Link #29 🌱🌿🌳 Being connected to value and understanding behaviors
Series: Links between L&D, strategy and value creation. Part 5
Recently, I've had a nice conversation with Liz Ștefan, the host of the L&D Spotlight podcast. Here's the part where we discussed about being connected to value and understanding behaviors (min. 19:18 in the podcast episode).
Explore the other parts in the series here.
Liz: I was just thinking now about something I became aware of while building the company. So, since we are a startup, we are focusing a lot of our activity on interacting with our customers and extracting the value, the jobs-to-be-done, how to do them better, the objective of each task, and trying to figure out the way that supports them better. And sometimes it it technology, sometimes it's something else, sometimes it's a procedure, an approach and so on.
And I was thinking now that there's this concept called 'value chain' and, if I'm hearing you right, an L&D professional could look at the way people get self-organized in those communities of practice and being aware or watching the value chain, they would go to those places where additional value could be extracted.
For example, a team of developers is getting together to talk about a specific topic and an L&D professional could intervene and say: Why don't you record that session? Or take some notes and document the process, or if you're doing some sort of practical examples, why don't you record that on a shared screen and we can just save it and you can have it later in our knowledge bank, or refresher or something like that. Is this the kind of enablement that you're talking about?
Bülent: Yes, so one key idea that you mentioned is to be aware of this value.
What's valuable for our colleagues?
What's valuable for our customers?
What's valuable for our partners?
And for other types of stakeholders?
Because I've seen, for example, cases when the L&D team created value not only for the internal stakeholder, so for the colleagues they had, but also for the customers. And it was a very meaningful experience for the L&D professionals to be aware that through what they do best, so understanding learning and development as these activities that create value for the individual, for the team, for the organization. They managed to create value also for the customers, so not only in the internal boundaries of the organization.
So this idea of understanding value, value proposition, value chain, or this value ecosystem that learning and development can amplify in this knowledge society that we have. Where, for example, many companies, are transposing their social capital and intellectual capital and other types of human-related capital into added value for their customers and capturing financial capital. So capturing financial value out of this exchange.
Value is a key idea to be aware of.
And the other key idea, connected to this, is that of "behaviors".
Behaviors are these ways of transforming inputs to outputs. You can create this value through activities that are made of behaviors.
It's useful, then, if you want to amplify, if you want to encourage specific behaviors that together, in a collective context, create more value, maybe it would be important for L&D professionals to also understand these behaviors.
Of course, there are connected fields like behavior change. If you want to encourage new behaviors in your organization, if you want to encourage existing behaviors that are not done as frequently as the business or the organization might need, as an L&D professional you might have the levers, the types of interventions and of interacting with the others to be able to inspire and sustain this behavior change.
So these two concepts, value and behavior, I think are relevant for our conversation.
Explore the other parts in the series.
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.
