Hopefully, you have been with us for a while and you have read some of our previous posts like Measuring your Success and Making Learning Stick. You won’t be lost if you have not – and you can always check them out later – but they are helpful – and we are nothing if not helpful around here!
So we are here to give you our seven ways to build your learning measurement muscles, to really get into the data and find out what is working and not working – and how to navigate changes to your learning strategy.
Seven Steps to a Building your Learning Measurement Muscles:
Build a continuous improvement/innovation mindset in your team. As we shared in Learning Team Skills of now and the future, we discussed the importance of evolving your teams to include new skills and roles to support the execution of your learning strategy. A Quality Manager/Data Analyst role can introduce a layer of continuous improvement and help your teams evolve a mindset of continuous improvement and innovation.
Celebrate what is working and replicate it. Collaborate and work together to solve what isn’t working empowering your teams to figure out how to solve. In most cases, they already have figured this out. Give them a voice. You as the leader don’t always have to come up with the answer and definitely don’t have to receive the credit. Recognize publicly your teams. A good leader knows they will succeed only if their team succeeds.
Foster a team environment of innovation and positive disruption. Enable teams the freedom to test, build, succeed and fail. Through trial and error, you can find ways to improve and also help your team learn. Around here we call that making good trouble.
Find the quick wins and build on them. Come up with 2 or 3 quick wins you can do this year – most improvements don’t require a ton of money, ideas and smart people can go a long way.
Define a process. What is your process? Many teams don’t document their internal processes or their services. How do you know how to measure your success if you don’t have consistent practices? Let your team design these processes and be part of building that foundation.
#Hackaton. Sponsor an innovation contest. Hackathons are very popular as groups come together in teams to figure out how to solve quickly a common problem. Find ways for your team to work together innovatively with other parts of the organization that may have domain expertise you do not have. You may come up with the next “big thing”.
Tell Your Stories. Share your success by creating a visual of all the improvements your team made this quarter – through seeing how a team adds value, this will help energize teams to continually improve and feel good they are helping the business thrive.
Learning measurement is hard stuff, if it were not, everyone would do it well – but that does not mean you should not do it.
This is our list to get you started – if you are still not sure where to go – let us know – we love these conversations and would be happy to share our experiences.
We are all on this journey together, and as we say around here, together we learn.
