the corporate L&D sphere. The glittering awards ceremony on February 7th took place at the prestigious Dorchester Hotel in London’s Park Lane and was attended by around 400 guests representing organisations from across the world.
Host for the evening, BBC star Claudia Winkleman, introduced the Start-Up category by saying: “This award is for organisations under three years old who have already made a significant impact on the sector. So you truly are amazing to be in this group.”
Ricky said: “Being shortlisted for this award has given us a great start to a year in which we’ll be developing our business further and rolling out What Would You Do? and the Strategy Wall. All of which ultimately leads to what, for us, is the biggest buzz of all: seeing the impact of our work and hearing our clients report fantastic results.”
He added: “Thank you to all those who have helped, inspired and supported us: We couldn’t have done it without you.”
Thinking Focus has been announced as a finalist in the Learning Awards 2019, a prestigious celebration of outstanding achievement in workplace learning and development.
The company, which was founded in 2016, was among hundreds of entries from companies across the world, and is vying for the title of Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year alongside five other organisations based both in the UK and abroad.
Ricky Muddimer, a director at Thinking Focus, said: “We’re delighted to be shortlisted in the Learning Awards and to be recognised for our achievements since setting up the company just over two years ago.
“The last couple of years has seen Thinking Focus win 49 new clients, work on assignments in 12 countries and across 21 sectors, and meet, work with and develop well over 2,000 interesting and inspiring people. We’ve also taken on our first employee, produced a book and created a gamified learning product called What Would You Do? which helps develop managers in a way that makes learning stick.
“But what gives us the biggest buzz of all is seeing how our work delivers impact, and hearing our clients report fantastic results.”
Run by the Learning Performance Institute, the Learning Awards are a leading event in the learning industry, and recognise outstanding examples of high standards, best practice, innovation and excellence in the corporate L&D sphere. Around 400 people will attend the glittering presentation evening at the Dorchester Hotel, London, in February next year.
Thinking Focus are people productivity specialists who work with organisations around the world to unlock productivity, implement change and deliver sustainable results. Using a flexible and practical tools-based approach, combined with their proven psychology-based methodology, they focus on developing growth mindsets to enable people to think and work differently, and to help them define a clear and shared vision.
Ricky added: “We’re so proud that our hard work, innovation and growth has been recognised in these prestigious awards, and would like to thank all those who have helped, inspired and supported us: We couldn’t have done it without you.”
by Graham Field
One of the greatest challenges that leaders face in the workplace is how to motivate their employees. How best do we inspire and support them to increase their performance?
There are many theories around employee motivation, but in the this blog we’ll be giving practical suggestions that all leaders can put in place immediately.
To start with, we’d recommend that leaders assess how much they understand their team members’ motivations. This can be done simply by drawing up a table like this:
| Team Member: | What Motivates Them? | What Demotivates Them? |
| A:
B: |
The challenge is for leaders to see how many individuals in their team they could honestly complete this table for. Our guess is that many would find it a struggle! High quality leaders know these basics and use this knowledge to actively motivate their people, avoiding doing the things that they know cause demotivation.
Let’s now turn our attention to three sources of thought which we think are important in employee motivation, engagement and performance.
It makes sense for us to use this commonly-cited source as our starting point. Created by pollsters Gallup, it measures employee engagement and its impact on business outcomes by asking employees to complete a survey. The survey questions cover 12 areas of consideration, which we cannot directly quote because they are under copyright.
However, the questions look at areas such as expectations at work; rewards and recognition; opportunities and progression; relationships between colleagues; materials and resources; leadership and support; communication; belonging, purpose and mission; and quality of work.
Asking questions around these areas are really important and give us a great insight in to some of the motivating factors of all employees (ourselves included). But leaders then need to do something with the information they get from asking such questions.
In fact, they need to then answer some questions themselves! Examples of what they could think about are:
And then, of course, they need to be proactive in committing to actions based on their answers to increase employee engagement and guarantee performance.
In 2000, Ohio State University carried out research into Human Motivational Factors (the things that drive our behaviour). Their research highlighted 16 different basic desires that affect behaviour. We think five of these have the biggest impact in the workplace, so let’s look at each in turn:
This is described in the research as “our desire to learn”. For us, this is an important factor in employee motivation. Leaders need to think about their people and the opportunities for learning that are available to them. From our work with organisations, we recognise that many people are given (or forced in to) ‘opportunities’ through training programmes. But, how focused is this development in terms of both what they really need to be a high performer and what they really want for their own development?
As a leader, ask yourself: How could you ensure that the desire to learn is (appropriately) fulfilled in your people?
This is highlighted as “our desire to make our own decisions” and, in our experience, it’s something that many employees may feel divorced from. Leaders need to consider what opportunities exist for their team members to make decisions. It’s not necessarily always about what they do (these will, after all, reflect your team or company goals), but certainly about how they can achieve them. Many managers will highlight what they need people to achieve, which does give focus. But they will also insist on the way in which things must be achieved, and this can stifle creativity, limit continuous improvement and ultimately demotivate. High quality leaders understand that the ‘What’ may need to be told, but the ‘How’ should be within the gift of the employee to decide.
As a leader, ask yourself: What freedom could you give your people to enable them to decide how to achieve your team goals?
This is described as “our desire to behave in accordance with our code of conduct”. More simply put, it’s about ensuring that our values are met in whatever we do. Many people are demotivated by what they see as a lack of congruence between their personal values and how the company they work in is operating. One a leader’s roles is to understand the values of their people and help them to align these values with where their organisation is headed. As a leader, ask yourself: What could you do to ensure there is ‘values alignment’ for your people?
Quite simply, this is “our desire to influence people”. It’s one of the more curious Human Motivational Factors, but it’s something that can be seen every day in the workplace as people strive to gain the buy-in of others for mutual success.
As a leader, ask yourself: How can you use influencing techniques with your team? (this is a whole different blog altogether!)
Something that many of us desire is order – in other words, we crave the certainty and organisation that daily routine and habits give us. We all have things that we do in a certain order, and most of us strive to be much more organised and structured. The number of people we’ve helped with their time and personal management demonstrates how important order is to us. We’re big fans of giving supporting structures and certainties to people, as long as they work, bring about success and allow for individual involvement.
As a leader, ask yourself: What structures or order might your people need, and how could you ensure these are put in place to support your team?
We believe strongly that inspiration can come from many areas, and the story of Ron Clark shows us that, no matter what your walk of life, when you’re looking to develop the motivation to perform, there are some simple things you can do.
Ron was a teacher in in a tough New York school when he won his award in 2000. He went on to become a New York Times bestselling author and a motivational speaker on the subject of inspiring educators.
We’ve picked out three of the areas he highlights when talking about motivation in the classroom, which we think continue to be very relevant in the workplace.
Setting stretching, yet achievable, targets works! People will generally perform to the level that’s expected of them. If we expect little of people, they will match our expectations. The flipside that we, as leaders, can embrace is expecting great things from our employees – and giving them the skills, tools and resources to enable them to meet our raised expectations.
As a leader, ask yourself: What expectations could you set that might challenge and stimulate your team?
It seems really easy – and really commonplace – for the negative stuff such as lack of achievements to be brought to the fore. But building in celebration and praise are essential tools in developing employee performance and maintaining motivation.
As a leader, ask yourself: What might you find today that you could praise and celebrate?
We recognise that there is value in having an interest in your people – and, as Ron suggests, this should be a genuine interest. At the simplest level, this is being interested in the response to questions; really wanting to know the answer to “How are you today?”.
As a leader, ask yourself: How could you develop a genuine interest in your team, and how could you show that you really are interested in your people?
As leaders, there is no magic wand we can wave to increase employee engagement and performance. However, one thing we can do is to invest quality time in understanding what makes our people tick. This forms the very basis of any aspect of managing people, and is the building blocks of high performing teams.
We recommend taking time to invest in your people and find out what really motivates them. After all, they really are the best asset your organisation has.
