From Bill Bruck...

Overview

The customer was a Fortune 100 company with over 20,000 employees, distributed in five major offices throughout the United States, with subsidiaries across the nation and in Europe.

The Challenge The company hired a new CEO because of five years of disappointing business results. After meeting face-to-face with over 20,000 employees, he recognized that the organization had done little to build its human resources by recruiting, training, and retaining top talent. A key missing piece was leadership training. The company had purchased e-learning libraries that included a variety of leadership courses. After taking the courses, however, it was not clear that new skills were being acquired and applied on the job. What was needed was a way to reinforce the training through on-the-job training including assignments and coaching.

Solution Q2Learning created a wrap-around for 23 e-learning modules from two different vendors, and bundled them as personal leadership, supervisory leadership, and business leadership programs using our eCampus platform. Each course followed the same general format:

Learning Activities

Learn Key Concepts Participants learn key concepts via e-learning. The purpose was to teach basic concepts, vocabulary, procedures. No collaboration is involved.

Q&A: We have done this activity via threaded discussion and via conference call. Neither method got much participation, and the customer eventually dropped this activity from the program.

Take away: We do not believe there is anything flawed with having Q&A, either via threaded discussion or conference call. However, with a soft skill like this, combined with very busy learners, it may not be necessary. We would probably use it in a pilot project with the option of removing it depending on audience need.

Presentation: Learners post a slideshow they would use to brief their team on the key concepts. The objective was to have learners actively process the material and assimilate it into their own cognitive structures. We experimented with having this be a coached activity, where learners receive feedback from coaches before the activity is considered complete. We found that, especially when followed by a group feedback activity, this added little or no value.

Take away: We started having coaches review every submission, but soon realized that there's a difference in a submission used for active learning (i.e. to have learners actively process material) v. a work sample that needs to be done to standard, and now reserve coaching for the latter.

Presentation Feedback: Learners see each others' slideshows, and are asked to give feedback to a specific number of other learners by a specific date. Originally, we used a request such as: "Steal one slide from at least two other presentations and tell the person why you're stealing their slide," but now use a more generic one such as "Give them substantive feedback on what you found to be most useful and/or what improvements you might suggest."

Take away: We started just asking learners to discuss the ideas in the e-learning module. That didn't work at all. We found we had the best success when:

The request was for a specific action - such as give substantive feedback to a concrete "thing" like a post, or a slideshow.

We gave them a date and a number of posts they had to make.

We structured it so they could do it in two sessions - one to post, another to read feedback they received - rather than imagining that they would come into the site daily or weekly to continue discussions.

Application Activities

In various leadership courses the application activities vary depending on the nature of the skills being taught. Two examples are presented: planner/report and observation/interaction

Planner: Learners are asked to post a planner answering specific questions about how they will put key learning into action over the next week. Questions are of the nature: What do you plan to do? What obstacles do you anticipate? How do you plan to overcome them?

Report: At the end of the week, learners answer another set of questions, such as: What did you do? What were the results? What do you conclude from this?

In both cases, the activity is not considered complete until a coach reviews the planner/report, gives feedback, and the learner reads this feedback. The type of interaction is private - between the learner and the coach. The sequence is often repeated two or more times over several weeks. The purpose is to encourage reflection in the application of skills into action.

Take away: We found several things in doing these activities:

The more specific the questions - especially the planner ones - the better the results. If it's a course on situation leadership, our planner has them select a person with a certain leadership style and do certain things.

The application activities need to be a required part of the program, and their completion tracked.

A critical success factor is having coaches give timely responses, and to scale this must be tracked as well, since a minority of coaches will simply fail to do their jobs.

There is a distinct difference in coaching styles, from coaches who give simple "attaboys" to coaches who give thoughtful, in depth feedback that causes learners to more deeply reflect on and learn from their actions.

It was important to have a super-coach who could have visibility on coach responses, and to have a training session for coaches.

... more to come...