Are you creating teachable moments?
Leaders who create teachable moments with intent, are creating a learning environment. These are the leaders people want to follow as they prioritise growth and development.
Gallup’s 2022 “State of the Global Workplace” report states that Employee Engagement in Australia is at an all time low at 17%. According to a 2019 LinkedIn study, 94% of employees said they would stay with their employer if it invested in their development.
With record low engagement, many industries working to capacity, resourcing and retention challenges, there has never been a greater need for Leaders to nurture talent.
The most effective way of nurturing talent and meeting the learning and development needs is on the job, not in the form of formal education and online courses. Formal training should only represent 10% of any learning and development strategy.
Research has long held that the rubber hits the road when we embrace the fact that 70% of what we learn we learn by doing, “on the job”, and the richness of this learning comes from leaders who are purposeful teachers and organisations have learning strategies that incorporate this intel.
GREAT leaders CREATE opportunities to teach, instruct, direct, advise, coach, support and guide whenever the opportunity arises - they look for these moments. The teaching is enriched with imparting wisdom, context and life lessons.
Sydney Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, has studied world-class leaders for more than a decade. He found that they make a point of personally imparting memorable lessons that fall into three categories: pointers on professionalism, technical knowledge and skills, and broader life lessons. You can read his findings in an HBR article here.
Create Teachable Moments
When I coach leaders who are struggling to meet learning and development needs, I often ask when is the last time they imparted wisdom or shared one of their own learnings, or left a meeting and used their own insights to teach others. Many either can’t recall or don’t really do it. Creating teachable moments requires a mindset of purposeful intent. Here are 4 quick tips:
1. Think like a teacher
When you find yourself working on something, or exposed to something, think “how can this information help others”, “how can I use this experience to develop someone else”, “what ‘curriculum’ could I develop that will impart wisdom and create a teachable moment for people in my team? Have a change of mindset to the experiences you are exposed to and turn them into teaching moments. Make it part of your mandate, your job description as a leader, to be a teacher.
2. Choose your environment
Creating teaching moments outside of the workplace “look and feel” like a learning moment typically devoid of any unnecessary distraction. It shows intent and purpose and will have a greater impact. Go for a walk, talking and walking is powerful, or over a coffee. For example, the award winning Head Chef who takes his chefs to experience other foods in other restaurants and uses the experience as both a teaching moment, imparting wisdom, giving feedback, as well as innovating, checking out the competition, and building rapport and relationships with his team.
3. Timing
Don’t wait for formal meetings or events to teach. Be instinctual and intuitive. If someone is finding something challenging, use the moment to create further context by teaching through storytelling. Purposefully carve out time to create teaching moments and do it frequently.
4. Don’t make it just about work
Share life lessons, impart information that will help people to grow and develop beyond just the job. Share learnings from wins and fails, what you did well, could have done differently, why it mattered and what you learnt and how you applied the learnings. Sports coaches are great at this, and always help their teams to keep their eye on the long term plan.
“Leaders who aren’t teaching
are only doing part of the job”
People become more engaged when they have context. Include the what and the why things are happening as part of the teaching moment. Providing context to key business decisions leads to a more meaningful connection to the vision and mission.
An added benefit is when you create teachable moments you show people that their learning and development needs can be met beyond a classroom. As a leader, if you set your mind to purposefully creating teaching moments, learning and development opportunities will never be missed.
This type of leadership behaviour nurtures talent and leads to improved outcomes.
If you would like to know more about our leadership and culture programs, our storytelling program, or how to create a program around “teachable moments” for high performance, reach out for a discussion.
