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Why You Should Care That Millennials Love Learning

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As millennials continue to take the U.S. workforce by storm, changing its face and essentially changing the way we work, engaging and retaining this employee group will require a targeted learning and development approach.

“The world has changed and the culture has changed and as such, the learning function has to change to reflect that,” said Alex Khurgin, director of learning innovation at Grovo.

According to “The Disappearing Act: Why Millennials Leave Companies — and How L&D Can Entice Them To Stay,” a January 2016 white paper published by Grovo, 60 percent of millennials exit their companies in less than three years, leaving their former colleagues with an increased workload and more stress because of it. Some 87 percent of companies report between $15,000 and $25,000 in costs for each millennial worker it has to replace.

At New York-based Grovo, where millennials account for a huge part of the company’s growth, the drivers that shape the tools it creates for clients also shape internal learning and development programming, Khurgin said. According to the aforementioned white paper, millennials are hankering for development — in addition to meaning, autonomy, efficiency and transparency in their employer — and learning is in a prime position to keep millennial talent from heading out the door.

Khurgin said millennials have different expectations when they enter the workforce and when it comes to learning. Millennials have grown up with the Internet, with contextualized, personalized and on-demand experiences from all kinds of technology — this has become their norm. “Any content that is presented otherwise — if there’s a disconnect there, millennials will tend to ignore or resent or both, whatever it is you’re presenting to them.

As a result, an internal management program the organization is developing includes behavioral goals with milestones, “aha moments”, microlearning, moments of motivation and KESHA, which is a method Grovo created to help workers hone in on knowledge, environment, skills, habits and attitudes that make up a given behavior.

The program isn’t simply a means to deploy information, Khurgin said. It includes a series of milestones that indicate employees are performing the behaviors that make the company function. Accomplishments such as “getting to know your people” and “giving direction,” for instance, are high-level behaviors made up of milestones like “scheduling one-on-ones with all your team members, or designing a tour of duty with one of your team members,” he said.

“Rather than having inert information that just transfer these ideas to people, we’re getting people to actively try to achieve milestones and then recognize them for that,” Khurgin said.

The white paper mentions several ways learning leaders can support the key values millennials identified as important including:

●      Providing daily development opportunities

●      Personalizing training

●      Teaching the company’s mission and vision right out the gate.

●      Helping employees learn by doing

●      Teaching a wide variety of skills

●      Putting learning in workflow

●      Teaching in short bursts

●      Facilitating brown bag discussions

●      Making real-time announcements and updates.

Millennials need a sense of purpose at work, recognition and support to help them develop and grow among other things. That they’re requiring these things as part of their contract working at a company has broad implications.

“One of them is that previous generations are now getting treated with just as much respect as millennials are demanding,” Khurgin said. “And they’re getting the benefits of engaging content and development experiences that are really focused on what that person really cares about rather than what the business needs at the moment.”

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Here’s How You Retain Millennials

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Digital Connection Technology Networking Team Concept

If organizations aren’t willing to invest in their millennial employees’ development, they shouldn’t expect them to stick around long. In fact, studies show they aren’t — Grovo’s ‘Disappearing Act’ report shows 60 percent of millennials leaving their organization after an average of less than three years, seeking out purpose, development and transparency elsewhere.

Impressive paychecks and employee benefits aren’t reeling this group in the way they did their parents and grandparents, and that reality is “slapping HR in a very different way,” said Allan Milham, senior leadership strategist and co-author of “Out of the Question: How Curious Leaders Win” with Guy Parsons.

Known for many things — among them a hunger for continuous growth — millennials want learning and they want to be listened to. They want development in ways that will help them with their immediate work and might one day lead them away from their company. They grew up as things were becoming faster paced. They’re adaptable and independent, and they’re not looking for hand holding at work; they want tools and resources to get the job done. And as the data show, millennials won’t hesitate to let their organizations know this with their feet.

“We’ve got very complicated issues we’re having to face,” Milham said. “But as [millennials] continue to integrate and move in and give voice, it really helps me feel empowered that we can fix some of this stuff.”

He said organizations will have to be critical of the culture they’re promoting and how well that jibes with millennial needs. Companies will need learning leadership if they want to hold on to this group.

On the continuum of leadership styles, where knower leaders are generals, following a command-and-control style, learner leaders are like guides — collaborative, curious, open to possibilities, Milham explained. Anyone at any time can drop into the knower mode — especially today — but “time will absolutely tell us that that learner mindset will be the profile of choice. And you’ll see it in the bottom-line results.”

Fostering a learning culture means meeting millennials where they are, primed to work with what learning leaders have to offer. Milham said his own daughter reflects this; he watches how quickly she processes information. “They’re coming in alert; they’re smart. They recognize they don’t have the expertise, but they want to be at the table because they want to learn.”

To retain millennials, a company can’t just call itself a learning organization — it has to demonstrate that by upgrading how learning happens, Milham said. Think about a blog entry today. There’s often a title, a short paragraph and then a “Read More” button. That’s basically how this generation processes information. Millennials don’t want formal lectures or a bunch of data hitting them in the face all at once. Instead, offer snackable learning options that are easy to get in and out of, continuous but also relaxed.

Further, learning works well when integrated into real-life, practical scenarios. Real-time interactive development found in mentorships is also appealing. In such a culture, leaders have to be competent and emphasize developing their interpersonal skills because millennials want to feel that they matter. “If you’re talking at them vs. with them, that’s going to have an impact.”

This culture of learning can be embedded into workplace design. For example, Milham said consider a company that recently gutted its lobby. Once an open space, now it’s white with meeting rooms, very high tech and pod-based. He said that is a beautiful representation of adapting to the millennial worker.

Certain behaviors communicate a learning culture, a company’s atmosphere supports it, and then the learning function can work with talent management to communicate the value of learning as early in the employee life cycle as the interview process. The moment a millennial walks into an organization, it’s go time.

“From an experiential perspective, they’re eyes are open,” Milham said. “Not only does the environment need to speak to the learning culture but the person who’s on the other side of the interview, they have to embody that because [millennials] will smell it.”

Milham gave another example of a coffee company that let its employees speak with some of the farmers who harvested the company’s coffee beans. Learning just can’t be talked about, he said. At the front door and once inside, millennials have to feel the learning and experience it.

“If you’ve got it right, if you’ve fostered the right kind of learning culture, why would they leave?”

Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below, or email editor@clomedia.com.

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Deliberately Developing Millennials

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We’ve all seen the grim data about millennials in the workforce. Some two-thirds hope to leave their employer by 2020 or sooner, according to The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016.

Most of us have also heard the prescription: Give millennials what they really value. They want professional development in a place that accelerates their growth. They also want purpose and meaning. Millennials want to do work that makes a difference in a place that shares their values.

That sounds good, but how well do most organizations fulfill this growth and purpose prescription? What forms do professional development or meaningful work tend to take? Is it more learning programs: in-person, online or app-based? Or more reminders of the charitable work the organization supports?

There’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about these and other related strategies, but they can be episodic, programmatic and separate from the work. There is a more integrated, systemic way to inspire and draw forth the full engagement and emergent potential in millennials and the generations to come.

Over the past four years, we’ve been researching a new breed of organization that we call the Deliberately Developmental Organization, or DDO. We looked at three companies. The first was Next Jump, an e-commerce company based in New York that cut turnover within its largely millennial workforce from the industry average of 40 percent to single digits while regularly breaking company records for revenue, profits, productivity and growth rate. The Decurion Corp., a Los Angeles-based manager of movie theaters, real estate and senior living facilities, averages the highest gross per screen in the industry. Our third research site was Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based global investment firm that runs the world’s highest-performing hedge fund over the past 20 years.

None of these three successful organizations is designed exclusively for millennial employees, but their day-to-day cultures connect directly with what millennials value. They infuse growth and purpose into the regular flow of work — from the C-suite to the receptionist desk — through intensive and inventive practices that are radically different from traditional organizations. Feedback flows faster, further and more honestly.Conflicts are mined for what they can reveal about the mindsets of the parties involved. Roles and goals are finely calibrated to maximize development.

If you can do your current job perfectly, it is no longer the best job for you. And everyone is expected to not just do their job but also  help make the culture and the company better with practices that support their engagement as full citizens of the organizational community. Everyone also participates in smaller communities of support, encouragement and accountability. Your colleagues know the developmental challenges you’re working on, and they help you just as you help them.

Each DDO possesses its own ingenious blend of what we call Edge, Home and Groove. Edge involves how the organization regularly moves individuals, teams, business units and the organization itself out of comfort zones and onto developmental frontiers. Home encompasses the full range of human support that people experience in DDO communities as they travel beyond their growing edge. And Groove reflects the growing storehouse of tools and practices that everyone in the organization can regularly access to overcome personal weaknesses and blind spots.

We heard in all three companies: “I come to work each day knowing exactly what I am working on — myself.” “Feast on your weaknesses,” a leader at Decurion said, “or starve on your ego.” “Pain + Reflection = Progress,” is the Bridgewater formula. At Next Jump, it is, “Better Me + Better You = Better Us.” Lest these organizations sound more like human potential centers than real businesses, keep in mind their simultaneous success across conventional business metrics.

We feel privileged to have studied these pioneering companies inside out, and we’re convinced the DDO idea represents a hopeful direction to meet the 21st century growth and purpose challenge: Organizations and all of their members supporting each other and flourishing every day in an integrated, systemic and always-evolving way. We believe “an everyone culture” will prove to be highly attractive and deeply satisfying for millennials and others, too.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey are the authors of “An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization.” Comment below, or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Millennials Crave Feedback at Work – But They Aren’t Getting It

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View of a Manager training young attractive people

According to Gallup’s May 2016 report “How Millennials Want to Work and Live,” millennials want feedback at work – to a greater extent than previous generations – but they aren’t getting it – nor are they asking for it.

Millennials, accustomed to receiving regular feedback growing up at home, in school and during extracurricular activities, seek that type of connectedness at work, but Gallup reports only 19 percent of Gen Yers receive routine feedback from their managers. Then, only 17 percent of millennials report the feedback they do receive is meaningful. Gallup also found only 15 percent of millennials regularly ask for feedback. The results suggest there is distance both manager and employee and a need to close the communications gap.

According to Gallup, engagement is highest among employees who regularly meet with their manager. Learning leaders can help improve engagement for employees across generations by encouraging managers to take more initiative and increase the feedback they provide. Improving the lines of communication between managers and their employees could start with short, daily check-ins by phone, by email, or by stopping by the employee’s cubicle or office, for instance.

 

Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

 

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Use Simulations to Develop Millennial Leaders

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Architects team discussion on blueprints in officeMany of the baby boomers are getting ready to ride their motorcycles into the sunset while millennials are using the Uber app to get a ride into work. The knowledge gap between the two groups is causing leaders great concern because the next generation of millennial leaders don’t have the experience to effectively lead. There is a senior management chasm developing, and there aren’t enough Generation Xers to help fill the gap.

According to a Forbes article, “5 Reasons Why Millennials Are Passed Over As Managers,” published in September 2013, a survey of 1,200 business professionals reported that 59 percent believe millennials are not ready to become managers because of lack of experience. Only 45 percent of those surveyed believed millennials were team players, and 36 percent believed them to be difficult to work with. That survey is a few years old, but perceptions haven’t changed much.

In reality, millennials are smart, energetic and extremely eager to take over the reins. But their appetites are often larger than their capabilities. This doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Instead, learning leaders should build their knowledge and accelerate their real-world capabilities by putting participants in the executive’s shoes for a given period of time.

Historically, giving young managers experiences above their position introduced significant organizational risk. Further, this development strategy can be challenging to implement. But there is a way to accelerate millennials’ skills, experience and capabilities by exposing them to real-world business challenges and situations without risk and in a shortened time frame. Technology can help. Specifically, the use of computer simulations can give learners a chance to live like a leader; it’s similar to putting student pilots into a flight simulator.

Simulations are ideally suited for millennial leadership development tools because traditional development tools such as action learning, learning exchange and employee rotations, while good, can be slow to produce results. Companies need to give millennials hands-on experience in real-world business challenges to produce executive-level business acumen, seamless collaboration skills, and a deep understanding of what it means to be an effective leader.

These kinds of simulations can be very diverse. Most often they are delivered via web-based or desktop application. Though the trend has been moving away from internet or cloud-based solutions due to the security threat they offer hackers.

In most cases, participants break into teams and compete against each other in friendly, business war game-style exercises. Simulations often run over the course of a single day, and many times up to 25 employees may compete against each other in an effort to run a business, lead employees, and solve tough business challenges. The competition is an important aspect,

These tools are ideal to accelerate management growth in millennials. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 14th Annual Global CEO Survey stated that “one of the defining characteristics of the millennial generation is their affinity with the digital world. They have grown up with broadband, smartphones, laptops and social media being the norm and expect instant access to information. This is the first generation to enter the workplace with a better grasp of a key business tool than more senior workers.”

Simulations are also excellent development tools for millennials because learning professionals can team them up with outgoing managers. The structure looks like this: If each team has five participants, combine two leaders with three emerging leaders. This creates an opportunity for both emerging and current leaders to interact. By working together, these teams can organically share deep knowledge that is traditionally hard to transfer, while having an engaging time solving business and leadership challenges and reducing the organizational brain drain that many corporate executives fear.

Getting started using business simulations for leadership development is not hard. To avoid development potholes, maintain control and save money: Keep the leadership simulation small and focused, ensure the simulation aligns closely with leadership program goals, and do in-person leadership development as companion learning.

A final bonus to using simulations is that business simulations help create training that is strategically applicable and closely aligned with strategic corporate goals. Strategic learning at this level provides all participants with an opportunity to walk a mile in a senior leaders’ shoes. By doing this, managers understand the enterprise as a whole as opposed to one business silo.

This type of training is hands on, engaging, applicable, strategic and puts millennials shoulder to shoulder with retiring baby boomers. Firing up the spirit of competition in both generations can produce organizational value that is virtually priceless.

William Hall is vice president of learning and development at Simulation Studios, a boutique corporate training firm. To comment email editor@CLOmedia.com.

 

 

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5 Ways to Use Next Generation Learning Tools Now

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Close up portrait of young african woman using digital tablet with her friends sitting by at a cafe table. Group of young people sitting at a coffee shop with digital tablet and laptop.In the 1990s, technology helped chief learning officers streamline and scale learning, moving time-consuming and costly in-house programs from physical classrooms online. The biggest value proposition: huge company cost savings, making e-learning a big win for the executive team, if not for employees.

Today, technology is changing the game again, but this time the driving force behind it is no longer the CFO working to cut costs. Today, it’s being propelled by millennial employees looking to connect, share and deliver innovation using the mobile, social and video tools they’ve seemingly used since birth.

Learning leaders have gotten hip to the potential of technology. A survey released this week sponsored by Saba revealed that HR leaders in the U.S. and U.K. are very tuned in to digital tools that support “always on” learning and development. In the study, 83 percent of HR executives say a modern company cannot compete effectively without its workforce using talent management tools, and development is a key tool.

HR execs and chief learning officers are actually ahead of their employees in envisioning what’s next. The survey shows that 54 percent of HR executives think it’s highly likely their people will work remotely and work primarily on smartphones in the near future. By contrast, only 36 percent of employees think this is likely.

With this in mind it makes sense to try and engage millennials, the biggest portion of today’s employee base. The survey uncovered a number of insights learning leaders can use to derive maximum benefit from the new generation of employees. For instance:

Help them learn to stop the churn. Millennials are one of the highest flight risks in an organization. Many businesses have tried to combat this by juicing up their culture with foosball tables and all-you-can-eat sushi lunches. But, as the study found, 86 percent of millennials are more inclined to stay at their current company if they’re given access to quality learning and development. That’s higher than Gen Xers and baby boomers, who are less likely to stick around even when they are given quality development. This means companies that want to thrive in the future must embrace new tools. The study bears this out: 72 percent of all U.S. employees agree that modern technology tools are very important to effective communication in the workplace, especially when it comes to younger employees.

Open your ears and act. Employees today demand to be listened to. Therefore, employers need to tune in — and respond — to their workers faster and more often. However, the survey found 59 percent of U.S. employees think when asked for their feedback that their concerns won’t be addressed in a timely manner. And 52 percent feel their concerns will be dismissed outright. Asking for feedback and downplaying or ignoring it is a business mistake that can cost you your best people. Technology can help connect the dots. Imagine linking an always-on survey tool for easy intuitive feedback with a talent management system that could recommend developmental actions to help address that feedback?

Mind the gender gap. When organizations don’t heed feedback from employees it creates a listening gap that causes workers to disengage. You don’t listen, so they don’t talk — especially women. The survey found 63 percent of female employees are rarely asked for feedback, versus 54 percent of male employees. Not surprisingly, women are therefore less comfortable giving their input. The survey showed only 58 percent of women are comfortable giving feedback, compared to 65 percent of men. This is a potentially damaging disconnect that requires immediate attention from HR and learning teams.

Embrace modern learning tools. Employers should welcome social, mobile and video learning tools to create a platform for a collaborative exchange of ideas. In the survey, mobile was ranked the “most important” tool by 68 percent of U.S. employees, followed by social (67 percent) and video tools (64 percent). Employees don’t want canned classes. They do want access to “in the moment” learning, such as a GoPro how-to video by an internal expert or a real-time video stream from a small group meeting. But they’re not getting what they want. Right now only 52 percent of employees think their company is effectively engaging and empowering them and their coworkers. It’s time to arm your multigenerational workforce with tools that provide continuous learning, easy collaboration and informal knowledge sharing, and that allow workers to develop their skills and constantly grow.

Don’t overlook “native genius.” One of the best performance drivers is social capital from in-house subject-matter experts, otherwise known as native genius. But organizations are not tapping into it. The study found 66 percent of HR executives and 60 percent of employees in the U.S. believe a significant amount of knowledge goes unshared with colleagues who could use that information. The onus is on the organization to draw out this social capital and communicate it to people who can use it. To do this, companies need a better way to track those conversations, shared blogs and articles, and connections to internal subject matter experts. Learning is no longer about employees taking the required class and checking off a laundry list of compliance requirements. It’s about bubbling up all the smarts that reside within the organization — unlocking and sharing native genius.

Personalized skills and leadership development will be key for learning leaders and their companies to succeed in the years ahead. The more you enable employees to explore the content, contacts and context that are most interesting to them, the more engaged employees across all generations will be.

Didi D’Errico is the vice president, brand advocacy for Saba. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Unleash Millennials with Learning

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co_0109_lead_302By Julia Stiglitz

Say what you want about millennials, but they are quickly determining how the world lives, plays, communicates and works. The workforce reality looks different for this cohort. Companies can’t guarantee employees career-long job security, and workers aren’t dedicating their entire career to one organization. Millennials — the largest generation in the U.S. labor force — are free agents in a fast-moving market.

Members of this age group, who typically change jobs at least four times in their first decade out of college, need and want work-based training and development. But employers often question the return on the investment because of this high turnover. So how do you develop a valuable system for both you and your employees?

The answer requires a different outlook on both millennials and learning. Here are a few tips to maximize both their and our company’s success.

  1. Millennials care a lot about their learning and development. Millennials value training over other benefits including bonuses and flexible working hours. In 2015, retired Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg put it simply: “When looking at their career goals, today’s millennials are just as interested in how a business develops its people … as they are in its products and profits.”

It’s not just a response by the so-called “me generation” to invest in themselves rather than a firm’s future. It’s a rational reaction to an uncertain and rapidly changing job market. Take the engineers at Coursera [Editor’s note: The author works for Coursera] — they are coding in languages that didn’t exist five years ago. Millennials were raised during a time of rapid technological and cultural change, and they must continue to develop transferable skills to stay competitive today and invest in their futures.

  1. Discover and invest in their long-term goals. How does management harness this eagerness to learn? Effective professional development for millennials starts with managers understanding their career goals. Climbing the corporate ladder isn’t necessarily a motivator for millennials. Maybe they ultimately want to start their own company or move from marketing into product. Their current job is a step along the way, and an effective manager identifies where their employees’ personal goals and business goals overlap. As Reid Hoffman says in his book “The Alliance”: “The notion of a career ladder is broken … you need to look at your career like an entrepreneur looks at building a company.”

Give employees a sense of control. They’ll work harder, be more motivated — and ultimately get their team better results.

  1. Create clear pathways for learning and mobility. That feeling of control also stems from the mutual understanding of how employees will get from Point A to Point B. The tricky part? Millennials’ career goals aren’t necessarily linear, so gaining skills for lateral transitions can be appealing.

Consider the company’s needs, and create multiple pathways for employees to fill those needs. Instead of mandating training and development along defined corporate career ladders, create multiple learning pathways for employees to advance in their careers, or move into new job functions. AT&T is a great example of how it’s done. With a workforce 280,000 people strong, many of whom got their training and education in a different era, the company faced two options to survive: reskill or find new people to fill the rapidly changing positions needed for the business. The company chose the former and is reinventing its workforce in a way that keeps employees ahead of the rapid innovations in their industry.

  1. Invest in their whole selves. Don’t limit those pathways — the most valuable learning experiences can come from surprising places. When I was a manager at Google, my direct report took advantage of a Google Kitchen apprenticeship program through the company. Each week she spent an hour or two shadowing the head chef at one of Google’s cafeterias. She didn’t learn hard skills for her current job, but she saw the company was invested in her as a person, and she further invested herself in the company and in her job.

Access to learning opportunities that go beyond an employee’s productive skills is an opportunity to show that the company cares about the employee’s whole self. That translates into employee satisfaction, commitment and job retention.

  1. Accept that retention is not the end goal. The biggest — and often most difficult — shift for companies is acknowledging that retention isn’t the only end game. Millennials will change jobs many times over the course of their careers. If they’re not going to be at your company forever, the relevant questions are: What is their impact while they’re there? How do they reinforce your employer brand when they leave?

Julia Stiglitz is vice president of Coursera for Business at Coursera. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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These Assumptions about Learning and Leadership Development Might Hurt You

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Knocking down learning and leadership developments myths to make an impact on the business isn’t a task relegated only to chief learning officers. Companies that offer learning and development products and provide consultative services in these areas must be aware of these misperceptions as well if they want to effectively support corporate learning and development strategy.

Ultimately, practitioners and providers want the same thing: that the right resources get into the right hands and that those people understand and use them appropriately. By email, Heide Abelli, vice president for leadership and business skills at educational technology company Skillsoft shared a few learning and leadership development myths and misperceptions the company wants to counter.

Heide Abelli

In the meantime, learning leaders can make sure that stale or misinformed thinking isn’t hindering their learning and development strategy by constantly being open to new ideas, approaches and perspectives. “In addition, learning leaders should regularly challenge and question ‘conventional wisdom,’ ” Abelli said. “The raw data may well point to a very different conclusion.”

Chief Learning Officer: What are some learning and leadership development myths or misconceptions Skillsoft is working with clients to debunk? 

Abelli: One myth we are working to debunk is the notion that learners in the millennial generation require radically different learning content and approaches than baby boomers or Gen X learners. Our Skillsoft research suggests this is simply not the case. One myth is that millennials don’t like to read books and only want to learn through fast-paced digital content assets, such as short, high production quality videos. However, we found that millennials view digital books as a vitally important learning mode. In fact, our research brought to light that millennials rate digital books as a more important learning asset than either baby boomers or Gen Xers. Millennials also indicated a strong need for job aids, handouts and other written material for reinforcement of learning. The results of Skillsoft’s research mirror what I see in the classroom when I teach millennial business school students. The reality is they learn about management and leadership in much the same way that my generation of business school classmates learned.

This misconception arises from the fact that millennials are the first true digital natives; because of their facility with technology they have been somewhat falsely credited with driving new work practices and expectations. The truth is the ubiquity of technology, the accelerated pace of work and the changed nature of our customer experience are the root causes of new work practices, not millennials per se.

Instead of focusing on differentiated training approaches designed specifically for millennials, organizations need to adapt to meet the needs of a much broader, more diverse group: the modern learner. Progressive L&D teams are embracing the informal, “always on” nature of learning by creating an ecosystem that offers diverse learning modalities that appeal to the modern learner. See Figure 1.

Source: Skillsoft, 2017

 

Learning leaders should not assume modern learning preferences only apply to younger generations. They should fully embrace the challenge of creating solutions that are effective across all generations precisely because they speak directly to the modern learner, regardless of age.

With respect to leadership development, one misconception that dominates the industry is the belief that one of the best ways to develop leaders is to send a designated group of individuals with leadership potential sporadically to formal offsite leadership development training programs, and assume they will return to the organization suddenly transformed into highly capable leaders. If leadership development were that simple, organizations would be overflowing with strong leaders, and that’s just not the case.

The best leadership development training is not the classroom-based, didactic training of the past, which is separated from the work context. Instead, effective leadership training is heavily contextualized into a leader’s workflows and occurs seamlessly as a leader wrestles with daily leadership challenges, both big and small. Doing that well really makes the difference in building better leadership capability across the board in an organization. Another misconception is that leadership training and development cannot be delivered effectively at scale. As a result, many organizations limit leadership development to the select few. The best leadership development solutions must be delivered at scale because organizations need leadership talent at all levels.

Organizations should shift their leadership development strategies accordingly and align their investments where they will have the greatest and broadest impact. The strategy should center upon providing leaders with access to rigorous and relevant microlearning content and modalities that can be delivered at scale. Whether the leader is wrestling with a recent crisis, how to solve a dispute within a team he/she is leading, needs quick advice about how to manage up more effectively, needs to be reminded to delegate more tasks to others, today’s leader needs quick and effective leadership training, and that training needs to be available anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Effective leadership training content also enables different learning styles and preferences, whether a leader prefers to watch, read, listen or practice depending on the specific moment of need. Providing seamlessly for self-directed pull-based learning is key, but so is the ability to push out links to individual leadership topics that fit into the workday. Finally, the content needs to be easily accessible within learning system and company portals. The point is to get the leader to the relevant content quickly and effectively for immediate application against a leadership challenge.

Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below, or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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6 Ways to Get Millennials to Care About Training

Alec Ross on the Future of Learning

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Over the past two decades, technology has transformed every aspect of corporate learning, from the way content is created to where, when and how it is accessed and shared.

According to New York Times bestselling author and innovation expert Alec Ross, this is the only the beginning. Ross, who speaks to audiences around the world about the impact of innovation on the economy and on society, sat down with Chief Learning Officer magazine to share his perspective on how technology will shape the future of learning.

CLO: When you think about the future of learning, what technologies do you think will have the biggest impact?

Alec Ross: Virtual and augmented reality technologies can and will be game-changing in education, but this is probably seven to 10 years away. In the meantime, there will be a number of things that are attempted but which prove pedagogically unsound or ineffective.

Over the shorter-term, we are finally getting to the point of video connected to other enabling technologies producing educational outcomes that are positive and significant. I love the work a company called 2U is doing in partnership with some of America’s best universities.

CLO: How will artificial intelligence change the way we create and engage with information as learners?

Ross: There is positive and negative to this. On the negative side, I see AI-enabled computer programs taking over the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers. Any kind of instruction that can be routinized will likely become a combination of video and computer programs with ever-more-powerful machine learning tools. I confess to not looking forward to this. This will likely be concentrated initially for instruction aimed at lower-skilled professions, which does not make it any easier to stomach.

On the positive side, I see AI becoming an increasingly powerful tool for research. We’ve already seen what algorithms have done for Internet search, enabling information retrieval that would have once been unimaginable. This trend is only going to accelerate and will enable the store of human knowledge to become increasingly accessible.

CLO: What are the biggest challenges companies face today in preparing for — and taking advantage of — this technological evolution?

Ross: One of the trickiest parts is that budgets tend not to be nimble, and learning leaders need the ability to be flexible and to experiment. In my experience, learning leaders are often forced into “all or nothing” investment choices. They have a choice between investing in enterprisewide systems with a multiyear commitment and a lot of risk, or not changing anything, and the latter offers more certainty and security. Learning leaders need to be able to try different programs and methods on different audiences within an enterprise to test and measure the product/market fit; how well a specific program fits their enterprise.

CLO: What advice would you offer learning leaders today on how to prepare for the future of learning?

Ross: The first thing is to be open-minded. Technologies can be painfully overhyped, but we can’t be cynical. Eventually the right technologies emerge that meaningfully enhance the learning environment, and as learning leaders we need to keep our eyes, ears and minds open.

The second thing is to closely observe the learning behaviors of millennials. I’m fascinated by how they learn in part because it’s so different than my own learning modalities. I could be negatively judgmental about it, but it’s important to recognize that millennials make up an ever-larger and more senior part of our workforces; the way they learn and work will only grow in importance.

The third thing I’d flag is our own learning habits. Learning leaders need to be intellectually omnivorous, taking in information from wildly varying sources. We need to be interdisciplinary learners ourselves if we expect to be good stewards of the learning environments in our organizations.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. Comment below, or email@CLOmedia.com.

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Hold on to Employees By Letting them Go

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To retain top talent, companies might want to make it easier for people to go — to another role or department that is.

In a February Fast Company article, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes advocated for a new focus on “people movement” rather than people retention. Gallup reports some 60 percent of millennials are open to new job opportunities, so rolling with the tide as opposed to swimming full force against it may be a better retention strategy.

Holmes acknowledged that losing employees in general isn’t a good thing. “But if all you worry about are retention issues, then you’re pouring tons of resources into reducing churn and missing other areas that, for one thing, you have much more control over and, for another, might end up making a bigger difference in the end.”

By focusing more on people movement throughout an organization, Holmes wrote that leaders could be pumping oxygen into their business. Why is people movement important? At the social media platform company, one of the enterprisewide goals is to ensure that 20 percent of its employees aren’t in the same position by year’s end. People movement is critical to organizational health, Holmes wrote. “Indeed, moving people out of their current roles can be just as important as keeping people in them.”

Here’s how:

  • It supports employees’ personal and professional development needs, which, when satisfied, help fuel engagement.
  • It busts up silos and disperses institutional knowledge and know-how.
  • It sustains startup energy and spirit at a larger scale.

At an early-stage startup, agility is a must for employees who often wear multiple hats. “But this kind of role fluidity diminishes as a company grows, and jobs become more specialized,” Holmes said. “The enthusiasm and creativity that makes the scrappy startup environment so appealing gets watered down.” Get rid of or scale back retention efforts in favor of a people movement strategy, and watch that startup type of excitement begin to flourish.

Holmes said a transition to such an approach would require a culture change around retention efforts and a recast of the manager role, among other things. A structured development program — offering a tour-of-duty type experience — would also help facilitate this alternate take on employee retention efforts.

In a competitive and limited talent landscape, companies encouraging people to move around may seem like a step in the wrong direction, one that may accelerate existing turnover issues. On the other hand, by promoting an open-door policy, companies could be communicating to growth-hungry workers that there is every reason to stick around.

Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below, or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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What Skills Will Leaders Need in the Future?

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future leadership skillsFor learning leaders charged with developing leaders who will assume positions of increasing complexity and scope, the task has seldom been more daunting. As leaders find themselves in both a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous — and a BOCA workplace — a workplace characterized by blurred boundaries, an overload of work, complexity and technology addiction — their preparation to lead as well as the mechanisms to support them become critical levers in any organization’s growth and success.

Demographic tipping points are already here. Baby boomers continue to exit the workplace, and those in Generation X are too few in number to fill all open positions. Millennials are assuming significant leadership roles, sometimes at a pace faster than they and the organizations they serve would otherwise embrace. Indeed, the millennial generation — one of the most globally connected and diverse in U.S. history according to 2015 census data — working in global multinationals, regional powerhouses and local firms, are rapidly approaching 50 percent of many organizations’ workforce. In many technology and financial services firms, they have already crossed that line. Senior leaders in these organizations recognize and are proactively looking for a response to millennials’ growing influence and impact. Research offers a few actionable options.

How leaders are best developed was a focus of leadership development research conducted by Development Dimensions International and The Conference Board’s “Global Leadership Forecast 2014/2015.” Leadership, particularly millennial leadership, was also the focus for a research study The Conference Board conducted in partnership with RW2 Enterprises, “Divergent Views/Common Ground: The Leadership Perspectives of C-Suite Executives and Millennial Leaders,” released in January.

Identifying, selecting, preparing and supporting long-term success for leaders of any generation is challenging. Leaders have to succeed, and they must grow into the kinds of leaders an organization will need in the future, even when the future is viewed through a murky glass. What kinds of leaders are millennials, who might they become, and what imperatives might drive their choices, if their values are different? What leadership attributes will they embrace, and how might they best be developed? Every generation leaves its mark. Will the millennials lead differently once the inevitable demographic tilt is complete?

Trendy, popular headlines about millennials and their impact should be taken lightly. Each of-age generation has been the recipient of disparaging commentary by its elders at least since Aristotle. Defensible, quantitative research about millennials is rare, however, and research about millennial leaders is even more so.

Learning leaders need to better understand which differences — if there are any — are attributable to generational, life-stage or leader-level differences; in which case, changes would be roughly similar for leaders of any generation. In spring and summer of 2016, the “Divergent Views” research conducted interviews, focus groups and surveys with chief executive officers, members of their C-suite teams as well as their millennial leaders to understand leadership now and what leadership is needed. Respondents answered questions about their leadership journeys, how they developed and the values they held that shaped them as leaders. The study also surveyed and interviewed those responsible for developing leaders about what they do and, perhaps, do differently.

Fourteen organizations participated: Aetna, American Express, athenahealth, Boeing Co., Cardinal Health, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Kindred Healthcare, KPMG, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, United Rentals, UPS, Verizon Communications, and Xerox. In addition to the 14 CEOs, more than 2,800 leaders at various stages in their careers and of different generations participated in the study.

Will Future CEOs Be Different?

The study asked leaders at all levels, including CEOs, for their views on what skills future leaders would need to be successful. Their responses suggest that millennial leaders will certainly reshape the CEO role. CEOs and millennial leaders paint distinctly different profiles of an ideal future senior leader. Each selected a different set of skills for success (see Figure 1).

For millennial leaders, the prototypical leader is an inspiring coach, a compelling communicator and one whose choices and actions are informed by an intercultural perspective. Their future CEO leads and succeeds globally through interpersonal skill and has an inclusive decision-making style versus “command and control.” One millennial leader focus group participant said, “You don’t tell people what to do, you empower them.”

By contrast, CEOs’ ideal future leader focuses less on interpersonal influence and more on efficient decision-making and business savvy. Also critical to CEOs was skill in stakeholder management, such as board members, shareholders, regulatory agencies and media. This disparity may reflect the leader level more than generational cohort as the millennial leader exposure to stakeholders may be more limited.

How Do Millennial Leaders Grow?  

A mix of experience, education and exposure drive growth, but that road map may not match the traditional path for leaders. Research participants selected five experiences (from a list of 14) that are likely to drive a successful journey to top leadership positions. CEOs and C-suite leaders could speak to what helped them the most in the past; others, including millennial leaders, could respond with what they thought would help them most as they look forward (see Figure 2).

There was full agreement on the top spot, “Leading Through a Strategic or Cultural Transformation” as well as on the No. 3 spot, “Guidance From a Mentor.” Interviews revealed numerous examples on the importance of mentorship. One millennial leader said all four of his promotions were due to mentors who were able to show him “what it takes to be a leader, to find his core values.” One CEO talked about an early experience as an executive assistant to a past chairman and CEO who served as a key mentor for a nine-month experience. “You learned that you can’t do everything yourself. The job is about them, not about yourself.”

Millennial leaders and non-millennial leaders agreed 100 percent on the top five experiences in order of importance. Then ideas began to diverge. CEOs were the only ones to select, “Growing a New Business” as a critical experience, and placed greater value on “Managing Through a Crisis.” In focus groups, the impact of crisis came up often; their perspectives and resilience changed within the context of a business crisis or through a personal one, like a serious illness or the loss of a loved one.

Part of this difference can be explained by experience. Most CEOs have spent several decades as leaders and, during their careers, they likely have had exposure — purposeful or not — to a greater and more strategic variety of experiences, not to mention the natural course of experiences gleaned from simply living. This raises the question, how can early-career leaders — of any generation — gain exposure to the high-stakes experiences that mold CEOs most?

How Can Organizations Develop the Next Generation of Leaders?

The research asked leaders as well as those responsible for leadership development programs about the frequency and effectiveness of a variety of programs and approaches. There was little difference among the groups. Developmental assignments were at the top of the list. Several leaders commented on the value of multiple assignments. Coaching from current managers placed second in terms of high-effectiveness/high-frequency development activities. Coaching from internal coaches/mentors was of relatively high value for both leadership groups.

Organizations can do a much better job of formalizing the coaching process, however, especially for early-career leaders. In today’s information-rich and constantly changing business environment, a network of coaches and mentors for early-stage leaders is likely to have a high payoff.

Formal workshops and training still carry a relatively high value and are used somewhat frequently. One millennial leader praised her company’s early-leadership career program, as it helped her learn how to expand her network and provided opportunities to learn from other managers.

Low on the list was self-learning or mobile learning; surprising for a generation reliant on technology, but this may indicate that when “on your own” learning programs go too far and disconnect a leader from chances to practice, receive feedback, and engage in shared learning experiences with peers, the learning payoff simply isn’t there. When it comes to leadership, social interaction is an important facet of the learning environment.

In many ways, millennial leaders aren’t that different from other generations or from CEOs. All leaders recognize the formative power of mentorship and growth through transformation, and they value development assignments, coaching, and formal learning while viewing self-study learning as unproven as a primary learning method.

However, there were exceptions — particularly when both CEOs and millennial leaders looked over the horizon at future leaders’ needs. Overall, learning leaders should carefully consider the common ground before deferring to oft-overstated differences among the generations. Research shows that learners grow through similar methods and means, even if the skills they are growing appear to be shifting.

Rebecca Ray is executive vice president at The Conference Board. Evan Sinar is chief scientist and vice president at Development Dimensions International. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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3 Tips to Help Younger Leaders Manage Older Workers

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millennials, older workers, managementThe Brookings Institution predicts millennials will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. With the group having surpassed Gen X as the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, it goes without saying that older workers will — if they haven’t already — report to a younger manager in the future.

Mary Shacklett, president of the technology research and market development firm Transworld Data, offered tips to manage older workers in a March TechRepublic article. They include:

Encourage managers to get to know what motivates their more tenured employees. Younger managers may be concerned with accumulating skills and experiences to move up or around in their company or to an opportunity outside of it. That’s not necessarily the case for older employees who have likely “been there and done that.” “Instead, older workers want to enjoy what they are doing and make a contribution,” Shacklett wrote. While that might not be a manager’s personal motivator, it’s critical that they understand what drives all of their employees in order to inspire their best work and contributions to the team.

Help managers use their older workers as mentors. If experienced workers are interested in giving back by helping train team members, managers should tap into that and build “staff bench strength,” Shacklett wrote.

Support younger managers in treating their older workers as partners. The manager retains strategic authority in this situation, Shacklett wrote. “But when you meet with your older staff members on a one-to-one level, you can earn their respect faster if your treat them as partners instead of subordinates.” Depending on how long they’ve been on the team or with a company, they may have a depth of project and/or institutional knowledge that would be helpful to a younger manager who may not have as much background.

Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below, or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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For Millennials, Consider Self-Directed Learning

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millennials, self directed learningBy now, many in the business world are familiar with Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson’s stance on his employees. They are the No. 1 priority, even more important than its customers. Following the retirement of Virgin Atlantic, he wrote in his “Dear Virgin America” article: “Build a business that puts its people first.”

When he first made this declaration a few years ago, many business leaders were surprised. But it’s no longer a controversial statement. When we take care of our employees, they take care of our customers. That truism is part of a larger picture: The pace at which employee demands, and therefore business demands, evolve continues to increase. As learning leaders, it’s important to keep up with — or stay ahead of — this evolution in order to keep employees engaged in their careers.

Millennials are one of the largest drivers for fast-paced change across business landscapes. Their thirst for self-direction in their careers is starting to make learning professionals look at development programs differently. According to thought leaders like Daniel Pink, people have an innate need for a certain amount of freedom in their lives; at least some capacity to plot their own course. In the business world, this translates into employees’ desire for obtaining ownership of their professional direction.

Learning is a key driver for professional direction and growth. Millennials need to learn, and they need to have a say in what and how they learn. That’s good. Self-driven and motivated employees are the employees we want on our teams.

The challenge for CLOs is to create a learning environment that allows millennials to feel a sense of ownership in their professional advancement. If millennials don’t have an engaging work environment, this pool of talent won’t stick around long. Express Employment Professionals’ conducted a survey last year exploring the reasons why employees leave jobs. Data suggests some 40 percent of young workers are likely to change companies because they aren’t given the opportunity to learn and advance as quickly as they’d like.

How quickly millennial employees want to advance depends on the person, and how motivated they are to learn and grow. Therefore, it is important that millennials feel empowered to learn about new concepts or future responsibilities. Further, accessibility to learning resources isn’t the only factor to consider when it comes to the self-directed employee.

Some millennials prefer to learn on their own by referencing world-class books and videos. Some prefer collaborative learning — online and in person — and others prefer to use their various mobile devices to consume learning content and offer their own ideas.

Many CLOs have found success with “always-on” learning solutions that meet self-directed learners’ demands for diverse content and the option to collaborate. These solutions also give the CLO a clear picture of the resources team members find valuable, and how much time they spend learning about various topics.

With this kind of data, learning leaders are in a better position to guide the self-directed learner in the right direction. For example, you may see that an employee has developed a keen interest in leadership based on the ways the employee interacts with leadership content — through comments, shares or recombining published content with their own thoughts and interpretations. That’s the perfect opportunity to recommend additional leadership readings or videos, or even refer that employee to an expert with whom they can exchange feedback and ideas.

According to the 2017 “Global Human Capital Trends” report from Deloitte, the average tenure in a single job is only 4.5 years. Millennials are regularly tempted to explore new job opportunities. Wouldn’t it be ideal if organizations could provide the kind of empowering environment that keeps this generation growing within an organization? Self-directed learning can be a valuable strategy to implement when it comes to engaging millennials and keeping them loyal.

Heather MacNeill is head of communications for BlueBottleBiz, collaborative learning platform. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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6 Ways to Get Along With Millennials at Work

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millennials at workThe phrase “millennials in the workplace” may bring to mind open work spaces with bean bag chairs, organic kale salad bars in the break room and in-office yoga. It may bring up thoughts of iPhones, social media and remote work. Or, it may bring up stereotypes around entitlement, laziness and an inability to commit to a job or a company.

Whatever your opinions are of millennials, they are rapidly becoming a growing and important part of the workforce, and they work and think very differently than the generations before them. For instance, they often use technology to work more efficiently, and their desire to understand the “why” behind everything can create opportunities for your company to refocus on doing the right things to meet big-picture goals.

So, why do so many business leaders have a negative view of millennials and hesitate to work with them or give them more responsibility in their organization? I believe it’s because the millennial value system is very different than that of previous generations.

Many millennials don’t value titles or appearances. They don’t need to wear nice suits or work in fancy offices. They have very little use for stiff organizational flowcharts that allow employees to move vertically, one rung at a time, on a set schedule. In the past, workers found validation in climbing the corporate ladder, receiving a new job title and office and staying loyal to the same company for many years. Millennials find very little value in any of this. This can be operationally disruptive to an organization, and frustrating for the manager trying to motivate and lead a millennial to work with a team and perform.

To attract, retain and lead a millennial workforce, start by understanding what is important to this generation and what drives them to perform. The following six tips can help.

  1. Regularly tell them “why.” Millennials are driven by impact. They want to feel that the company they work for has a worthy mission, to know they are measurably contributing to that mission with their work, and that there is a reason for every task they are assigned. The employer who can tell them the “why” will likely be successful leading this group. Warning: If you can’t give a compelling reason as to why their job is important and contributing to your organization’s mission, you have done yourself more harm than if you hadn’t answered the “why” in the first place.
  2. Ask their opinion — a lot. You may not be used to asking your employees or team for their thoughts on a task, project, meeting, or goal, but this can go a long way with millennials. They want to feel like they are personally valued and contributing to the organization’s mission; giving them a chance to voice their opinion will create buy-in and ownership for your millennials. Try to make a habit of asking for their ideas, thoughts and opinions, and listen carefully to what they say.
  3. Let them try new jobs. Millennials place a lot of importance on finding their calling and doing work they are passionate about. Create ways for them to try jobs and develop new skills outside of their division or team. Many companies have rotation programs where employees can get a feel for how each area of the organization works, and then the employer and employee decide where he or she will be the best fit. Finding ways to allow your millennial employees to feel like they can grow, learn and explore new opportunities will help you attract and retain them.
  4. Allow flexibility in how they work. Millennials often place a lot of importance on the experience rather than the results. This means that many will choose to make less money for a job that offers a better work experience, a strong company culture or the ability to work remotely. These young workers want jobs that allow them the freedom to develop outside interests.
  5. Find ways for your company and your employees to give back. The millennial generation was raised in a world so connected by technology, the issues of people in the developing world are just as present as problems their neighbors have in their own community. This generation tends to be incredibly passionate about solving humanitarian, social justice and environmental issues, and they appreciate an employer who feels the same. Consider a cause or a project that might align with your team’s or organization’s core competencies — or develop new ones — and be intentional about letting employees contribute to larger philanthropic efforts.
  6. Encourage face-to-face interactions. With so much technology within reach it’s easy to get out of practice interacting face to face. Encourage in-person meetings when possible, and create space for informal relationship building. Provide free lunch for the whole team, with the caveat that no cell phones or computers are allowed into the lunch room. Millennials may not like the idea at first, but if you promote human connection and authentic relationship building, they may get a lot out of the experience and appreciate you facilitating it.

Leading these young workers can be challenging, but if leaders invest in this incredible generation they can make a difference in their teams and in their business.

Larry Little is CEO for Eagle Consulting. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Millennial CEO: Focus on Employee Growth and Development

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Matt Rizzetta millennial CEOMatt Rizzetta was 26 with a baby on the way when he founded North 6th Agency and began managing the business out of his basement. Through hard work and delivery, Rizzetta grew N6A into an award-winning brand communications agency.

In an industry littered with predominantly older CEOs, Rizzetta’s age has offered him a unique perspective on management and leadership. As a millennial CEO just starting his business, Rizzetta’s primary goal was trying to prove himself. Now, he’s switched his focus to fostering an environment that promotes internal employee growth as a means to maximize the company’s success.

Chief Learning Officer: As a millennial CEO, how do you handle managing and educating those in your age range? Given the stereotypes out there about millennials, is it different than educating other generations?

Matt Rizzetta: When I first started the business I was young. We had just started our company out of my basement, and we were doing everything to try and convince clients to work with us and staff members to come join us. The proof had to be in the pudding for me to be able to recruit employees.

Fast forward, it’s eight years later; our business is completely different. We have 50 people now; we don’t really have a ton to prove to anybody in terms of our ability to succeed. So, now, my leadership style is much more personal. I think, what I’ve learned through the years, is you need to invest in getting to know everybody, especially at the millennial demographic. There’s certainly no one-size-fits-all approach to managing people around me, whether they’re my age, younger than me, older than me — that’s something I’ve found to be applicable to all types of folks I’m managing, regardless of where they fit into the work chart.

CLO: How important is a learning culture for your business’ success? What value does that investment bring to your organization?

Rizzetta: Our business really is only as successful as our people. That’s why we’re investing in a culture of learning appreciation and professional development. You want your people to feel just as invested in the success of the business as you do, and the best way to do that is to promote from within. By investing in educating your staff, they’re going to realize the benefits of that because they’re going to make more money, and they’re going to get leadership roles at younger ages.

CLO: What is the correlation between monthly performance reviews and leadership development?

Rizzetta: We’re eight years old as a business, and this probably came about two or three years in. We just started to scale, and I started to really see the need for objective data-based metrics and checkpoints to show our employees where they stood in the company, where they needed to grow, and in some cases, what was holding them back from being promoted. Our old system … annual performance reviews, it’s much more subjective than objective. Nobody should ever be surprised sitting down with their supervisor and hear for the first time, feedback about their performance at the one year mark.

So, we developed this objective, KPI-based system. Every month you sit down as an employee with your supervisor… You get ranked in certain categories that are customized according to your core role in the company. You see crystal clear how you’re performing. People have been promoted more quickly than they would have in our old system, and they’ve made more money earlier on.

CLO: What advice do you have for young leaders?

Rizzetta: Listen to your people. Your greatest asset you could have as a manager is your ability to benefit from different perspectives around you. As a leader, it’s on you to constantly keep learning. You’re going to have a pretty special business if … you can just commit to listening to your people, holding yourself accountable, and then making adjustments on a regular basis according to what they’re telling you.

I would not be afraid to experiment. I have this saying: Don’t be afraid to experiment and to move the barn to find sunlight. You never want to bet the farm, but don’t be afraid to move the barn around if you’re going to benefit from more sunlight. You don’t want to be stuck in your ways. You want to be very comfortable operating in an environment of innovation and experimentation. If you’re a young, aspiring leader, commit to that.

Marygrace Schumann is an editorial intern for Chief Learning Officer. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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3 Ways to Prepare Millennials for Leadership Roles

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succession management millennials leadershipThe fastest-growing generation in the U.S. workforce, millennials surpassed Generation X as the largest generation in the U.S. labor force just two years ago. These workers are being promoted into leadership roles daily, often without being fully ready or being adequately prepared to transition from star individual contributor to equally successful manager.

To prep millennials for leadership roles, it’s important to focus on what your organization believes makes a great leader. To ensure your high-potential millennials are set up for success before and after managerial transitions, consider the following actionable tips for your organization.

Clarify successful management. While what makes a great manager varies from company to company, there are standard skills and traits which are often standard in successful management. Documenting the attributes of top managers in your organization is important to clarify how expectations and definitions of success shift from individual contributor to manager.

While Gen X and older generations understand that success in management largely depends on cross-departmental communication skills, millennials may see management as an extension of their work as an individual contributor without fully understanding the importance of communication skills and project management as the most vital skills for success. By defining and being clear about what success means in a management role, there will be no surprises for employees who fail to receive a promotion or who are removed from management roles for failing to meet unspoken expectations.

Provide an actionable plan and regular feedback. The task of developing and training new managers often falls in the hands of existing managers. Once the definition of a successful manager is clear across the organization, managers must coach their employees on how to improve in these key areas. According to a June 2016 article from Gallup, millennials are hungry for feedback at work, but rarely ask for it. Only 19 percent of millennials say they receive routine feedback, with just 17 percent saying they receive routine feedback that is meaningful.

By creating clear developmental goals tied to gaps in skills and traits that define the best managers in your organization, current managers can focus on building a plan that helps build the right manager for your company and surface not just high-potential employees who are talented individual contributors but those who have potential for management.

With high-potential employees, instead of discussing how to become a manager, focus on what specific hard and soft skills define the best leaders in your organization, and then create a structured plan to obtain any skills or attributes the employee lacks today. For example, if an employee needs to work on more charismatic public speaking, create a set of goals around public speaking opportunities and completing relevant training programs and other educational materials to build these skills. Quarterly check-ins on these goals help connect formally on progress toward becoming a successful manager.

Create two paths to leadership, manager and specialist. Not everyone is cut out to be a manager, and that’s okay. By forcing the idea that management is the only way to promotions, greater salary and more opportunities within an organization, you unnecessarily force your most talented individual contributors to make a choice between stifling their career growth or moving into a management role that may not be right for their personality.

While anyone who wants to become a manager should be provided the opportunity to move into this style of leadership role, opening up clear specialist tracks that have senior-level positions in your company helps to identify the right individuals for management tracks. It also ensures your best individual contributors don’t get lost in traditional senior roles. By offering these two paths for high-potential employees, you end up with better managers in your organization, and retain the value of incredibly talented individual contributors who may be highly creative or technically brilliant, but not the right fit for management.

With some 75 million baby boomers retiring in the next few years, employers need to invest in training millennials to fill management roles. By providing a clear definition of success for managers, ensuring your existing managers are coaching millennials on how to become better at skills and attributes which fit this definition, and providing a secondary path to leadership for specialists, you will be on the right path to fill the workforce gap in management with the right talent.

Rajeev Behera is CEO of modern performance management startup Reflektive. Comment below or email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Do CLOs Need a Mobile First Strategy?

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Employees are on the move. Whether working from home or offsite at the local Starbucks, a growing segment of workers are rarely parked in the office cubicle all day. Forty-three percent of Americans spend time working remotely, according to a survey of 15,000 employees conducted by Gallup earlier this year.

As more people change the way they work it begs a question: If work is done on the go, shouldn’t learning be too?

While some in the learning industry believe adding mobile apps and components to existing learning management systems is the best route, others argue for a more radical shift.

It’s vital to accommodate employees by “[meeting] people where they are within the way that they work instead of them having to seek out a system,” said Scott Burgess, CEO of Continu, a provider of learning software.

Increasingly the way they work, particularly the young, isn’t through a system but rather their smartphone. According to a 2014 report released by Experian, millennials spend more than two hours a day on their phones — more than any other age group.

While technology usage and demographic shifts have had an affect, learning content has simultaneously shifted to become shorter and more bite-sized. Smaller pieces of learning that are easier to consume and retain lend themselves to mobile learning, Burgess said.

Though some believe the best way to deal with these shifts is to add mobile capabilities to the existing LMSs, Burgess disagrees. He argues for a mobile-first approach.

“You should build a product for a mobile experience rather than just an add-on … because it will provide better experiences for the user,” he said. “It can’t be an afterthought.”

Burgess said mobile learning is most effective as a way to deliver just-in-time learning in the context of employees’ work, such as “sending a push notification to alert a sales rep to a new pricing model or product feature so they can quickly deploy knowledge in the field and have the most current information at their disposal.”

Mobile learning is also useful for learning off the job, such as when employees are commuting or traveling for work, added Dani Johnson, vice president, learning and development research leader for Bersin by Deloitte. But she argued it’s important to look ahead and think about mobile learning in the context of a broader learning approach.

“It’s definitely a strategy but it’s part of a larger strategy,” said Johnson. “Whatever your strategy, is should have a mobile component to it but to go in and just say, ‘We have a mobile strategy,’ is shortsighted.”

Whether delivered as part of a legacy system or as a stand-alone app, mobile learning has benefits provided it’s used in the right way for the right purpose.

“One of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is that they use it for everything,” Johnson said. “There are very specific things it should be used for.”

According to data from Bersin by Deloitte’s “High-Impact Learning Organization” report, only 21 percent of companies utilize mobile apps for learning. But leading companies use mobile apps 32 times more than those who lag behind the trends.

“It does seem to be something that the more mature organizations are paying attention to,” Johnson said.

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If You Build It, Millennials Will Stay

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Job-hopping millennials are seeking significantly more stability than before, making way for employers to train more talent — and keep them.

Researchers from professional services firm Deloitte surveyed 8,000 young workers in 30 countries and found a significant drop in the number of workers planning to leave their company within the next two years. The results, published in the “2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey,” point to an opportunity for employers to rethink their relationship with this large and growing segment of the workforce.

To employers still not convinced it’s worth the time and effort to train millennials if they just end up leaving, Michele Parmelee says to consider the opposite: “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

“We can’t afford to think about how quickly someone might jump ship when we’re preparing them to provide superior service to global clients,” said Parmelee, Deloitte’s global managing principal of talent, brand and communications.

The Shifting Millennial Mindset

In the 2016 Deloitte report, 17 percent of millennials said they were planning to leave their company soon and 44 percent said they would leave within two years. That’s down to just 7 percent and 38 percent respectively in 2017. Further, 31 percent said they plan to stay beyond five years, up from 27 percent last year.

Parmelee said those shifts can be attributed to world events in the past year that have affected millennials’ beliefs and values.

“They’re more apprehensive about the world in general so it may just be human nature that’s causing them to cling to the familiar more than before,” Parmelee said.

For example, in the 2014 millennial survey, climate change and resource scarcity were millennials’ top personal concerns. In 2017, terrorism was the top concern and environmental issues ranked near the bottom.

In the U.S., the report showed millennials are more likely to say they will stay beyond five years than to leave within two years. Parmelee said drivers of that desire for stability probably stem from 2016’s contentious election cycle and the heightened fear of terrorism.

 Parmelee said employers should take advantage of this current desire for stability by adapting their workplaces to millennials’ wants and needs. Deloitte seems to be taking their own advice from the research.

“We cultivate an inclusive and connected environment that allows people to be their authentic selves,” Parmelee said. “We give them the flexibility, choices and support they need to personalize their experiences in ways that matter most to them.”

Flexibility Is the Future

Another finding of the report was that although millennials prefer the freelance lifestyle, almost two-thirds said they’d rather have a full-time job.

“They want the best of both worlds,” Parmelee said. “They appreciate stability but they value flexibility.”

Lindsey Pollak, a consultant specializing in generations and author of “Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders,” thinks they can have both. She said the significant number of baby boomers who are retiring are taking their leadership style and work preferences with them, giving way to Generation X, millennials and soon to be Generation Z employees.

“That demographic change is going to have massive implications,” Pollak said. “We’ve seen a growing trend toward more flexible work arrangements for millennials … and everyone else as well.”

In order to keep the millennial talent they worked so hard to train, employers are going to have to continue adapting to what millennials want. Most millennials reported they already get flexibility; 85 percent report some degree of flexible working and 39 percent say their organizations offer “highly flexible” working environments.

“Obviously, not every job can be done from home and some employers are more limited in terms of the flexibility they can offer,” Deloitte’s Parmelee said. “But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do whatever they can within the confines of their particular operations to provide some degree of flexibility.”

The growing flexibility in workplaces doesn’t just benefit the employee. There’s proof it benefits the organization, too. The Deloitte report found that offering high flexibility correlated with improved organization performance.

Specific results include increased engagement and productivity, better individual well-being, health and happiness, higher employee morale and elevated financial performance when working in a flexible environment. “When you look at those findings, the benefits seem obvious,” Parmelee said.

Pollak added that this is only the beginning of changes in the workplace.

“Millennials are the largest generation in the workplace today, so their preferences are really leading the way toward this new different way of working,” she said. “Offering any kind of flexibility is a really smart strategy for any company wanting to appeal to any generation.”

Looking ahead, Parmelee said it’s hard to predict millennials’ preferences but she and Pollak both agree that flexibility in the workplace is here to stay.

“Almost every job is being reinvented as the workplace evolves to be a flexible workforce augmented by software, robots, crowds and artificial intelligence,” Parmelee said. “How we work in the future will be more networked, more devolved, more mobile, more team-based, project-based, collaborative, real-time and fluid.”

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Soft is the New Strong

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When Philipp Schramm was offered the job of chief financial officer for Webasto Roof Systems in Detroit in 2014, he expected the U.S. office of the global automotive supplier to operate as smoothly as its German headquarters.

What he found was a disorganized and often hostile work environment where people made excuses for why work wasn’t getting done. “The entire organization was dysfunctional,” he said. When he asked why work wasn’t getting done, everyone complained that they were never properly trained.

Schramm had been brought in to turn around the financial side of the organization which was losing both money and customers. But he soon realized that the problem ran deeper than financial issues. “Something on the culture side was broken,” he said.

Without clear corporate values, HR only focused on administrative tasks and training was determined individually by managers’ budgets. “It was shocking,” Schramm said.

This cultural breakdown led Schramm to work with the executive team on a culture change project that introduced soft skills training on leadership, communication, collaboration and problem-solving along with the financial and operational changes he’d been brought in to implement. “The soft skills training focused on a lot of the emotional aspects of leadership like using ‘I statements’ and active listening,” he said.

Many of the courses were taught by managers who went through instructor training to reinforce the importance of the change to the business, a detail that Schramm said added needed authenticity and made the biggest impact.

“The training helped us significantly change the way people behaved,” he said. “It engaged them to be change agents for the company.”

The effect on employees and the business was profound, Schramm said. Within 15 months of launching the program, the division returned to profitability, turnover dropped significantly and employee engagement survey scores showed double digit increases.

It had a personal effect on Schramm, too. He was named vice president of human resources to go along with his CFO title.

Shocking Results

Webasto’s story may be an extreme example but it underscores the importance of soft skills to business success. “In the end, we are all human and we have to work together,” Schramm said.

In a global marketplace where companies need to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions and woo customers with excellent service and timely solutions, business leaders can’t afford to not invest in soft skills training, said Leslie Knowlton, partner with Deloitte Advisory Services in Houston.

“Whatever your role, success comes back to your ability to collaborate and build relationships,” said Knowlton, who also heads learning and development for Deloitte US.

Learning and development professionals across industries seem to agree. In LinkedIn’s “2017 Workplace Learning Report,” more than half said developing managers and leaders is the No. 1 objective for their organizations and that coaching, leadership communication and team collaboration are specific leadership skills in greatest demand.

One of the challenges is identifying these skill gaps in employees, said Michael Chavez, CEO of Duke Corporate Education in Durham, North Carolina. You can tell from a résumé or work experience if a candidate can program software or build spreadsheets but when it comes to determining whether they can speak publicly, lead a team or collaborate effectively, it gets murky.

“These skills don’t fit easily into any one discipline but they are vital to all of them,” Chavez said.

Because soft skills are applicable in virtually every aspect of business, Duke integrates them into all of their leadership development content, often using what Chavez called “error-based learning” to help learners see where they fall short.

In these courses, participants are put into difficult situations and tasked with solving problems as a group. In one course based on a real life case study created with Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, leaders play the role of members of an emergency room team who have to diagnose and treat an unconscious patient whose family disagrees over what is wrong and what medication he is taking.

The course is designed to underscore the importance of teamwork and making quick educated guesses under pressure. “In most cases, they kill the patient through inaction,” Chavez said.

It’s a visceral experience that replicates how participants make decisions in real life and shocks them into realizing where their communication and leadership skills are lacking. That shock is an important first step to changing behavior and building soft skills.

“We hold up a mirror so they can see what’s not working then we teach them skills to do better,” Chavez said.

Soft Skills Drive Business

Developing strong leadership and communication skills isn’t just useful for managers leading internal teams. It can have a real impact across the business especially for companies like Deloitte whose clients rely on their consultants for guidance.

While Deloitte’s people have to be up to date on the latest technology trends and industry data, they also have to be able to communicate those trends and build relationships with clients and cross-functional teams. “Without professional and relationship-building skills they won’t be as effective,” Knowlton said.

Rather than teaching soft skills in separate courses, Deloitte integrates them into programming often through experiential learning where participants must collaborate to solve technical or industry-specific challenges. During Service Relationship Mastery courses, senior consultants have to learn how to become trusted advisors on topics of importance to customers. The course covers industry knowledge but the content requires them to role-play in teams using core people skills including empathy and engaging through meaningful dialogue. It’s an optional course but it is always booked, Knowlton said.

“Our people know that it’s not enough to know everything about cybersecurity or analytics,” she said. “How they deliver that information to clients is just as important.”

Much like the Webasto example, most Deloitte courses are led by senior executives, thereby reinforcing the value of soft skills development to the next generation of consultants. “When they see a leader take time out of their work schedule to practice, it sends the message that learning these skills are important for the business,” Knowlton said.

The realization that soft skills are core to business has led learning leaders and vendors to incorporate them across courses to ensure everyone continues to develop them. With the rapid pace of change and disruption in global markets, it is vital that individual contributors and leaders have the skills to predict and adapt to change, said Stephane Charbonnier, chief human resources officer at L’Oréal USA.

“Soft skills and technical skills are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

L’Oréal offers leadership development at every stage of an employee’s career beginning with new hires who complete training on self-awareness as part of the onboarding program. They also provide courses for first-time managers and senior leaders who often attend multiday off-site training through Harvard, MIT and other programs.

The company’s investment in soft skills training is fully supported by the executive team because they see the business benefits, Charbonnier said. His team conducts regular surveys of the impact of training across the organization and he said they’ve found consistently strong correlations between leaders with effective soft skills and the level of engagement on their teams.

“The leaders with greatest soft skills deliver our best business results,” he said.

21st Century Skills

Providing soft skills training early in the career development process is becoming increasingly important as millennials and Generation Z candidates flood the workforce. College students today are advised to build their science, technology and math skills if they want to find a job but as a result, soft skills training appears to be suffering.

Despite the fact that the National Education Association has identified the 4 Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity) as the most important skills young people need to succeed in the workplace, most college graduates come up short. In a 2016 Payscale report on workforce skill preparedness, hiring managers listed critical thinking, problem solving, attention to detail and leadership as the soft skills most lacking among young job seekers.

This fact has forced companies to ramp up new-hire training programs to close the gap, as well as show young workers the company is investing in their future. Charbonnier has begun to promote L’Oréal’s commitment to leadership development for new hires as a way to engage millennials and position the company as an employer of choice for the next generation.

“We develop talent who can anticipate, innovate and thrive in a constantly changing economy,” he said. “We want recruits to see that we will give them the skills to be confident in the workplace.”

Providing leadership development options may give companies a competitive advantage when recruiting millennials, who expect to move quickly into leadership roles. A 2015 Hartford study showed 69 percent of millennials aspire to be leaders in the next five years and they said leadership training was the most important skill development they expect from their employers.

When that development doesn’t happen they are more likely to leave. Deloitte’s 2016 “Millennial Survey” showed that among millennials with plans to leave their companies in the next two years, 71 percent were unhappy with how their leadership skills were being developed, 17 percentage points higher than those intending to stay beyond 2020.

The study also found the most loyal young employees are actively encouraged to aim for leadership roles and provided ample support and training to move into these roles. “Millennials are being put into complex leadership roles on multigenerational teams and they are eager to develop the skills to be successful,” Charbonnier said.

While the impact of soft skills training may be difficult to measure, the long-term benefits of having strong and engaging leaders is unquestionable. The impact of good soft skills training can also last a lot longer, Charbonnier added. Technical skills become obsolete but teaching employees how to communicate effectively and lead teams builds a company’s overall agility and resilience, which can mean the difference between success and failure.

“If you don’t build the soft skills of your people you won’t be around for long,” he said.

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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