Resistance to learning, like resistance to change, is a matter of both the head and heart.
In this True Snacks mini-episode, Melissa Janis shares how she helps leaders recognize the need to use both and adopt learning agility as their number one competency.
She is passionate about helping the first-time manager understand the awesome responsibility they have taken on, and that learning agility will become their best friend when it comes to growth and navigating change and ambiguity.
In this episode, Melissa answers the following questions:
- How can I learn new skills as a manager?
- What does learning agility mean?
- What training should new managers have?
- Why do people resist training?
For more information about Melissa and her company: Melissa Janis Consulting: https://www.melissajanis.com/
Music in this episode created by Ian Kastner.
“True Snacks” is a series of excerpts from the "What Do You Know To Be True?" podcast. The purpose behind this series to share some of the key learning moments from the podcast.
"What Do You Know To Be True?" is hosted by Roger Kastner and is a Three Blue Pens production.
"What Do You Know To Be True?" is recorded on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish people. To discover the ancestral lands of the indigenous people whose land you may be on, go to: https://native-land.ca/
[00:00:02] If I Was Your Co-Chie or Your First Time Manager, Who's Having Challenges Learning Into That Growth Area? Because of An attitude Issue. What Would You Do To Help Me?
[00:00:13] So a couple of Thoughts. One is just because we understand that We're going outside our comfort zone with our head. It doesn't mean our heart came along. And so that frustration of things not working.
[00:00:33] I have come to embrace that as part of the process of learning. Part of the answer is that understanding the value in the struggle. The stuff that comes easy isn't real growth.
[00:00:49] It's just like improvement. But the real demonstrable growth is when you work through it and come out the other side with something that you weren't able to do before.
[00:01:00] Right? Now for new managers or managers or leaders at any level, I have dealt with leaders at all levels who don't think it's necessary to have meaningful conversations with employees beyond status updates. I thought with pretty senior leaders who never met with their
[00:01:17] direct reports. But at the end of the day, if somebody doesn't really see value and whatever you think would be valuable for them, it's about asking coaching questions and helping them
[00:01:31] see the value. Give you a great example. I have a dear friend who is very senior in an organization and the president's office was on the way to her office. She reported directly to the
[00:01:45] president of the company and she was very frustrated because every day when she came in, she'd walk past the president's office and the president would call her in and she'd chat for half an hour.
[00:01:56] And she just wanted to get her work done. She's like I get in early. I want to get to my desk and I just want to sit down and get going and I waste a half an hour every day with my boss.
[00:02:08] Okay. So this one's easy, right? You know where I'm going to go with this. I said so your first task every day is to kill a half an hour with your boss and when you sit down at your desk,
[00:02:18] you can tick that off that you did that. And once it became a task, she was totally okay with it. But it had to be seen as a task, right? And we could talk all day long about
[00:02:31] trying to influence your boss and how would you use that time to maybe pitch what you're looking for, the value of building that relationship but she was so task driven that it needed to be framed in a way that she could accept it.
[00:02:49] The reason I decided to focus specifically on the new manager, one to one, was because I found that disproportionately even when training is available for managers, fundamental manager training. When that's available for managers, you know who doesn't go, the high stakes manager
[00:03:11] and it's more often than not at least you know in my anecdotal evidence, people in STEM functions. But they promote the top engineer to run the engineering team. He's not going to training.
[00:03:28] And if he does, he's going to turn his camera off and he's going to keep coding. And by the way, usually is a key but it could be a shape. So so I thought that's a person who would
[00:03:40] really benefit from a one-to-one experience that was tailor-made and tightly focused on what they needed to learn so the what's in it for them was really high and they weren't wasting any time
[00:03:51] learning things they didn't need. You can really move the needle. The theme I'm pulling from this is the power of learning must include an approach that speaks to both the heart and the head.
[00:04:05] And in a webinar with 500 people, it's really hard to connect with the hearts of 500 people. I think that's fair. The whole approach to learning where it's really based on the instructors availability and their time, what's convenient for them and not the students.
[00:04:24] You're learning a skill that you may not use for six months or six weeks or six days and yet it's the application and learning reflection and then trying it again. And that sort of
[00:04:37] that grind that we need. But that's exactly what ran through my head. That was exactly it, right? That when you look at curriculum for new managers and sometimes they go cradle to grave
[00:04:51] so it starts with hiring people. And I go why would the programs start with hiring people? Like that's the employee life cycle but if you don't have any open positions you don't need to know this
[00:05:07] hiring should be just in time delivery. And so, you know, to your point it's about making it incredibly relevant and practical and I think that's one of the reasons why early on
[00:05:20] I was making a decision when I went back to school in my late 30s and to earn my master's at Columbia. I was debating if I was going to go back to be a social studies teacher or move into corporate training.
[00:05:32] And I decided that corporate training was the route because what I love about learning is being able to do something with it. It wasn't and I love social studies and I loved having conversations
[00:05:48] about it but even more so was being able to help people do better. And so one of the challenges that we have and particularly when you're delivering large-scale webinars or even webinars
[00:06:05] without more of design around it to support the stickiness of the training is that we grow the knowing doing that. So people say I've heard this concept before I know this right? I know it
[00:06:18] right and so I have been known to open my sessions with you may not hear anything new. I may not tell you today anything you have not heard before but before you decide to let me know that
[00:06:35] I'm going to challenge you to ask yourself are you doing it consistently? Because if you understand the importance of feedback and you've heard how to give feedback but you've never given it, it's the same as not knowing how. It's about the doing.