FOUR WAYS TO CLOSE THE LEARNING-DOING GAP FOR FRONT-LINE MANAGERS

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FOREWORDWe’re in business to help organizations

achieve their goals by making sure their

employees have the knowledge and skills

they need to succeed. Our experience

and research led us to identify that one

audience organizations consistently

struggle to do this well for is front-line

managers. Many of the organizations we

work with and spoke to are unhappy with

their investments in developing front-line

managers (aka supervisors, team leads,

mid-level managers). We were puzzled.

Isn’t there a lot of training out their

already for front-line managers? What’s

the problem?

We decided to investigate and soon found that organization after organization bumped up against what we’ve come to call the learning-doing gap. They are clear on the importance of helping new managers transition from skilled individual producer to team leader and business manager, they feel good about the quality training content available but, the vast majority are frustrated by the lack of transfer back to the job after participating in training.

We puzzled over the learning-doing gap and this led us to define a new approach to developing front-line managers (an approach we hope is relevant in many other situations where there’s a learning-doing gap). In this white paper, we summarize what we found and the approach we’ve embraced. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Have a reaction? Please reach out to us!

Steve Lowenthal CEO Kineo US

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WANTED: A BETTER WAY TO DEVELOP FRONT-LINE MANAGERS

It’s been well documented that people leave managers – not companies.

According to BearingPoint Institute (2015), “The majority of today’s front-line managers were promoted as a result of high performance in pre-management roles, regardless of what those roles might have been. Thus, many promotions into front-line management positions result in ‘accidental’ managers who are ill-equipped to perform successfully in their new role.”

BusinessWire (2007) writes, “…nearly 60% of front-line managers underperform during their first two years in the seat, driving performance gaps and employee turnover across the entire frontline.” Given the importance of the front-line role, this shortfall matters. But there is a way to close this gap. According to the Leadership Roundtable of the Conference Executive Board, “Shifting an effective manager to an effective people manager can improve employee performance by 25%, employee engagement by 52%, and employee retention by 40%.”

So how effective are your managers at leading and building a team today? How can you ensure that your managers don’t underperform? How can you help your managers develop the skills they need to succeed?

Many organizations don’t have an adequate path for leadership development. In fact, your organization may not have a formal leadership development program in place at all. And even if you do, your managers may still struggle with applying their new knowledge on the job. KnowledgeAdvisors (2015) reports that “41% of training on Frontline Leader Development is not applied back on the job.” What can we do to make sure all that newly acquired know-how actually makes it back to the office?

“NEARLY 60% OF FRONT-LINE MANAGERS UNDERPERFORM DURING THEIR FIRST TWO YEARS”

Let’s say that you’re one of those organizations that has an effective training and support in place to get your front-line managers. You still probably struggle with quantifying the results you achieve. According to The ROI Institute, 96% of Fortune 500 CEOs want to know the business impact of their learning and development programs. Only 8% do now.

OF FORTUNE 500CEOS WANT TO KNOWTHE BUSINESS IMPACT

OF THEIR LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

PROGRAMS

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“Developing first line managers remains one of the biggest challenges in business today. Solutions that help bring a complete focus to developing new leaders are critically important to organizations of all sizes.”

Josh Bersin, Principal, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP

WHAT HOLDS TODAY’S SOLUTIONS BACK?According to Bersin, it has not been simple to get help from the leadership training market. “Leadership solutions in the market remain fragmented, forcing companies to build their own custom solutions” (Redesigning the Organization, 2015).

Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of leadership development offerings readily available today:

• Asynchronous On-Demand: You purchase access toa library of training, resource materials, and supportmaterials. This is typically fairly inexpensive. Keyvendors include SkillSoft, Lynda.com, and HarvardBusiness School Publishing.

• Live face to face: You may use a F2F trainingprovider. Typically, the training provider will runanything from an afternoon session to a severalday workshop, focusing on topics like coaching ormanaging performance.

Companies then piece together their leadership development offerings from these offerings. With both approaches, it’s about getting content to participants. But the biggest gap we see is that there’s typically very little emphasis on creating an environment in which managers will then use these new skills and knowledge back on the job.

In short, under today’s approaches we do our best to provide strong content and then sit back and hope that participants will put it to use. After they consume the content, we then tend to lose track of participants. Evaluation gets lost in the process and so we never really know if the solution actually made a difference.

So what’s the answer? We think there is a way to make a difference. What does that look like? Up next, we’ll dig into where we think we should be going.

FOUR PRINCIPLES FOR BETTER OUTCOMESWhat specific changes will lead to an

improved solution to front-line manager development? Our goal is twofold: for participants to be able to systematically transfer what they learn to the job –

basically, we want participants to become better managers – and for organizations to see clear and measurable results.

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To achieve these goals, we adhere to four

key design principles:

Shift the perspective from

“event” to “journey”.

Wire in deliberate practice.

Build a partnership between each

participant and his/her manager.

Make progress concrete and visible.

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Imagine that Sue is a new front-line leader who has had several direct reports complain that they just don’t know what she expects after she gives them new work. Also imagine that Sue is one of the 5% … she is a rock-star self-directed learner. So she decides to improve her ability to set expectations. What might she do about it?

PRINCIPLE 1: SHIFT THE PERSPECTIVE FROM “EVENT” TO “JOURNEY”

Think about when you have

become proficient at something

new. Was it as simple as taking a

training session? Or was it more

of a journey?

As people develop proficiency in

a new skill, there’s a repeatable

and systematic journey that they

go through.

• Engage: Sue is one of the 5%. Based on thefeedback from her team members, she’s verymotivated to improve her skills. She’s fully engagedin her development process because she wants toget better. In Sue’s case, her intrinsic motivation iswhat’s moving her to improve.

• Diagnose: Sue has a general idea of what sheneeds to improve, but she knows she needs to getmore information to better diagnose andunderstand her skill gaps. Sue might poll some ofher team members about what works well and whatdoes not when she sets expectations. She may thinkabout when others have set expectations for her.Let’s say Sue determines that her key issue is thatshe simply doesn’t know what a good set ofexpectations looks like. After talking with her teammembers, she understands that when she setsexpectations, her team often walks away unclear onexactly what is to be done by when and how it willbe judged.

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• Learn: Now that Sue knows where her gap is, she’sready to start learning. She’s targeted an area onwhich to focus and starts exploring some tools andresources. She runs across the SMART (Specific,Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound)model, which is a good framework for definingexpectations. She finds some great articles andeven some free elearning to help her gain a deeperunderstanding of SMART and get exposure to anumber of cases and examples.

• Apply: With her new skills and knowledge, Sue isready to try applying SMART in her conversationsfor a couple of weeks.

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Gauge learning success. Is training complete or is more needed?

ASSESS

Practice newly acquired skills and knowledge in real world applications

APPLY

ENGAGEShow value to motivate learning

Identify barriers to success and determine action steps

DIAGNOSE

Go through learning activities, classroom, elearning, etc.

LEARN

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• Assess: After a few weeks of practice, Sue takessome time to reflect on her new skills and evaluatehow she’s doing. She sits down with a few of herteam members to get their feedback and realizesthat she has to extend her effort a bit more. Shedecides that when she sets expectations, sheshould also discuss with her team members howshe will manage progress going forward.

Now, what Sue did in our example scenario wasn’t particularly fancy and didn’t require expensive investments. In a very lean and natural way, Sue tackled her own performance problem. If we look at the path she took, we see she followed a journey that went in systematic steps from Engage through Assess.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get everyone to behave this way? While we can’t expect everyone to create their own journey to proficiency, we can create a structured journey they can follow.

An improved solution for developing front-line managers shouldn’t just include the Learn stage. It should start before the presentation of knowledge and go beyond it. It should take participants on a structured learning journey.

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PRINCIPLE 2: WIRE IN DELIBERATE PRACTICE

In many training programs,

participants learn something new

and go forth into the world with

their knowledge. And then we just

cross our fingers and hope that

they apply it on the job. All too

often, that just doesn’t happen.

We all know how awkward it can be to try out new skills. You may not be very good at them yet. You may stumble over the process or miss a step. Someone may contradict what you were taught, calling it into question. You may forget a key concept. You may even doubt yourself and get frustrated along the way.

A critical step in the journey from a new skill to proficiency is taking the time for deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means intentionally putting new skills to use on the job via a highly structured activity with the specific goal of improving performance. We’re not leaving anything to chance with this model; we’re not just hoping people will apply their new skills, we’re making sure they practice these new skills for better transfer back to the job—and ultimately to create better outcomes.

So, in Sue’s example above, after she discovered the SMART model, she then practiced applying it in her conversations with her team members. An improved solution for developing front-line managers should require participants to conduct real-life practice activities as part of the very fabric of the program. For those of us that design learning experiences, we should design the opportunity for deliberate practice into our programs. We need to provide the structure for deliberate practice and—more importantly—provide the structure for debriefing afterward where the participant can reflect on and learn more from the experience.

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PRINCIPLE 3: BUILD A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN EACH PARTICIPANT AND THEIR MANAGER

So let’s ask a meta question right

now: who’s really responsible

for a front-line manager’s

development? The training

department? HR? The talent

development team? Maybe. But

isn’t it primarily the responsibility

of the front-line manager and

their manager? Isn’t the role of

the talent development group

really to provide the system and

environment which systematically

enables that front-line manager

and their manager to succeed?

Unfortunately, participants’ managers are not typically part of their development plan. Instead, talent development takes on the responsibility to produce “good” managers.

But for a participant to become “good”, he or she will likely need hours of coaching and guidance in the field. And who’s best suited to that process? The participant’s manager, of course!

A program to develop front-line managers should provide structure for a learning partnership between front-line managers and their managers. A program should lay out just how a participant will receive guidance and support from their manager. This means that managers-of-participants will also likely require support in the form of training, guides, and instruction. It takes a village, sometimes. Let’s be sure we design development programs that take that village into account.

“ISN’T A FRONT-LINE MANAGER’S DEVELOPMENT PRIMARILY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE FRONT-LINE MANAGER AND HIS OR HER MANAGER?”

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PRINCIPLE 4: MAKE PROGRESS CONCRETE AND VISIBLE

Clearly, the performance of your

front-line managers matters.

According to the Leadership

Development Roundtable of

the Corporate Executive Board,

“Shifting an effective manager to

an effective people manager can

improve employee performance

by 25%, employee engagement

by 52%, and employee retention

by 40%.” That’s going to have an

impact on your bottom line, no

matter how you slice it.

And yet it’s hard to carve out time for front-line managers to work on their development plans. These are busy people, often caught in the tension between still trying to complete day-to-day tasks while also stepping up to manage their teams. To gain buy-in to your leadership development program and sustain that commitment to developing a front-line leader’s skills, we need to make those gains concrete and visible to your organization.

An improved solution for developing front-line managers should provide a scorecard of impact measures. These may start with “did we enable managers to become proficient?” but should also reach to metrics that business sponsors care about such as retention, productivity, and employee engagement.

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PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICEReady to put these principles to work at your

organization? See what kinds of changes your

organization makes in how you develop tomorrow’s

leaders when you:

• Shift the perspective from eventto journey. Create a structuredjourney from ‘engage’ to ‘assess’ foryour managers to follow.

• Wire in deliberate practice. Designthe opportunity for learners topractice their new skills on the job –and provide the structure fordebriefing afterwards.

• Build a partnership between eachparticipant and their manager.Create support and guidance for themanagers of learners so they canbecome part of the developmentplan.

• Make progress concrete and visible.Provide a scorecard of impactmeasures so that results can bevisible to the rest of the organization.

Taking a broader perspective, how much value would you unleash in your organization if all of the investments you made in training actually transferred into performance on the job. Would the ideas we propose here help you systematically cross the learning-doing gap not just for front-line managers but for other roles as well?

MEET THE TEAMS BEHIND MANAGEMENTPLUSManagementPlus is the result of combining award-winning learning design skills from Kineo US with deep expertise in management development from The Oxford Group.

About Kineo

Kineo is a global workplace learning company that helps businesses improve their performance through learning and technology. Kineo provides a full range of services to support the design and delivery of your learning program.

www.kineo.com

About The Oxford Group

The Oxford Group helps global organizations get the best from their people, unleash hidden talent, and successfully manage their business through times of change. The Oxford Group offers a full curriculum of training programs and one-to-one coaching at all levels of the leadership pipeline.

www.oxford-group.com

Kineo and The Oxford Group are part of The City & Guilds Group, a leader in global skills development.

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