Author: Sharon Clews

Do organisations really believe in Learning & Development?

| Sharon Clews

I’ve been working in Learning & Development for quite a few years now and it has occurred to me during that time, that perhaps organisations could be a little better at really working to embed the learning they provide.

We all know that as an employee, I am responsible for my own learning journey. I am responsible for whatever I want to be curious about and whatever I want to learn. It is my responsibility to ensure that I sign up for whatever courses we have on offer in the curriculum (if indeed we are fortunate enough to work in organisations that have a curriculum!). I attend those courses – some of which I can nominate for myself, some I have to be nominated for and some that are compulsory (I’m looking at you FCA). I don’t usually have to learn anything from them, nor prove these new skills, but I can go along!

With the requirement of mandatory learning in industries such as Financial Services, learning can get a bad rap. All that required “learning” doesn’t allow for time to do some cool, fun, proper developmental stuff – that will actually progress our brains, give us better skills and not just learn how to keep the money laundering under control.

But it’s more than that for me. As employers, why isn’t it a responsibility to ensure your people are developed during their tenure? In any profession (accounting, law, medicine etc) we are expected to undergo CPD (Continued Professional Development) to stay relevant. Yet, we can join a company, work there for many years and not be expected to continue to develop our existing skills, let alone create new ones. There might be “courses” available to us we can choose to do. Diligent people leaders will have discussions with their teams about their own development, but organisationally – where is the expectation that they will invest in you, not just by paying you, but by developing you? Where is the duty of care to ensure that you leave a better version of yourself than when you joined? Obviously you will have the experience of working for a great brand or an industry specialist – but what other learning have you done? Around leadership or self-awareness or developing others or creating an agile environment or future trends for the business and your people…..the list goes on.

If organisations were really serious about ensuring they kept their top talent – not just attracted them, there would be some kind of agreement going in. Expectations would be set around personal and professional development over their time there. If I join an organisation as a permanent employee, wouldn’t it be great to have a conversation focused initially around my development? (I’m a career interim and coach – we don’t count when talking about development…..is that another blog post??)

I have been in plenty of interviews that ask how I keep myself current in certain industries, or around my skillset, but once we join – are companies really having these continued conversations with their talent? I imagine this would look like a bit of a coaching discovery call. You know, identify things like what their goals are; what they want to achieve whilst they are there, where do they want to be in a few years from now, what would success look like? What’s the journey they go on together with their employer to help them reach their goal? How does that benefit the organisation and the individual?

That’s a sizeable conversation and a sizeable investment in time and obviously money. But aren’t our people worth it? And how much more are they worth to you and your teams, when they are not only smarter and more highly skilled, but when they are engaged, content and focused on a shared outcome?

I think it’s time to reframe what we mean by Learning & Development and CERTAINLY time to reframe not just how we identify TALENT (a whole other post!), but how do we keep them in that learning mindset?

Let’s be honest, this is no longer a lifetime kind of commitment by organisations. According to Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis of Amazing If, we are far more likely to have a Squiggly Career than ever before. That is – one that doesn’t necessarily follow a linear path. Future generations are more likely to take roles that interest them and go where they are invested in. We are talking here about having a budget – sure, but in the main, we are talking about sitting down with our people, identifying the skills they have – (the same ones we interviewed them for and hired them for), building on their strengths and helping them out around their challenges.

That sounds like a pretty good investment to me.

No small amount of courage

| Sharon Clews

I recently sent an email of thanks to my old therapist. She herself isn’t actually old, but you know what I mean.

I value her so highly and together, we worked through an enormous amount of change over six years of sharing her office. They were gruelling sessions and sometimes the toughest times of my life. Being able to go inwards and work on myself was a great privilege for me and a gift I will never forget.

She reminded me that the work we do on ourselves requires commitment and no small amount of courage. Let’s be honest – it’s a MASSIVE amount of courage we need – I think she understated that! Not just courage in showing up every week when at times it felt like I had nothing to talk about, but courage going to the dark places of shame and discomfort that have allowed me to move on and improve my life, my experiences and my world view.

I chose psycho-dynamic psychotherapy when I realised that not all of my relationships were going well. And I knew it was time to look inwards, to stop blaming other people and start looking at what I was doing that might not have been helping that.

We talked about over 50 years of learned behaviours, experiences, fears and aspirations and some of those days were golden moments and some of those days I would come home and cry on the couch for hours, remembering some of the things that made me who I am.

I wouldn’t trade any of them. In her words, she saw someone in our first meeting who had potential. Potential for change. Manifesting this potential as we well know, takes endurance to accept that there are parts of ourselves that need changing.  The most difficult part, is making sense of how we came to be this person, being able to bear those painful realisations and in turn allowing the person we want to be to emerge, the truer version of our self.

The most difficult part, is making sense of how we came to be this person, being able to bear those painful realisations and in turn allowing the person we want to be to emerge, the truer version of our self.

It took me a long time in therapy to unravel my true self. It felt like a returning to something familiar. I think we are all born with kindness and compassion in our hearts – and things happen along the way to us that make us protect ourselves, or change who we really are. It took me a while to uncover the real, strong, flowing source of kindness and compassion I have now. And I am still – and will continue to be, a work in progress. I am now fortunate to use my skills to help others be kind to themselves. To let ourselves off the hook – to stop beating up on ourselves. That stuff gets really boring after a while.

The coaching work I do is based on self-kindness and self-compassion. It’s not therapy – it is most definitely coaching. Kindness and compassion are tools we can all use in whatever version of self improvement we choose. It won’t end well if we continue to beat ourselves up as a way of motivating ourselves towards achieving our goals.

We are attracted to kindness and compassion in others – there’s no reason why we can’t start with ourselves. When we know ourselves well enough – we can start to understand our own behaviour. We can make sense of our own reactions and our own responses not just to ourselves but to others. It’s a critical skill when leading a team – or being in any position of leadership that we first know ourselves in a way that makes us confident, consistent and caring. There is a real place for this kind of leadership. It achieves so much more than a command and control mindset – but it does take courage. This Emily McDowell image sums all of that up – our true selves are always there. We are powerful, creative, resourceful and whole exactly the way we are. We might just need a helping hand in unravelling.

This is what I mean by being kind and compassionate to ourselves.