Link #30 🌱🌿🌳 Enabling new behaviors and a better culture
Series: Links between L&D, strategy and value creation. Part 6
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 enabling new behaviors and a better culture (min. 22:26 in the podcast episode).
Explore the other parts in the series here.
Liz: If I were to go back to your example of community of practice spontaneously forming inside a company, their conversation produces this tiny little nugget of value that could be used further for, let's say, a new joiner. And then, this addresses the value point.
Then, the L&D professional, thinking about the potential behavior that could enable this kind of value to perpetually be created in the future, could speak to those people who put together these communities of practice, help them form this new behavior of, for example, capturing the value from those meetings, and then every once in a while remind them: Hey, did you recently have this meeting with your community of practice? Did you capture the knowledge there? This is where the knowledge bank is. This a cute format in which you could summarize your ideas. Maybe you can do a recording of the screen the next time and so on.
I believe this is where the L&D professional could become a behavior change enabler, right?
Bülent: Yes, and of course there are many, many behavior change strategies. So ways of influencing, encouraging behaviors. Because a close word to "behavior" is "habit".
So you can have specific behaviors that might happen at some point sporadically, on the go, people doing specific things. Or you could ask yourself: Ok, from my role, from the types of interactions and activities that we could do as the L&D team, or as the single L&D person in this organization, how could we nurture the development of these valuable or healthy habits that contribute to the learning and development in the organization? To the strengthening of the learning culture?
Because if you're going into this culture space, which is very complex, with many things interacting with each other in order to create this culture, behaviors are one element in there.
Other elements are: the language that is being used, various norms, various mindsets and so on. At some point I identified 4 levels of depth, of cultural elements, with 5 elements each. So around 20 cultural elements that are continuously interacting with each other to form the culture.
For which the L&D team could influence, even in terms of vocabulary, in terms of the words being used, it might have an influence to use some words that convey some specific meanings that are more helpful for the organization.
Let's take "innovation", for example. It's a word that's been used a lot. It might be very fuzzy. What might help is to bring some new words in this innovation space, but that have more specific meaning. Like "product discovery", or "jobs-to-be-done" but with this risk of being understood differently by different people.
So you need to have this coherence of what jobs-to-be-done are. Are the colleagues in the product team using jobs-to-be-done as a concept, similarly to the colleagues in the sales and marketing and customer support team?
To this specific use case of new words that might help the organization progress and create value, L&D could create or encourage these conversational spaces inside the organization to try to help people align. And it's kind of a negotiation of the meaning.
So, when we're talking about "innovation", when we're talking about "strategy", which is another word that it's a bit loaded, maybe some other words can help that specific organization progress with what they need and L&D can have an influence on all these cultural elements.
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.
