The Importance of Humanistic Leadership Skills: with Linda Murray

Transcript

Karen Kirton  00:01

For many businesses. It's been a challenging few years, and there are expectations of that continuing. And a hot topic in Australia has been the ongoing skills shortages. And although the government does have a role to play, businesses are also find that they need to upskill and grow their staff to meet their own business growth plans. And we know that upskilling and development is also a key retention strategy. So joining us today to dive into this topic of building a learning culture is Linda Marie, who you may remember from series three, Episode 18, where we discuss psychological safety. Linda is an executive coach and leadership development expert whose obsession is creating leaders that people actually want to follow. And in addition to running her own businesses since the age of 22, Linda has studied psychology and philosophy and has a Master's in Business Coaching. She's the founder of Athena Leadership Academy, which is the professional development hub for high performing and high potential leaders. Welcome back to make it work, Linda.

Linda Murray 01:04

Thank you. Great to be back here with you both.

Karen Kirton  01:07

Thank you. And perhaps we can start with a bit on your experience. And I'm really clearly curious to know what skills you have seen that need to be developed in leaders and how has that changed over the last kind of 10 years?

Linda Murray 01:20

Yeah, good question. Look, I think we've seen quite a shift in the past 10 years when we think back. So when 2023. Now obviously, there was three very disrupted years with COVID and global pandemic and locked down and everything that that meant for leadership. But even in that 10 years, we've seen a big shift in technology, as well in terms of how much technology we use day in day out. And also 10 years ago, that was just after the GFC when the financial crisis. So we'd already just seen a big shift, we had a lot of businesses sort of come out of pain and turmoil, and some that didn't come out at all. So though, it's actually been an interesting 15 years, if we want to look at it like that, I think there's been a big shift from technical leadership skills to more soft skills. And I know we don't love that term anymore. So if I were to put that in a different way, it's kind of like, for more visionary and procedural leadership focus to more humanistic skills. So a decade ago, the types of things that we were seeing leaders really focusing on was articulating a clear vision so that people could buy into it, there was a lot of talk about strategic planning, change management, especially because we just come out of the global financial crisis, and interpersonal skills, of course, were important and still, and that was with stakeholders across businesses, so your team, your peers, your key customers, etc. But everything seemed to be very results oriented. Obviously, all of those still remain today, we need to have all those skills as leaders, but I'm seeing a real shift towards those more humanistic skills like emotional intelligence, empathy, really embracing diversity and inclusion, we've got that digital literacy that we're having to build in response to our use of technology. And then obviously, resilience and adaptability are key changes part of life. But as we all are experiencing changes faster now than ever before. And life is also slower now than it will ever be super fast compared to how it was, but it's actually going to be ramping up. So we need leaders building those resilience skills. So they're adapting to that fast.

Karen Kirton  03:34

Are you seeing that shift from a research perspective, or you're seeing individuals also asking for I want to develop these skills more,

Linda Murray 03:42

I'd say both. But asking for it and pass it part of its necessity. Like they're just having to build these skills. It's like resilience, if you don't build it, life kind of forces it upon you. And suddenly with a skill, like resilience, or any of these skills, EQ, digital etc, better off building the skill before you need it. skills in the bank first if we can, so that when we need to draw on them, we can.

Lachy Gray  04:10

What's, what's behind this, this shift to think, to more human centred skills?

Linda Murray 04:19

Look, I think there's a couple of things. One is if we look back at say, our parents or grandparents generation, people stayed in their organisations a lot longer, not uncommon for someone to join a accounting firm as a junior and ended up ultimately retiring as a partner 30 or 40 years later. So I think the leadership styles that people suffered, because they just had to stay in that organisation. We don't suffer those leadership styles anymore. So that whole command and control there has been a call for softening. I think people there's more appetite for people having a voice around showing up at work to be their best self to be human that it's actually You realise we get more out of people, when we understand the whole person, what makes them tick when they're not at work as well as at work, but also that life happens. So historically, you left your life at home, and then you went to work and you got into that mode, you put on your work mask, you did your thing from nine to five, and then you left, right, that's not the case anymore. There's this meshing or overlap of life and work. And we're humans, we all work best when we're being authentic, when we're able to actually show up as our true selves. So I think in order to create the environment, for that to be possible, leaders have had to build these humanistic skills to make that safe for people to be their full selves, to get the best results.

Karen Kirton  05:45

Do you think there's been an acceleration of that understanding since the pandemic because we had been talking about this idea about your whole self to work for quite some time? But I don't know my own personal perspective is that people seem to really understand that more now. And we seem to be more accepting of, you know, school holidays, people having their kids in the background on video meetings. Are you seeing that as well? Or is that just in my, my life?

Linda Murray 06:13

Yeah, I agree. 100%? And is it because for that time, when we were locked down, we actually got to see people's lives, like, see what their living room looks like? Because people were working from the dining room table, you see the kids in the background? Because they were being homeschooled. I see you've got a dog. Tell me about your dog. So I think we got privy to more of people's lives than we probably had previously. So that's part of it. I think the other part of it is we got to see people in a raw form. We're going through a global crisis. Yeah. That's massive, you know, like everyone is, as brave as you are. Everyone ended up a bit frayed around the edges, there was uncertainty. So we got to see what people were like, under stress, we got to see people challenge we had to have those conversations of how are you actually going? How are you coping? We were asking our people that more than we've ever asked it before. And we did see conversations about words that we hadn't considered in a commercial environment before as much like belonging. When did we ever talk about word belonging before 2020. And now we talk about in a work setting all the time, we've realised how important that actually is. Understanding what it means for different people to belong.

Lachy Gray  07:30

Hmm. Yeah, I agree. I think COVID really brought a sledgehammer to that that persona, those separate personas that we had we could work with, it was like a mask, I think it was often referred to as that, put your work mask on the take it off when you go home. And you just couldn't do that. And yeah, I think you get a sense of vulnerability, and that all the balls and everyone was juggling. So I think for me that that that's a real positive, but from a leadership perspective, does it make it much harder to be a great leader, and think about the skills that you need to develop because your team want to belong, they want to see you be vulnerable, they want to see you encourage that in your in your teammates, they want to see really good communication, quiet transfer, transparent communication, I think as well, we're moving away from command and control, give us the context to what's going on in the business so we can make our own decisions. That is a very different, I think, ballgame for leaders. So in the context of skills that they want to develop. How are you saying that a leader is kind of identifying the skills themselves that they think they need to work on? Are they getting it from 360 feedback and performance check ins and so on? Or is it a combination of both?

Linda Murray 08:50

Yeah, no, God? What a crazy time it was. Because I think, you know, obviously, businesses have to shift so fast. We all individually, whether we're leaders or not had to shift fast in our role, but what it forced was that fast development of individuals, and so it was all, you know, quickly having to learn how to look after your team, but also quickly learning about yourself, especially for those who had not done the work as they say, and introspected and reflected and had lower self awareness, because the collateral damage very quickly started to show and in terms of those leadership styles, as we said, command and control, there is a time and place for command and control. Like if the Titanic is going down. We do not want a Democratic leader to gather on the third deck who thinks we should jump in from the starboard side? Who thinks poor Great, thanks for your opinion, you know, we'll collate that. No. We need someone making quick decisions. So actually, at that time in those first couple of weeks of March, here in Australia, command and control was a great leadership skill, but it doesn't work all the time. So as you say, we've got leaders who need to skill up and it's interesting you you asked me How do leaders know what they want to build on what skills they want to develop? There's a big difference between want and need. Right? So sometimes we've seen leaders who want to develop certain skills, but actually they need to develop need to develop other skills really quickly and as a priority over the ones that they want to develop. So I think all of the above in terms of different ways that leaders can develop, I think self reflection is so important, we consciously constantly need to be taking the time to get introspective and and think about where our strengths are, how can we leverage those what areas might be holding us back? I think we need to build self reflection into the busyness of Bau, it's very easy to just get caught up in that we actually as leaders need to carve out that time in our calendar to sit and reflect because they say that you learn from experience. You actually don't you learn from reflecting on an experience, or as leaders, where are we building in that thinking time. So I think that's really important, I think, focusing on their own aspirations and what it is that they want for the future that could be as a role, or as what they want to be known for, and known as, as a leader and identifying the skill gap between what that leader looks like versus where I am now. And how can I be building those, but even the most self aware leader has blind spots. And so I do really strongly encourage all leaders to get 360 feedback, because it's a well rounded view of those opportunities for us to keep developing from a whole lot of different perspectives. And at the end of the day, life is constantly changing, like we're changing the world is changing the industries that we're in changing our staff change all the time. So what worked for you, as a leader five years ago, or even five months ago, probably won't work for you going forward. So really seeking that feedback all the time, so that we are constantly improving, I think just needs to be part of a leaders objective. And I love saying that the World Economic Forum said that 40% of roles need to be upskilled every four to six months. leadership's no exception to that. So we don't need to be going and doing an MBA or studying constantly. It's really looking at those opportunities to polish it. It's kind of an evolution rather than a revolution, if you like.

Karen Kirton  12:30

Yeah, that's a great point. Because I've certainly come across people that feel they know. And they've told me, they know everything there is to know about leadership. Because they've managed teams, and they've done an MBA or you know, whatever it might be. And I just find that really fascinating thing to actually think because it's like, I don't know, it's like me saying, I know everything about Microsoft, or Microsoft changes all the time. So possibly know that I think everything is the same, everything changes all the time. So you've just, you can't possibly know everything about a single thing

Linda Murray 13:04

that I told you about humans. Humans are inherently complex. So we don't know everything about ourselves, even let alone the whole team of people who were writing.

Karen Kirton  13:15

Absolutely. So I wonder what you know, what do you see of the benefits of building a learning culture and perhaps through the lens of if I was to walk around an organisation that had a learning culture versus one that does it? What would I see is the differences?

Linda Murray 13:31

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, you shared some great stats, actually, in one of your earlier podcasts, I think it was the Deloitte Report that looked at the benefits of having a strong learning culture and, you know, 92%, more likely to produce novel and innovative products. So they're 52% more productive, or 17%, more profitable, 30 to 50%, more engagement. So these are some of the actual benefits. But what does that look like and feel like? Well, I think for starters, just on those stats, I would say these are huge results that leaders need to be KPI paying themselves around. So when you look at those stats, think about how can we be measuring that as a success factor? So if we're going to implement a learning culture, what can we expect to see and be measuring it but I think, what would we see in a learning culture culture is not some team powwow off site that we have and we come up with some key values words and what have you, and then we're done. That's our culture. We communicate that to the team that's going to happen, coaches, I believe, the sum of all of the values, their behaviours, every interaction, every conversation that we see happening all day, every day. So a learning culture is how do we make sure that learning is part of those day to day practices and ways of being at all levels of the organisation not just the grads coming through who just been on boarded it's from the bottom to the top and left over Right. And that that is really a behaviour and a way of being that's rewarded. It's encouraged, it's pointed out. So I think a learning culture, what would we see and feel it's really about giving people lots of opportunities to learn. And we know from lumbar dos work about the 7020 10 principle of learning where historically we've thought that all of our learning should come from courses and education, what we realised is that only 10% of our learning should come from education. 20% should come from our exposure to opportunities, and then 70%, that experiential learning. So I guess, applying that lens across how you encourage people to learn, so yes, education, get them doing training courses and programmes, have book clubs, with your teens do online learning, like LinkedIn learning, or better still, you know, interactive, mobile and gamified learning, like IANA offers, and we look at the exposure factor. So are we giving people opportunity to access coaches and mentors, and encouraging people to go to networking events so that they can learn from industry leaders? And then we've got that experiential part? How do we make on the job learning part of what we do not just for new people, but that we actually encourage and reward shadowing on projects, bringing people into meetings, job rotations, we do that with graduates for a reason. Right? So they can see and understand different areas of the business. Why does that stop, you know, should be giving people opportunities to experience other business areas, stretch projects, being part of committees, like beyond the diversity and inclusion committee? Right? How do we build that into the culture and that this is happening at all levels? And I think in a learning culture, after someone has had a learning experience, in a learning culture that gets embedded broadly. So it's not just that the individual did a course, they then come back, what did you learn? How can you apply it? How can we apply these learnings and use what you've learned to improve ourselves so that therefore every learning experience that one person has actually benefits? Many, and leaders would be building an accountability around the applications of these learnings? Because we know that knowledge disappears, you know, you go and do this great workshop or attend a conference and two days later, come back to the office and everyone said, Ah, you know, tell us about what do you learn? And you're like, ah, stuff? No, it was really good. But just a lot of it's drifted is the quicker we can get those learnings back into the business, then we start creating this learning culture.

Karen Kirton  17:45

Yeah, I the happiness and causes Conference, which is on each year, and I go every couple of years, it's a nice sort of deposit in your emotional piggy bank. And I was going with a friend of mine, who's a psychologist. And so we actually started to meet up every six to eight weeks at a coffee shop, and we get our notes back out from the conference. And so all those things that we wrote down that we said we were going to do, and we hold each other accountable. And we did that over that year to say, okay, like, because we would go to this, you know, two days, it'd be awesome, we'd walk away hugely pumped up and then be like, what was that? I found that a really good way to keep myself accountable, to actually talk to someone else about it. And then it helps me to then share that with the team as well to say, okay, you know, here's this concept that would actually be quite good in our work. So, yeah, it's okay, we those small things that can make actually big difference to learn in common.

Linda Murray 18:43

I love it. And that's where the value is, at the end of the day, you're going to a conference to learn not as a concert, you're not going to be entertained for two days. And that was fun. We're going there to learn new stuff. And the learning comes from actually implementing those learnings.

Lachy Gray  18:59

Yeah, I think that's a I think that's a really good point, actually, that the learning doesn't just happen at the conference. It's the same with any kind of learning that we do. We do a course, we do an MBA. It's not like, oh, that's done. Now. I'll go back to my day to day. That's just the start. Like you said before, then it's about reflecting on your experience, like what of what I heard, or read or listened to, or watched, am I actually going to implement? And it might only be a couple of things. But we have to do it, like to operate, carry have to hold ourselves or be held accountable, which is probably superior, isn't it? Yeah. And that's what I think, in my perspective, or what I see with our customers at Yano is that those were the those that that look at learning as a way to achieve a company strategy. Just very strong at it. And they see it as something that's continually happening. And so it's not something that is very structured, that you go and do a course and you tick a box and you're done. It's happening all the time. And all those different ways that Linda spoke about can be very informal could be, Linda and I are going for a coffee. And yet, in the checking in on me, the couple of things that I said I was going to do two weeks ago, or lunch and learns where you were you go away, I learned something, I come back, I share it with the team, they asked me questions, and I realised, I don't actually know it as well as I thought I did. Maybe I should go back and try again. So I think it's a mindset shift. But in order to that bit for that to be successful, I think you need to have people in the team with a similar mindset, which is one of growth, and very open minded, as opposed to close minded. You have people who think they know everything. What are they going to learn? They know everything already, if their brains full. So if you have enough of those people in a team, I think that will kill the motivation for anybody else to learn. Because why should you it's not being role modelled for you, it's not being demonstrated for you. There's no real encouragement to do it. So hiring people then with those kinds of values and that mindset to come in. And I think also those types of personalities and mindsets, will be able to adapt to change as well, because they're able to reset their thoughts and beliefs about things. It's not like, well, here's what I heard, here's what I believe. And that is it is fixed, nothing's going to change my mind. Here's my approach to things. Oh, that bit of information is different to what I know, I'm going to take that on board, maybe I'll change my point of view, what do you think? Or where do we go? And I think that then ladders up? If you have teams of people doing that, that ladders up to those stats, that lien dimension from Deloitte.

Linda Murray 21:57

Yeah, and you said something really interesting, okay. It was like people are like, I can't possibly learn anymore, I'm full. If someone is feeling that way, and I get that, you know, Life is stressful, there's heaps going on, no one sitting there twiddling their thumbs these days. If someone feels like their brain is full from learning too much, then I would dare say they're not applying. Right? Because it takes no brain effort to tie your shoelace, or to brush your teeth. Because now it's just tacit knowledge. And at some point, we had to really focus on doing that. So it was taking up brain space. So yeah, as I say, if we if we're creating a learning culture, it's about turning it into an application culture. It's not just about how many books can we pump into people's heads? It's what what, as you said, the two or three things that we might take from a book. And that's valuable, because a little bit done well, is better than a whole lot, not not done at all, and then being tried by people to store it in their head. And that just takes up room that we need for other things. Yeah, that real application mindset, isn't it learning? Yes, applying better?

Lachy Gray  23:05

Absolutely. And I think this is where the leaders role is so important to lead by example. And also, I think part of that is putting your hand up when you don't know something, which we can't know everything. It's impossible. So yeah, I don't know. We're gonna find out. Oh, cool. So they're demonstrating that that makes me feel comfortable to do the same thing. And that's going to encourage learning in of itself, because it's a safe environment. But I think what's interesting is, we're talking about a lot of benefits of a learning culture. Even I see this, that it's not that common. I think. So I'm curious, Linda, why do you think it is? Why is it rare for an organisation to have all the talk about their learning culture?

Linda Murray 23:54

I think learning culture itself is a relatively new term. So So I don't think most organisations would even know to call themselves that or know to have a learning culture. I do think that regardless of the semantics of that of the term, I do think a lot of organisations have the aspirations that they want people to learn. You know, that's why they run programmes or where they might send their people on conferences. I think learning itself has been seen as expensive. I think when times get tough, and belts need to be tightened. Often, it's seen as you know, the first thing in a profit and loss that has to be ditched, in touch, tough times, and off it goes. And I suddenly observed this in 2020, when COVID Strike being in the learning and development space, and some of the first people that I saw being made redundant, were the learning and development people in the programme coordinators and even some of our training programmes were put on ice that year, which in one sense, I get it global pandemic, uncertain who knows what's going gonna happen. But interestingly, the firms who continued to run our programmes, loved the ongoing development that it created and the results that that brought, but also the stability and connectedness that it created for its people during a time that was really uncertain. So while everyone, well, not everyone else, while some firms put training and development and growth, and improvement, and all those sorts of things are nice, they're competitors, we're seeing is an opportunity to keep building. And so fast forward the clock a couple of years, and no surprises, what has happened, you know, those those people who stuck with learning and recognised and we're determined to seek the return on investment, got huge return on those investments. And so therefore, what we're seeing is those same companies are the ones who've booked twice as many programmes every year since because it really did prove the point that learning works, and learning delivers value. And I do think that when it comes to something that might be perceived as expensive, nothing is expensive, if you're getting greater value from it than what you spent. Right. So someone could buy a really cheap pen, and never use it. That makes it expensive. Someone could buy a valuable pen, and they love it, and they use it every day. And then it makes it a valuable pen. So I think what's actually missing is that we think it's explored, some people think it's expensive, but it's actually missing the expectation or accountability around the measurement of the application of the learning. So organisations struggle to measure the ROI on training sometimes, and it just becomes too hard. What do you see Locky? Because obviously, this would be a conversation you have with your clients a lot.

Lachy Gray  26:48

Yeah, well, I think we should get you on our sales goals first. Yeah, look, it's a really big challenge. We started Yano, seven years ago. Because we thought there was a real opportunity to tie learning to business outcomes, that we just didn't see it happening. Learning was something that was done separately, as you say, it's something that's done in good times. Businesses making money, we can afford to do learning, revenue drops, profits drop, we can't do learning anymore. So what people are still growing. And so you're, you're telling people in your team, we want to grow, just just hold no growth until we until the business picks up? It's a it's a confusing message. So we thought well, and to your point about value. Price is one element, isn't it of the discussion, but it's often it's a big one. But what we're actually saying is, what's the value that we're creating? So we thought, well, what if we can tie the learning outcomes to the business outcomes and actually start with the business outcome? So for our retail customers, they might say, we want to increase like for like sales by X percent? And it's okay to how are you going to do that? Well, here are the behaviours that we want our team members to be doing. And then here's the learning that's going to help them support those behaviours, which is going to drive towards that metric. When it works, it works really well. But not many, I would say businesses actually have metrics that they can measure. And also they can confidently say, Well, if we change one of the variables, so if we change our online learning, if we change our toolbox talks or our face to face training, there's going to be a strong correlation to this metric. I get it, it is hard to do. And there's probably never be causation because there's so many variables that go into these metrics. But we were kind of surprised that, that it, how few companies are actually measuring?

Linda Murray 28:55

And is it that they don't have metrics to measure or they haven't taken the time to sit down and go, What do we measure? And what do we measure that and some things will be quantitatively measurable. And then there are things that are more qualitative, like how do we measure emotional intelligence? How do we measure empathy? How do we measure measure a sense of belonging? Be You know, so it's harder to measure, but it's not impossible to measure? And I think, you know, maybe part of creating a learning culture because we need everyone on board. It's not just that leadership, say we've got one is I think, to involve people more, get curious and ask them as your team, you know, we want to measure your sense of belonging. We want to measure your self awareness. How would you suggest we measure that? How do you know when you're being self aware when versus what evidence do you have that you're not? Or what do you see in other people? Like your team?

Lachy Gray  29:51

Yeah, absolutely. And it is true. I think it is more difficult for those qualitative for the human skills, like how do you measure that interesting way, one thing we've seen probably in the last 18 months is staff talking about their staff turnover. So they put a lot of learning on hold all that growth and development got put on hold. And people left not because of that, that's probably one of many reasons. But it's continuing to happen. And younger people, especially on them, we've talked to some of this on the podcast, are saying how great their own growth and development is such an important criteria for them when they're looking at an employer, that they're going to support me in this can I grow into the future, and they'll they'll change jobs if they don't see that. So that defensive, exactly, so, so expensive, when people leave, and we're going to do the hiring and onboarding again. So that's a metric and be measured. And that learning from onboarding all the way through, can definitely correlate to achieving. And we know as well that if an if a new starter, in those first three months, when you're getting a feel for the place, if they feel supported, and there is a structured onboarding, they think, Wow, this has been considered like this is setting me up for success in my role. I'm assuming the rest of the organisation runs in a similar way this is this is really exciting, they're more likely to stay. So I think that's actually a really strong metric that we're using more more often now.

Linda Murray 31:30

Yeah, and, you know, I can't remember who said this. But um, but you know, what happens if I train my staff and they leave? They say, Well, what happens if you don't train them? And they don't leave? Right? So yeah, what's the cost of not doing it? So Karen, what do you see in this feminine HR standpoint, in terms of retention and younger generations coming through, etc? Yeah. And I was reflecting

Karen Kirton  31:55

on what Lachy was saying, actually, because it had me think back quite a few years now, when I did a focus group with employees. So we did an engagement survey, which is how we measure success of our programmes. So one of the measures of success is employee turnover, but it's also employee engagement. How does that change after we've implemented HR programmes? Anyway, I had this focus group with the staff, and they were saying the employee turnover is so high. And the management team was saying to me, no, it's not No, it's not. So that I actually got the data because no one had ever actually measured it. Because smaller businesses don't tend to do that. So I got the data. And I said, Well, actually, your employee term for the last three years, it's been over 25%. So that's why your employees are saying everyone's leaving, because they're looking around and saying, Well, you know, hang on, there was four people over there at the start of the year. And now, one of them's gone like that, you feel that, whereas from the management team, they weren't necessarily feeling that because the level underneath them was very stable, but the rest of the organisation and the people that were doing the work, rather than managing the workload, you know, we're turning over so. So I think, yeah, employee turnover is a really important metric to look at. And not in my experience, small organisations, not a lot of them do look at it. And I think that most of us now are using even zero, you know, you can get a report out and look at that. So I think that's, that's worthwhile. But yes, growth and development comes up. Very often, I would say it's up there, along with communication, as usually the top things that come up as the lowest scoring in employee engagement, satisfaction surveys, and more around the, my manager has a personal investment in my growth and development. So normally, when we give the scores that organisational say, but you know, they've got professional development players, they can just fill them out. And then you know, if they want to do train, they'll go on the training, it's like, but that's actually not what they're asking. Or usually what people are asking for is actually want you to care about me, and have an investment in me and what I want to do with my career and my growth, which is very different to put myself in this bucket as a Gen X, you know, the older style managers that just think it's just a training course and it's not a training course anymore.

Linda Murray 34:27

Yeah, and you know, I've started with our programmes, we always do manager briefings so the the nominating manager of the participant, we all get in a room, obviously they in order for them to understand what's included in the programme, but also what's their role in supporting their participant on the programme because as I look, we've got all these great trainings that people can do. They don't feel like they can step away from their Bau, you know, so, in one sense, the manager has the mindset of Yeah, look, I create these opportunities. It's like but are you actually saying I would love you to do it? Training Course, let's sit down and look at your professional development plan, which peers, everyone needs to take more responsible, more responsibility for their own compliance thing that the business needs you to do twice a year. This is your career and your development. So it's not your manager's responsibility. So I think that would be a good starting point. But yeah, it's to actually sit down and go great. What are the areas you want to develop? Let's look at what training courses we offer in house. Okay, so what's that going to mean for us and workflow, etc? And how can I best support you in doing that? courses available if participants feel too guilty to go on them? And even if they do go on, then they kind of have concentrating, half emailing, pointless. And then

Karen Kirton  35:46

it's like, okay, and then what do you do with that knowledge afterwards? So what's the next step after the course,

Linda Murray 35:52

Totally. And everyone wins, because the best way to test our understanding of something is to read teach it, you said earlier, like you did something you're like, I haven't actually got that as much as I thought, I understood it. So to bring those learnings back to their team, it's a win for the participant, because they're further embedding the learning, but then they're sharing it and having that conversation at a team level. What can we do with this? How can we as a team grow and improve with this new knowledge or system or whatever it might be?

Karen Kirton  36:22

Yeah, and I wonder, Linda, like, in our business with amplify HR, we work predominantly with companies that have less than 100 employees. So the idea of a learning culture would be like, oh, yeah, that's nice. But how would we actually do that? You know, we only got 12 people, or 30 people or whatever it might be. And let's be honest, as you said before, it's seen as costly, so. So it can be seen as no that speak business realm. But we know that the majority of businesses in Australia are smaller businesses, they're under 100 employees. So what would your advice be if I'm a business owner listening to these? And I think, Okay, well, like, Where would I get started that will be suitable for my business? Is there one thing that I can simply do to start building a learning culture?

Linda Murray 37:09

Yeah, I think I'm pushed to come up with just one Can I Can we create a menu for the couple, and people can just pick which one they liked the best,it can be appropriate. So and also, it doesn't have to be expensive, because as we said, 70% of our learning comes from experience, not necessarily going on courses and things that cost money. So in terms of a few free options, if you like, I think the first one is from a cultural perspective to normalise failure. And what I mean by that is, we know through our own life experience that our best learnings come from when we make a mistake, right, or when something didn't turn out as we thought it would. So I think to normalise that, and really shift from a right or wrong to a right or learn culture where when we make mistakes, they're to be celebrated. They're to be shared. And that's done in a way that psychologically safe. So I think to create that psychologically safe environment where we do take risks, we understand that innovation is just a series of stuff UPS until we land on something that's better than what we did before. And that is to be celebrated. And if people want more on psychological safety, obviously, we did that podcast in season three, so they can understand more there. But otherwise, people feel like they need to know everything, and be right all the time. And so they don't stretch the system. So I think really creating that culture where feedback is part of what we do feedback is part of our conversation, because we know that that is what makes us better. So any presentation you do any new project is that part of that is to say, great. So what did we do really well in that? What are we really going to double down on next time? What didn't go to plan? How will we learn and improve on this next time, it's very easy to do a piece of work, and then doing next next next we just keep rolling on is making it part of a piece of work that at the end, we talk it through or could even be a meeting or no doubt at the end of today of this session at this recording. We will sit down and go great. How did that go? Because this is how we all learn and develop. So I think making that failure or learning just part of the everyday conversation is really important. Another tip, I would say is really creating those opportunities for exposure and shadowing so that people can see what other people do, even if it's not so that I can do your job. It's so that I can better understand what you do. Because that makes us stronger as a culture. It makes us easier to work with together. And we've got that bigger understanding of the business. So, you know, a great example of this is when we watch medical TV shows, right? There's always the newbies coming in learning that you're in The HR department and they are these new new studies, these interns following the doctor's around, because that's how they like to learn. That is what happens in real hospitals. And that's even life or death situations. Like if that's how they learn life or death, then we can turn certainly learn well from following that in terms of shadowing and learning from each other. And then the other thing is, I think, really encouraging that knowledge sharing that we've spoke about a lot. So when one person learns something new, let's all learn from that person's learning. Right? Again, this none of this actually costs any more. It's just a little bit of time, but their ROI on that time is really massive.

Karen Kirton  40:43

Yeah, no, I think they're great points, that it's really about having that intention and say, Okay, well out of those, more than one option that Linda just gave me. Which one do I want to pick and go? Okay, I've got to give that a go. I think that's a really good takeout.

Lachy Gray  40:57

Yeah. And just to add to that, perhaps even timebox it, we're going to try this for a month, we're going to ask for feedback after our meetings for a month. And then we're going to regroup and see what we thought. And then we'll go again, just to make it part of the habit, the behaviours that this is what we do. Yeah,

Linda Murray 41:15

I love that. I love that. And, you know, at the end of that month, what did we learn that we wouldn't have otherwise? But also, what did we learn about that process? Yeah,

Lachy Gray  41:24

absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, love. Linda, what are your top three skills that you think we could all benefit from developing in the workplace?

Linda Murray 41:34

So the thing with how leadership has evolved, I would say the top three, they're all humanistic skills. One is giving and receiving feedback. Because that's how we all grow. And I say giving and receiving, we Yes, we need to learn how to give feedback really effectively. And that is part of that conversation. But we also need to learn how to receive feedback effectively. And what we're going to do with that. The second one would be communication skills, I just think it's something that we can all always Hone, and how do you know what you need to develop with that this is where I think feedback comes in, you know, seeking feedback, even from your peers to say, if there's one thing in my communication, you think is holding me back a little bit? What would it be? And how do you think I could work on it? And part of communication skills as leaders, I think building those coaching skills, of asking good questions, being curious, that helps bring out that, um, yeah, that understanding and belonging that we spoke about at the very beginning. And then I really do believe that resilience and adaptability to change is such a key skill for us all to be developing, because life is full of change. And I think of resilience, like a bank account, we want to be making lots and lots of deposits, so that we've got plenty of the tank so that when we need our resilience, we have it there. So I think really practising some skills around that would be important. Right?

Karen Kirton  43:00

Well, he and I had a conversation in the last episode about you know, what's, what's the one thing that you've learned this week? So before we wrap up, today, I'm gonna ask you, Linda, what do you want sharing? What's one thing that you've learned this week?

Linda Murray 43:12

A lot. There's always a lot. I'm always reflecting every day on what I've learned today. And one of the big things that I've learned this week was the importance of adopting new adopting what is new, so things like chat GPT, you know, everyone's talking about it is rather than being resistant, just be curious and have a play with it. And no, one learning I had this week was one of the newest job, or career options that people are speaking about is a prompt engineer. Who knew because, obviously, chat GPD is here to stay, whether you like it or not. And so people are actually making careers out of writing great prompts, to get better information from people, which is kind of like coaching as well, isn't it? It's asking the right questions to get the right answers. But I just thought that was so interesting of how quickly life evolves that we say, We're teaching kids for careers that we don't know exist yet. How quickly that came about that suddenly being a prompt engineer. Is a career option.

Karen Kirton  44:12

Yeah, no, I love it. I had this conversation with my neighbour because she has a five year old and she's quite focused on he needs to know coding. I said, No, he doesn't. But he's not gonna have to code the computers code.

Linda Murray 44:24

Yes. Yes. That was quite revolutionary.

Karen Kirton  44:28

exactly. It's like, at this point, who will need to learn how to do the prompts, but who knows what he's gonna need to learn in 15 years, right? Yeah,

Linda Murray 44:36

15 days. Life is fast. So I guess that's my learning life is fast and move with it. You know, we don't have to be experts in everything. But just to be aware and curious about that what's happening all around us.

Karen Kirton  44:50

Yeah. That's a great point. It's just to be curious. So look, thank you for joining us again today. And in terms of some of the takeaways that are Got one was what you said, you know, you need to have those skills in the bank and particularly with resilience, you know, I think that that idea of having them ready before we actually need them is really important. And also, when you said if someone says that they're quite full, and they just can't learn, or maybe it's not a learning thing, but it's actually an application one. So I thought that was really good. I'm going to reflect on that as well. Because I do have people that have said to me, I'm not interested in development, I don't want to know any more so. So I think perhaps I can be a product engineer. Isn't shouldn't any issues. So thank you for that. Why don't you Lachy?

Lachy Gray  45:41

Yeah, thanks, Linda. So much, so much value, once again, a great reminder to learn from reflecting on experience. You've told me that before, and it's really good to be reminded about it. Just try to think through what the leader wants to know, and needs to know. And just keeping that framework in mind, and the importance of individuals taking responsibility for their own learning. I think that's really important. It's easy to say, Oh, well, it's just going to come down for me, it's going to happen be made to happen for me. So well. It's for you. So what do you want to learn? And what's important to you? I really like that.

Linda Murray 46:30

I think it's the leader. So the leader can help by creating the conversation by so by prompting the questions around, where do you want to go? What do you want to develop? What skills do we need to build to get you there, etc. But it's not the leaders responsibility to own that, that learning journey. It is the individuals as you say.

Karen Kirton  46:53

We're going to keep talking about prompting now, aren't we.

46:58

Well, thank you so much. That was great.

Karen Kirton  47:01

Thank you. So links to articles that we've discussed, including how to get in touch with Linda, we'll be over on our websites ever fight hr.com.au and yahoo.com data, you just follow the links to the podcast section. And if you've received value from this episode, we'd love it if you could leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts.

Lachy Gray  47:20

Yeah. And coming up in the next episode, we're actually revisiting an episode from series two. So it's Episode Five, who is responsible for workplace culture. So that was released by all the way back in October 2021. So almost two years ago, be curious to go back here what we had to say then hear how much has changed? And if we think about that, as well, in light of who's responsible for the learning culture? Is there any difference?

Karen Kirton  47:48

Yeah, be interesting to see what we were talking about back then. Because I think that would have been like locked down period or just after it as well. So so that episode is coming up in two weeks from now. So click on the subscribe button, you'll be notified of when it's available, then get any final thoughts from you?

48:06

Know, I think just that whole notion of getting curious, which is the essence of learning, isn't it? Getting curious in all areas of our life and, and asking the next question, what else can I learn here? Or if we think we know everything about being a leader?

Karen Kirton  48:24

Absolutely. Any final thoughts from you Lachy.

Lachy Gray  48:28

I'm going to re listen to this episode. In a couple of weeks time to pick out one or two things that I want to work on.

Karen Kirton  48:38

Good. And thank you so much for joining us. We will see you next time on the Make It Work podcast. Thank you!