Digital learning in the flow of work

Digital learning in the flow of work with Paul Middleton from 1st90

Developing habits to optimize performance

I've got a great interview for you about digital learning and learning in the flow of work, of course, a term that was popularized by the great Josh Bersin, who I think of as the most popular man in HR. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. I certainly follow him and all his thoughts on LinkedIn and his blog. I was lucky to have him as the opening keynote speaker at our conference, the Talent Development Think Tank back in January 2020. Josh is not our guest for this episode. He has been on the podcast in the past. We talked about learning in the flow of work and what HR looks like today and in the future. If you haven't read that, I highly recommend you to go back and check that out, as well as follow him on LinkedIn.

My guest is Paul Middleton, who has developed a cool digital learning habit-based app for learning in the flow of work called 1st90. You'll get to learn all about his and my perspective on learning in the flow of work and how that app works when we get into the interview. Before we get started, a couple of things I want to mention. This show has been running for a few years now. We passed 100,000 downloads and we're still growing. I am so grateful to everybody who has tuned in, read, joined, and supported. I went and looked at the ratings and reviews on iTunes. If you've been tuning in for a while and you have not left a review on iTunes, I would love for you to go over and do that. Give this podcast its due.

I want to read a couple of reviews to you because I hadn't looked at them in a while. There are some nice words here. One of them is from Jimmy Rose, who I've gotten to know. He says, “Great mix of ideas and execution. There are so many podcasts on the world of management science and human resources that focus on the meta-frameworks and ideation of great thinkers. That’s great and I love it. What I’ve really enjoyed about Andy’s podcast is the mixture of people who do a lot of thinking and research and those who are in the day-to-day trenches of talent development. Vision is wonderful for setting true north. I also need to hear about the visceral experiences of my colleagues who are struggling to bring a vision to life.”

Jimmy, thank you so much for that kind and honest review. I appreciate it. I've heard that a lot from followers. There are tons of great theories out there. You can read a lot of books. My goal for this when I started it was to interview real talent development practitioners, leaders, and chief learning officers. People who are doing it and talk about their real successes and challenges so that you can learn from them. We often don't get a chance to go out and hear what other people are working on.

The second review I want to read from you is from Parris’ Mom. I don't know who that is, but that's the username on iTunes. The subject is, “Here's one of my secrets to being a better me.” Five stars. “I’ve had the pleasure of stumbling over this amazing podcast one day after doing some googling on L&D podcasts. Boy, did I make the right decision to hit listen because what I heard was almost life-changing. I listened on my way to work and had a positive influence on my entire day. I recommend that you listen. Have a notepad handy because you'll want to jot down so many gems heard in this podcast. Subscribe, you won't be disappointed.”

Digital Learning: Everyone has five or ten minutes during the day when they can be given an opportunity to learn something which they can immediately apply.

Thank you, Parris’ Mom. Parris, wherever you are, you're lucky to have a great mom who listens to this podcast. Thank you for that great review. To those of you who haven't left ratings and reviews yet, I'd love for you to jump onto iTunes. Take one minute and put in some stars and jot down a sentence about what you've gotten out of this podcast. I've heard so many great things. I'll read more of your reviews in the future. The other thing I want to mention to you is that this podcast has and is still sponsored by Advantage Performance Group, the company that I am affiliated with. We specialize in connecting companies with exceptional learning programs.

We've got partnerships with thought partners all over the US with amazing programs. We have been running a weekly webinar series. It's no pitch, no sales, just 30 minutes of great value followed by some Q&A. We've had webinars on the secret sauce to digital learning and learning in the flow of work from Paul Middleton, who is our guest. We've had webinars on how to learn during this pandemic and everybody is remote from Julie Winkle Giulioni who has been on this podcast. We've had webinars from some of our other thought leaders.

We've had one on multipliers and how to use multipliers during this pandemic. There's one from Brent Snow about decision-making. One from my colleague Christine DiDonato about generational learning and the importance of helping our early-career professionals take ownership of their careers. If you want to find any and all of these webinars, head to our website TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com where you can read all of our interviews. You can go up to Free Resources and you'll find Attend a Webinar. You'll find a lot of free learning journeys there.

One other program I want to mention is we do have a new program called Leading in a Moment of Crisis from our partners at BTS. It is a two-hour virtual simulation that models this global pandemic we're going through. If you want to help your leaders learn how to lead better through a crisis, this is a great solution to check out. You can reach out directly to me or you can go to our website at AdvantagePerformance.com and the information is right on the homepage. I want to send you now to our interview with my friend Paul Middleton, who I used to work with at BTS. He has developed a cool learning habit app called 1st90. Here's my interview with Paul.

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I am with Paul Middleton, who is an expert on digital learning and learning in the flow of work. Paul, welcome to the show.

[bctt tweet="Whenever you invest in any learning, the goal is always to optimize performance." via="no"]

Andy, I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited to have you on. This is going to be fun. Paul, you and I have known each other for quite a long time. We used to work together at BTS back in the old days. We were consulting, building, running workshops together, and flying all over the world. Funny enough, you and I never worked on a client together. I don't think we even worked on a project together. We just knew each other in the office, hung out on client trips, and things like that. Since then, we both left and went on to do bigger and better things. You've been doing some cool stuff in this area of digital learning and learning the flow of work, like helping companies figure out how they can get their people onboarded and learning faster using the newest technology. Before we go further into that, let me stop and let you explain a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you are now.

Thank you, Andy. I don't know why we never worked on a client together. Now, we're working together so that's good. Thank you for calling me an expert in this digital learning and learning in the flow of work. I think we're still learning. The journey we've been on in the last years was motivated by the previous experience we had years before then. When we founded 1st90, we were coming from the background of designing with your and the others highly immersive classroom experiences. What we observed was participants would leave engaged and highly motivated to change new behaviors. There would be that mindset shift. They would go back to the office the following Monday and find that they go back to their old habits. Nothing would change.

They want to change, most of the time, but we know how it is. Suddenly we're on back-to-back Zoom calls, traveling on sales meetings, or whatever that may be. It's hard to be disciplined and start to try new things. For us at 1st90, it was, how do we solve that problem about changing behaviors. Josh Bersin led it with this learning in the flow of work. It's ultimately how you find those moments during the day. Everyone has 5 or 10 minutes during the day, even the busiest CEO, where there's an opportunity to penetrate through the noise and give them an opportunity to learn something and immediately apply to start to build new habits that will drive performance. For us, that was the motivation. How do we get into the 5 to 10 minutes during a busy day?

To crack that, we looked at the consumer space. There's a lot of science around building new habits. The consumer space is the biggest inspiration for us, purely and simply because millions of people are using apps to change behaviors. That can be meditation with something like Headspace or language apps. My stepfather is learning Italian on Duolingo for 5 to 15 minutes a day, every day. In twelve months, he's not fluent but he's definitely progressed enormously. There are lots of examples like that and that was an inspiration for us, taking what's working in the consumer space and bringing it to the workplace. In summary, it's about building habits every day that will help a professional increase or accelerate their time to performance or elevate their performance. It's ultimately all about driving performance and identifying those. That's the journey we've been on, how we approached it, and how we continue to try and solve it.

Digital Learning: 1st90 is all about building habits that help a professional optimize their performance.

I love that you started with the consumer perspective and what is working in the consumer space. You and I have been in business for quite some time. You see how certain things work so well and get picked up by consumers. Companies still want to try to force these other things on their people that don't work because it's more secure or whatever it may be. I always think of a great example where there was a big shift in the working world when Apple came out with the iPhone. Before that, the company told you what technology you would use. Everybody was on a Blackberry. When the iPhone came out, people started bringing them to work and coming to IT to say, “I don't want the Blackberry. I want this iPhone.”

I think about how consumer apps have driven my behavior over the last years. I use the Calm app to meditate every single day. I never miss a day because I love the fact that I have a streak and I don't want to break the streak. I've tracked my steps using a Fitbit or Apple Watch. I connected with friends and had competitions about who's going to get more steps, which keeps us healthy. I'm on a lot of different health and fitness apps where you can check in with friends and see what they're doing. I think it's cool and it helps people get engaged. You just haven't seen that as much in the corporate space or learning space. I was curious as you started to approach and look at that, what are some of the mistakes or some of the things that you think companies in the corporate world have been getting wrong when they try to move to digital learning? For a long time, there's always been a movement of getting everybody together in a classroom to learn. We need to create some type of digital component but there have been so many failures over the years. Why is that?

It's almost forcing people to accelerate to digital and challenge what digital means. We're in an interesting period right now. I don't think the answer is Zoom because we're already getting burnt out on Zoom calls, Skype, or Teams. I find that the days are exhausting but that's the world we're in. For now, if you need to deliver learning over Zoom and it's critical for individuals in the business, it makes sense. It's an immediate short-term impact solution but I don't think it's the long-term solution. There are some observations that I’ve see is an LMS. We've invested in an LMS and we don't want any other tools.

We don't want any more applications, we've got an LMS. That's limiting in itself. You've got so many end-users that you're serving that you're limiting yourself to the capabilities of that LMS that's designed for you, not for the end-user. Does it have the user experience that is going to create that pool where people have expectations that it needs to be the same experience that I may get if I'm using Nume or if I'm using Expedia? Salesforce.com is good in terms of user experience. That's one mistake. Imagine if Apple approached it that way. Between Apple and the Play Store, the Apple Store is where it's just a plethora of apps to the consumer’s design. There's no control there. It's no different if you’re serving 10,000, 100,000, or 500 employees. Give them the choice and let them choose what helps them to drive performance.

In essence, whenever you invest in any learning, the outcome is to optimize performance. It doesn't matter what it is, that's the outcome you should be driving for. It's not to learn something. The outcome is to learn something that drives performance. That's where this notion of digital learning, being fixed on one platform and thinking that can serve everyone. I am a believer in giving choice and having multiple approaches because everyone learns in different ways. That's one thing that I've seen. That's probably a longer answer than you're looking for it. Choice is important. We see that in the consumer space. I would even challenge this notion of unlimited licensing, getting baked into a platform, and stuck with it. If we're inside a client and users aren't using it, then I want to embrace that with the client. I’ll think “We're not the right platform for you. I don't want you to feel that you have to stick with us if we're not helping to drive performance.” It's this utility model that’s letting the end-users make the choice.

The other thing is this notion of taking classroom content and putting it into a digital format. We did that in 2000 with eLearning. We're guilty of doing it now as well. We're rushing quickly with all this classroom content. We can't deliver classroom learning and we're just putting it into a zoom format or into a portal. It's eight hours and we condense it down to four hours. I would argue, “Is it delivering the outcome that you want?” If you want someone to sit in front of a screen for four hours and absorb everything, then great. It's more about what you want to do with it. As you think about digital learning, it's not about transferring knowledge, it's about getting people to do something different that will drive performance. Think about, “Is it weekly nuggets?” You don't have to use our approach in terms of microlearning. It’s weekly ways to deliver something to help people do something, learn from it, and then connect. Those are the two things. One is not giving the end-user who you're serving in your business the choice. Two, taking classroom content and making it into a digital format, assuming that you're going to drive the outcomes that you're looking for.

[bctt tweet="1st90 is less about the technology and more about the learning methodology." via="no"]

That first one is big. It's underrated. In 2019, I created and produced a trend report of the top five trends in talent development based on the over 100 interviews I've done with talent development leaders. I led a session on that at the Talent Development Think Tank where you were. One was eLearning at scale or digital learning. One of the other trends on there that is still vastly underrated was catering to the learners. What do learners want? Giving them a choice and understand that everybody learns in different ways. Not everybody wants to sit on Zoom all day. They might learn something they might learn in a different way or they may not have that much time for it. It totally validates that. You said something that I wanted to ask you more about. You said, “Outcomes drive behaviors,” or “Outcome drives learning.” Could you clarify what you meant by that?

What I meant was, what are the outcomes you're trying to drive for whatever learning initiative? I was mentioning to always look at any investment that you're making in learning on the client-side if I’m responsible for a population and I need to develop that population. If we think about talent development, what do we want to develop for them? You're going to make an investment, whether you're doing that internally or externally. We talked about business results but the outcome is ultimately, performance. You want to optimize performance. That's the outcome you're driving for. Any investment you do has to be linked to translating into an improvement in performance. Whether that's as a leader, individual contributor, or sales professional, performance looks different. At the end of the day, that is the outcome that you're driving for.

When you think about moving to digital, it's not that the solution shouldn't be how do we take this content, put it online, and make it digital. You should start with the end in mind. What's the performance we're trying to change here? What will help them perform at a higher level? It's not all of the content you've gotten in the classroom experience, maybe prioritize only 1/10 of it. If we could get everyone doing this, think of the impact we would have. Start with the end in mind. It's that notion of optimizing performance.

It's an important but underrated thing. We think, “This would be cool. Let's teach people this,” or “I think they might need this.” We want to start with what the objective and goal are. It even ties that into organizational objectives. You and I both have a lot of experience creating impact maps. We start with the organizational objective, what they want to achieve, and what behaviors we want to change as a result of this. What do we want people to learn? What are the objectives of the program? How do we want to set this up as an app, whatever it may be, to achieve that goal? It's not just about learning for learning's sake. You want to have a goal at the end of the day and then design something that's going to help you achieve those objectives.

When we started 1st90 and as you think about our learning approaches, technology is less important. It's more about the learning methodology or the approach. We give 5 to 10 minutes of learning a day. Every day, we're going to ask the individual to go and do something during the workday that they should be doing anyway. We'll give them a simple tool to go and perform that. Our point of view around this is that you need to compress the time between something that you learn and then applying it. You learn something and now, we want you to go and do something. Apply immediately. That, for us, is critical. That gets closer to delivering performance improvement. It's that notion of how you can compress that time from learning something new to applying it. A lot of the time, with learning, we think about the knowledge or learning we want and the application comes later. That's part of why we started it. You'd go to a two-day learning and then the following week, you go back to work. That time that’s gone by, the atrophy there is enormous.

Digital Learning: Digital learning is not about transferring knowledge. It is about getting people to do things differently to drive performance.

What's happening in between? The meetings and all that stuff?

Let's remove ourselves from talent development for a moment and look at other disciplines, activities, or skills that you want to develop. I was a big golfer growing up. Look at sports, music, or even cooking. We've all become great chefs being stuck at home. Every night, I'm creating something new. We've explored both cooking new meals and baking, which I'm not good at because I don't follow the recipes well. Let's take sports, for example, basketball. I've never been a basketball player but if you want to evaluate your performance and think, “I need to improve three-point shooting,” or “I need to improve my free throws,” then you would need to go and practice those. If someone gave you some instruction to improve that, you immediately need to apply it and practice. That's how you'll build that skill. You wouldn't sit and read a book on the theory of three-point shooting. I know it sounds silly, but that's how you master something or become better at something. Why would it be any different?

For example, a new manager says, “I want to be better at giving feedback and receiving feedback.” You can read and learn something. The best way for you to be better at giving and receiving feedback as a new manager is to do it and practice in the real world immediately. Maybe there’s a tool that can guide you. When we develop these actions, what we want you to do is go and give feedback to someone who's not performing to expectations. We say, “Here's a tool to help you. This is what I'm observing.” Through that, you're going to stumble and may make mistakes but you're going to build confidence. You're going to start to be stronger in that particular area. It's no different than giving and receiving feedback, coaching, setting expectations, or aligning with your manager. Whatever it may be, it's compressing that time between learning something and applying it in all areas of skills. I don't think it's any different from leadership or performing at work.

It's so important because you lose so much just by walking out the door or the time you spend in between. I’m glad you went to sports. It's a great metaphor. I also think it's funny that you chose to give an example in basketball. I get asked a lot about experiential learning. You and I grew up in this world of experiential learning so we know how important it is. A lot of people don't have that experience. I always bring it back to sports or the military. Look at elite athletes or the military. They spend most of their time practicing. They learn something and they practice it so that cognitive sports is in it and it sticks in their mind. When they get out on the field, they already know how to do the thing and they're ready to execute. When you get in the business world, we expect that we're going to send somebody an email or have a meeting and tell them, “Here's our new strategy. Go and do this with clients.” We expect them to do it without any practice at all. It's interesting.

Simulations are powerful ways to immerse into whatever the area may be to practice to build confidence. We've always said, “The power of the and,” so we still see classroom learning. Experiential, for me, is the only thing that I've seen work well in a classroom experience. We're focused more on that micro. Josh Bersin talked about macro and micro. I like that. We've focused on things like transitions. When I'm onboarding into a new company for the first time, what are those habits that will help me be successful here? How do I accelerate if I'm a new manager or a sales professional? It could be one of our clients. We're actually doing all managers and just elevating everyone. It's more micro. I agree with you. We want them to practice or apply as immediately as they can. Simulations are experiential for the macro and getting around the strategy. I see enormous value there. That's obviously where we've learned a lot in our past as well.

I've got a couple of questions. I want to go to this idea of learning in the flow of work and talk about time. One of the biggest excuses I get when I engage with a potentially new client and try to build a workshop with them is, “We can't take people out of the field. We don't have enough time. They're so busy,” or “There are so many things going on.” You've got a webinar called The Secret Sauce Learning. You led off with a survey or a poll about how much time people spend on email. I thought it was low, whatever the results were. I thought it was 90% of the day. Whenever you start talking about this idea of learning in the flow of work, which I know we borrowed from Josh Bersin, what does that mean?

[bctt tweet="In times like this, leaders need to start acknowledging and dealing with the human side of change." via="no"]

I forget now what the data is. I think it was 28% of the time we spent on email. That was a study by McKinsey. You're right, it probably is low, isn't it? We spend about 99% of our time on Zoom, 1% on email, and then nothing else. The purpose of that was, if you think about the flow of your day, especially for a large organization, they're on back to back meetings. I see it with a lot of my clients. They're on email throughout the day. Sometimes, they'll have lunch meetings or working lunch. Then out of commute, it could be 30 to 45 minutes, especially in the Bay Area or anywhere. You have the commute home and then you have family. It's difficult when you think about how busy everyone's schedule is. We're on 24/7. We should be so much more productive now with technology but we’re even busier than we probably ever have been. How do you penetrate through that?

Our view on this is that if you want to get into that stream or that flow of work, you need to fit within everyone's schedule. We've seen this with a lot of our participants, as well as users. Everyone has 5 to 10 minutes of learning. When we think about the flow, there are two things. We don't want to have more than 5 to 10 minutes of learning in the day. That could be a commute. It could be 30 minutes when you get to work before your first meeting. It could be while you're transitioning from meeting four to meeting five and you're waiting for the next meeting or sitting outside at a conference. It doesn't matter where that 5 to 10 minutes is. That's what we're trying to capture. What we want to deliver is something that's practical and relevant to that individual. If you're a new people manager, we understand you're going to be busy. What we're asking for you to commit to for 30, 45, 60 days is 5 to 10 minutes of learning a day. That's what we'll deliver.

We'll then ask you to then go and perform something. During your day, you're going to be meeting with direct reports or cross-functional partners. We're going to find an opportunity for you to go and apply what you've just learned. That's where these actions we give you, an action a day, with a tool and where all the challenges go and do this during your day. Those actions have to be relevant, simple, and deliver impact. They also have to be something that's practical and relevant for that individual. When we think about the flow of work, we're trying to inject ourselves into that stream and say, “Here's 5 to 10 minutes. You choose when to do it. Now that you've learned it, go and do X.” We believe that if you do X, with some support from a tool, you will learn by doing and you will grow. More importantly, it will help to deliver impact for you based on where you are and what transition you're going through. Ultimately, you will start to turn that into habits that you consistently do. It becomes a habitual thing for you.

I'm a big fan of developing healthy habits or learning or achieving a goal, whatever it may be. I’ve been on a couple of calls explaining to people how I've gotten some things done. I've got a lot of habits around health and fitness. I already mentioned that I use the Calm app to meditate every day. Having that habit has helped me develop mindfulness. It has helped me feel a bit more patient with two children in my house all day during the virus crisis pandemic. Also, I finished writing a book. I did it by developing a habit of writing a little bit every single morning, seven days a week until I got the book draft done. I committed to writing 500 words a day. That's what I did. By the end of April 2020, I ended up having 60,000 words written for the first draft of this book. If I just sat down and said, “I want to write 6,000 words,” it seemed impossible. By developing a daily habit, it allowed me to slowly build and get closer to this goal.

It’s the same thing with my daily habit of reading, which I'm all in on. I'm always learning things. I have a regular habit of interviewing interesting people like you so that I can learn more about all kinds of different subjects. I’m a big believer in that. We mentioned this idea of learning in the flow of work. Josh Bersin talks about this idea of the flow of work. There's not a separation anymore. There are all these things going on like emails, meetings, Zoom, calls, or whatever. You go home and work is still going on. There is not as much separation anymore. It's more about integration than balance. How do you work that into a day or week so that they're still getting some learning and behavior change that you want and they're getting the development that they want? People want that. They just don't know how to make it happen. They feel overwhelmed with all this stuff going on.

Digital Learning: It is critical to compress the time between learning something new and applying it.

Integration is the keyword. How do you integrate seamlessly into that? It's an extension of what they're already doing or what they should be doing and giving them some learning and guidance to try new things and to grow and build on things. Let's take the end user. If during the busy schedule, you said, “We want you to go to a destination login and sit in front of a screen for 30 minutes,” that's unrealistic. You may get some highly motivated individuals doing that but for the most part, that's not integrated. It could become challenging. It's focused on knowledge transfer, not on the application and immediate impact. There are different ways you can reach them and be integrated. We believe it should be an app. That's how 9 out of 10 people feel comfortable. They don't mind having the app on their device if it's going to help them. It's that pull test. If this is going to help me be a better manager, sales professional, or individual contributor, especially as they go through transitions, they're going to pull from it or want it.

For us, it's mobile. Where the smartphone is, they live and breathe this. It's always in their pocket, even if they're traveling around work or subway, whatever that may be. That is also how you integrate. It's making it easy for them. That's just our point of view. I know that there's text messaging and things like that you can also embrace. For us, the least intrusive and seamless is this notion of being an app on the phone that has push notifications. They start to build that habit of learning every day. It’s on-demand, almost.

Let's talk about the app that you built. I agree with you on the apps. It needs to be seamless, non-intrusive, useful, goal-oriented, habit-based, interesting, and engaging that people want to engage in. Tell me about the 1st90 app. How did you create it and how does it achieve all of these goals for it?

The platform that we developed was inspired by consumer apps. We were looking at the features that work well there. There's gamification with badges and leaderboards. Everyone is motivated by different things. That definitely drives some motivation for a particular segment of the learners that we're serving. There's a community. As we help organizations that are more fragmented or distributed, the learner loves to be part of a broader community and learn from their peers. There is a social element where you're peer to peer learning and embracing that. From the actual learning itself through the app, we deliver 5 to 10 minutes of learning a day. Every day, there is something that you will either read, do, or watch about a particular topic, based on the path designed for you, is something that you should learn and know to improve your performance. Once you've absorbed that content, we then give you the challenge or the action that we want you to go and do. For every action, we include a simple tool that you can use to perform the action. This is a tool that you can continue to use for similar types of actions, ultimately driving performance. You're guided through the experience.

For example, a daily experience where you have 5 to 10 minutes of learning and action. It builds on top of each other. A path is typically no more than maybe 15 to 20 steps that you may progress through at your own pace. It's self-paced or self-driven. It might take you 40 days to complete. Each step builds on top of each other. It’s a sequence, based on what we feel will help to drive performance for your role. If you're onboarding into a new company, we identify those habits and then create those actions. From there, we create that path. If it's a new people manager, we obviously have done a lot of work there. If it’s an inexperienced people manager or sales professional, there are a couple of things that we've launched, which is leading in the new normal. We’re thinking about leading virtually or selling in the new normal. That's been our approach or our platform. It's embracing some of those features from the consumer apps. From a learning standpoint, the methodology is about building intention, content, taking action, and then reflecting and sharing with peers along this path to build those habits.

[bctt tweet="Keep learning. You don’t want to be caught with your pants down when things change and your job becomes obsolete." via="no"]

It's so well done and such a needed thing for organizations. I know you've worked with a few different clients over the last year or so in different spaces. Can you give an example of how a company used this and achieved some level of results with their people?

What we found is we've worked across many different industries. An interesting one we're working with is a distributed workforce with a large global retailer. We helped develop an onboarding experience for assistant store managers to onboard them into their roles. If they were an external hire or an internal promotion, we developed an experience or path for each of those roles to accelerate that time to performance. What were the habits they needed to develop to be a successful store manager or assistant store manager in that environment around the customer, employees, and operations? That's one example where we launched it in different regions. We saw a lift, both in terms of retention and performance. It was encouraging and exciting. We've rolled that out company-wide.

Since no stores are open, we're even looking at what we're calling Fast Start. When they come back, we're looking at designing an experience to re-onboard everyone. For all the store managers, what are the habits that they need to develop coming back into the retail world? When we start to open the stores, there are going to be a lot of challenges. How do you create that consistency? How do you build the habits that will help them drive performance, given all the change disruption we've had?

Another example where we've worked with a large global technology firm is that we're helping all new people managers but we're also helping experienced managers. We've created two different paths, depending on where you are. Whether you're a new manager or an experienced manager, go through a path to build habits to help you be a better people manager. That's partly solving the issue. That's something we launched partly because of classroom learning. What's their digital strategy to continue to develop their managers and ultimately develop their managers with the goal of driving performance? That's another interesting engagement that we're working on. It's focused on managing development.

You also developed something around this idea of leading through a crisis as we got into this global pandemic, right?

We launched leading virtually in challenging times during the Coronavirus pandemic. It's a 45-day experience to build habits that will help you lead remotely or virtually. How do you drive engagement in a virtual world? How do you ensure your team stays focused? There's that element of accountability. Without having informal pop-ins, how do you create that connection and ensure that the team is collaborating effectively, driving towards the goals, focused, and so on? What are those habits that will help you lead more effectively in a virtual world? For some people, it's not new. For many coming out of an HQ environment who found themselves working from home, it's quite challenging. That experience, leading virtually in challenging times, has evolved to what we rebranded as leading today and tomorrow. We recognize that people are probably going to be working like this for a long time. It continues to evolve. Some of the content and habits that we initially developed, recognizing the world is almost settled. Everyone's in a different place in that change curve. It's recognizing that the habits you needed are still relevant but 1 or 2 need to evolve. We're constantly looking at the needs of what people need to effectively be strong leaders in this environment.

To give a little value to people reading, can you give an example of a couple of habits that would be useful for people to improve their ability to work and lead in remote times?

Digital Learning: In the virtual world, it is all the more important to make sure that people are being recognized for the work they do.

There's a lot of research out there to support this. One is to start acknowledging and dealing with the human side of change. Let's not think about how we lead, how we drive results. It’s how we build empathy as a leader to understand that everyone's going through an enormous amount of change. That's one of the habits that we want to develop. It's critical for the leader to develop that empathy, and to understand how people are managing through that. The other habit that we're focusing on is how you create clarity on how we're going to get work done in the near term. It’s creating focus and having that right cadence as a team. If we're all virtual, how do we stay focused on the task at hand and what the deliverables are? As a leader, how do you create that clarity and keep everyone focused?

There’s this notion around more frequent feedback and recognition. In the virtual world, make sure people are being recognized for the work they're doing, but you almost need to increase it. The cadence of it is purely simply because we're all working virtually. You don't have those informal check-ins that you may do in the office. Maybe see someone during lunch or coffee where you can make those informal comments. The habit that we're building is providing more frequent feedback and recognition. The final habit is around becoming more proficient with the technology tools that you're using. When you're having meetings and you're using Zoom or Teams, you need to model the way of how to use those tools. How do you change meetings to be more engaging? Also, what are the collaboration tools you're using? Whether it's Google Docs, Box, or whatever you're using, make sure people are embracing those. As a leader, that's a habit that you need to become proficient in and advocate. Those are the habits that we've identified. During that 45-day experience, we want you to build those habits and become a more effective leader in this virtual world.

I agree with all of those. You started with empathy. Recognizing the human side of this change and what people might be going through is important. Communication is important as well. This is something that can be useful for a lot of people. If you are reading, you're in talent development, and you're interested in finding out more about this secret sauce to digital learning and learning the flow of work and Paul's app 1st90, Paul did a webinar for Advantage Performance Group. The recording is still up on the website. I believe we also have an offer there for a three-step demo using the app.

Going back to our philosophy around learning, if you'd like to learn more, the best way for you is to experience it. We've developed three-step demos for leading virtually, selling virtually as a new people manager, and becoming a new manager on day one. We have three-step demos for all three that you can sign up for on the webinar on the Advantage website.

You can go to our website at TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com. If you go into Free Resources, there's a webinar section, Attend a Webinar. You can find Paul's webinar called Secret Sauce. We also have information about the 1st90 app on our website. If you are a worker, running a business, or working in a company, you're not necessarily thinking about how you develop other people's talent. You're thinking about your own career and learning. We started with talking about the importance of learning in the flow of work, developing habits, and regular learning. I've been writing this book called Own Your Career, Own Your Life. Part of it is about taking ownership of your future, preparing for the future of work. It's important to engage in continuous learning.

We all need to take responsibility for our own learning and development. We don’t need to wait for companies or someone else to tell us, “Go to this workshop,” “Attend this webinar,” or “We need you to learn X, Y, Z.” You've got to take responsibility for your own career and for your own learning. I hope this conversation has spurred that in a lot of people to think about, “What can I do every day to do a little bit of learning?” If you lead a team, “What can I do every day to help everybody on the team learn something new?” Maybe it's an app like 1st90, it's reading a little bit of a book every morning like I do, or listening to a great podcast like the Talent Development Hot Seat or the thousands of others that are out there. There's no shortage of resources. The point that is you've got to keep learning. You've got to keep preparing for the future because things are always changing. You don't want to be caught with your pants down when things like your job become obsolete. Anything you’d add to that, Paul?

I think you summarized it well. Thanks, Andy. I've enjoyed being part of your show. Thanks for including me.

Thank you so much, Paul. I appreciate it. I love everything that you've been building since we work together. I'm glad we're partnering again on this. I didn't mention it but Paul and 1st90 are a partner to our sponsor, Advantage Performance Group. All that information is on the website. If you go to TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com, you can find the webinar. You can also find the information and the three-step demo. Go and check out the 1st90 app. Thanks again for coming on. This has been awesome. It's been great for our readers as well.

• Talent Development Think Tank
• Josh Bersin - past episode
• LinkedIn – Josh Bersin
• Paul Middleton
• Advantage Performance Group
• Julie Winkle Giulioni - past episode
• Christine DiDonato - past episode
• AdvantagePerformance.com
• Headspace
• Duolingo
• Calm
• Salesforce.com
• The Secret Sauce Learning
• https://Info.AdvantagePerformance.com/secret-sauce-webinar-registration
• https://www.AdvantagePerformance.com/solution/1st90/