The Mindtools L&D Podcast

Learning measurement is difficult, complex, and expensive. Or is it?   In Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring , Dr Alaina Szlachta applies a Build-Borrow-Buy approach to learning measurement, and joins The Mind Tools L&D Podcast this week to share her insights with Ross Dickie and Owen.   We discuss:   the importance of asking the right questions   how to bake measurement into your programs...

Measuring management capability is intrinsically complex. Unlike sales training , where you have sales, or customer-service training , where you have CSAT scores, management doesn't have a built-in metric we can use to quantify learning impact. So, what's the solution?   This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross Dickie is joined by Owen and Anna to discuss our new 'Manager Skills Assessment'...

If you work in learning and development, you probably get some direction from your senior leadership team about what to focus on and how much to spend. But, once you get into the details, you have lots of room to play. In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Chief Learning Officer Marc Steven Ramos joins Ross Garner and Ross Dickie to discuss: ·        the strengths and weaknesses o...

In Power to the Middle , McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field argue that the 'middle manager' is key to organizational success. Long maligned (often by McKinsey), the manager is in fact responsible for delivering objectives, addressing underperformance, building trusting relationships, and resolving team conflicts. In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast...

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross Garner and Ross Dickie are joined by Kathryn Hume, strategic workforce planning and L&D consultant, and author of the book Learn, Solve, Thrive . In the book, Kath argues that learners have a responsibility for managing their own learning and outlines strategies that anyone can adopt to make that process easier. We discuss: ·        why we can't 'wait...

It's been three years since the first edition of The Learning and Development Handbook by Michelle Parry-Slater was published. In that time, a global pandemic, rise of AI, and shift to remote working, have transformed how we work. This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Michelle returns to the show to discuss the second edition of her book with Ross G. We discuss: what has changed (and what hasn...

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross Garner and Ross Dickie   are re-visiting their L&D mailbag to answer your questions.     We discuss:   What is L&D actually doing well with Large Language Models ? (via Gill Chester )   What's the top 3 least likely L&D jobs to be replaced by AI? (via Alan Hiddleston)   How can learning teams partner better with the rest of the org? ( via Sarah Danzl)...

Hey listeners! No new episode this week, but we wanted to revisit this 2022 classic with Jane Bozarth because we thought it paired nicely with the latest edition of our  L&D Dispatch  newsletter. Do check out the newsletter Ross G discussed on our L&D Dispatch  page, ' Four papers that will make you laugh (then make you think) '. Regular show notes below. --- In learning science, there are certain...

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross G and Owen are diving into their L&D mailbag to answer your questions. We discuss: ·        Will there be more or less opportunity to make a meaningful living in L&D over the next five years? (via JD Dillon) ·        If we think of L&D as a product, what would you sunset and what would the top three candidates look like for development? (via Sean Brow...

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , we're putting the 'people' back into People Development and the 'human' back into 'Human Resources, as we explore Natal Dank's book Agile L&D.     Natal is the co-owner and director of PXO Culture, a consultancy firm on a mission to make HR, culture and change about humans.   And her book, Agile L&D , is a follow-up to Agile HR .    We discuss:   Problems...

Technical professionals have a high level of expertise, but translating that expertise for non-technical colleagues isn't alway s straightforward. Whether you're an engineer, a resea r cher , or even an L&D professional, how can you communicate in a way th at resonates with you r audience?   This week on the Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross D and Owen are joined by Neil Thompson, founder of Teach The...

This week we're revisiting an old adage: The employer who says, 'What if we train our people and they leave?' And the trainer who says, 'What if we don't and they stay?' As Talent Development Manager for Kew Green Hotels, Clare Sheppard knows all about this. She's responsible for helping those who want to stay progress in their careers, while giving those who leave a great experience that they can...

Last week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross G and Owen explored how the 70:20:10 model is being applied by three L&D Practitioners: Ceri Sharples, Cath Addis, and Carl Akintola-Davis. Today, we wanted to follow up on some of the challenges posed during that discussion with The 70:20:10 Institute's Charles Jennings. What does it really mean to 'integrate learning into the workflow', and how does...

Depending how you count it, 70:20:10 is almost 40 years old. The model provides a high-level outline of how we learn at work: 10% through formal learning, 20% through working with others, 70% through doing the work. The numbers get criticised, but this insight is widely accepted: Most of what we learn does not come from formal training. But how then should L&D practitioners apply the model to the...

A summer holiday holds the potential for distraction-free reading. With that in mind, in this week's episode our podcast team suggest books that hold lessons for L&D practitioners. Which might you take on holiday this summer? Book list Right Kind of Wrong. Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive (2023) by Amy Edmondson www.amazon.co.uk/Right-Kind-Wrong-Learning-Thrive Counter-Intelligence: Wha...

According to a recent study from Ipsos, and commissioned by Amazon, 86% of respondents said that career development is essential, very or fairly important to them. But, in our experience, it tends to become a lot less important when the day-to-day demands of work crop up.   So, in this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , return guest Neil John Cunningham from Align Learn Do joins Ross G...

In part three of our #B uilding B etter M anagers series, Ross Garner and Nahdia Khan are joined for one last time by Dr Anna Barnett from the Mind Tools Insights team. If you've been listening along recently, we've already covered the capabilities that make a 'good' manager, and how we can develop them. In this week's episode, we're looking at how we support more experienced managers.   We discus...

Last week, we kicked off our three-part #BuildingBetterManagers series with an overview of the 12 capabilities that we know make a difference to performance. Now we're asking: How do we help managers build those capabilities?  To answer this question, Ross G and Ross D are joined once again by Dr Anna Barnett, from the Mind Tools Insights team, to discuss her recommendations from our latest report...

What does good management look like? What skills and capabilities does a manager need? Are you a good manager? In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross Garner and Owen Ferguson are joined by Dr Anna Barnett, from our own in-house Insights team, to discuss the findings of our latest report: 'Building Better Managers'. In the first of three episodes exploring how we can improve ma...

For eight years, the team here on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast (formerly The GoodPractice Podcast ) have been chatting work, performance and learning with some of the brightest minds in learning and development. This week, to celebrate the release of our 400 th episode, our friends Phil Willcox from Emotion at Work and Ady Howes from Digital Skills People have pulled together a tribute episode for u...

Digital learning content offers a scalable, always-on option to help your people build their skills and overcome workplace challenges. But often these libraries get dusty, bogged down by out-of-date content with little relevance, or hidden away in a dark corner of the intranet where no one can find them.   So in this episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Virgin Money's Martin Ritchie, Digital Le...

In 'Measure of a Man', episode nine of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the Enterprise crew debate whether their robot companion, Data, is truly alive. More interesting for us, though, is the way they interact with artificial intelligence (AI) in general. Not just for what it tells us about how AI tools might evolve, but also for how we humans work with them. So in this specia...

We humans are social creatures. We form organic communities wherever we go, based on shared interests, passions and needs. But when we try to impose top-down learning communities on an employee population, things get more difficult. Is it possible for L&D to create a flourishing community? In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross Garner and Nahdia Khan are joined by Andy Lancast...

In learning and development, we typically want people to do something that they are currently not doing, or to stop doing something that they shouldn't be. One obvious approach is training, but there are in fact a broad spectrum of interventions that we can deploy. In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast , Ross and Owen are joined by Wil Procter, Strategy and Innovation Director at Na...

As professionals, we want to know if our work has had the impact we originally intended and to tell others about it. This means getting comfortable with data and crafting compelling data stories. On this episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G is joined by Neil Cunningham, founder of Align | Learn | Do and author of Narratives and Numbers , to discuss practical and mindset shifts L&D can tak...