Getting The Team To Care
We've talked a lot about how to build effective L&D teams and how to measure the value that thoughtful and intentional training can provide teams.
However, even the best training programs and educational content that we can measure to show how it helps teams do their jobs better can be ignored. This is a common pain point for L&D professionals: getting the team to care. This is most acute among teams that may have a negative connotation of training, thinking of it as an irrelevant and dull -- something that distracts from, rather than bring them towards, their core goals in role.
I experience this a lot in my career. Skeptical managers that are hesitant to take their teams away from their day-to-day to spend a few hours in the classroom. Individuals that need to be chased down to complete their training requirements for a compliance need. In some ways, building the training is easier than convincing the team to take it.
This image comes to mind often. While the team focuses on their day-to-day, they miss the opportunities to stop. Taking time to slow down for a short time can help you speed up later. Investing time in training, like many other changes, can feel difficult to start. L&D pros want to believe that people should be excited about opportunities to learn, but day-to-day reality and objectives almost always supersede the desire for future gains.
Worse still, poor training experiences can shape expectations. When people approach training with low expectations or treat it as a "check the box" exercise, they engage superficially. This reinforces the belief that time spent in training doesn't add value. Going through the motions to participate only by being physically present leads to worse outcomes and worse association with the experience. Breaking this pattern requires changing how the organizing thinks about learning and development. Engaging earnestly is a choice, but it needs to be accepted and encouraged culturally.
The L&D Culture
Culture shapes what we value. This is reinforced through belief, but also through the mechanisms with which societies, organizations, and families operate.
Let's take a look at China.
China's societal norms and values are largely shaped by Confucian ideology. Confucius has a number of core tenets that shape Chinese and many other East Asian societies, such as emphasis on filial piety, living virtuously, and social harmony. These areas of emphasis shape what is and isn't appropriate in society.
In Confucian ideology, there is the concept of the "Junzi" (君子), which literally translates to "son of a vassal", but more accurately refers to a person of superior knowledge and morality. The Junzi, according to Confucius, is the ideal for any individual to strive towards. This includes discipline, acting humanely, and educating one's self.
The last point is key: education was seen as critical to this pursuit. In China, scholarship was celebrated and encouraged. The Sui Dynasty was famous for having civil service exams to identify those who embodied these treats to elevate them to public service. Most radically, it selected on merit versus bloodline, inspiring many from less well-to-do backgrounds to seek education as a way to better one's self -- becoming a Junzi. Although merit-based hiring is a norm now, in the 7th century, this was a radical concept. While contemporary critics of the exam sound strikingly similar to modern critiques of education, focusing on rote memorization and cultural knowledge vs. practical application of skills, the most notable piece was again that an education was seen as more predictive of performance than bloodline or wealth alone.
Education is still deeply embedded in Chinese culture. In 2023, the university enrollment in China was 60.2% according to country's Ministry of Education, representing 47 million mainland Chinese students enrolled in 4-year university and college degree programs across 3,074 Chinese tertiary institutions. Like the scholars preparing for civil service exams in the Sui Dynasty, students today focus on passing the Gaokao (高考), literally "big test", to enter into top universities on merit of their knowledge in the hopes of improving their lot in life.
For us in our businesses, we don't have over 2500 years to build such a deep culture of learning. We need to move faster and more tactically to get teams to care about the training we produce.
The role of positive reinforcement
"Positive reinforcement generates more behavior than is minimally required. We call this discretionary effort, and its presence in the workplace is the only way an organization can maximize performance." - Aubrey Daniels
Aubrey Daniels is an American clinical psychologist who coined the phrase "performance management", after taking his knowledge of behavioral science and looking for ways to make it more applicable in the workplace. I had the pleasure of taking a course in university that used his textbook, which I still keep near my desk.
We will talk more about performance management in depth later, but for now, the core piece to take away is the value of positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is about providing feedback towards activities that we value. For example, telling someone they did a nice job after a difficult task or nominating someone for an award for their book (hint hint). As a kid, if I did well in school and received above certain marks on my report card, my mom would take me to the store and buy me a video game. A treat that I would come to associate positively with my efforts in learning.
In the workplace, we don't do this often. It's easy to go weeks or months without getting a clear sense of performance and what needs to improve. The lack of feedback for effort can be demotivating. Let's go back to the video games I played as a kid.
Think of how video games provide players with positive feedback. When I lived in New York, I used to love going to Barcade with my friends and colleagues. Barcade, as its name implies, is a bar with all the fittings of a retro arcade. On the occasions we went, I would quickly order an IPA and hit the Ms Pacman machine. Seeing my score improve which each successive level, the acknowledgement of points when I navigated Ms Pacman to eat a cherry or hot pretzel (my favorite inclusion in the game), and even the audio feedback of the little dots getting eaten all provide positive feedback that says: "you're doing it well, keep going". One night after work I went for a happy hour and ended up not speaking to any colleagues. I had a great run on the Ms Pacman machine and won the high score. Almost everyone had left the bar.
Modern video games are even more explicit with their focus on positive reinforcement. In Sonic Adventure 2, performing tricks on racing levels or finding gems quickly in treasure hunting levels would not only make the score number increase, but words like "nice", "radical", and even "awesome" would appear in bright colors on screen, providing more positive feedback and wiring the player to do more. Mobile games are particularly good at this, providing positive feedback to basic actions in hopes you'll pay for microtransactions. Games like Candy Crush really pepper you with positive reinforcement with every point-scoring move you make, while others offer in-game currency for purchases -- a sweet treat to try and get you hooked and purchase more.
I'm not saying we should turn the workplace into a gacha game, but there is a lesson here: frequent reinforcement shapes behavior. We can take this and apply it to the workplace to help drive a culture of learning.
People often talk about the carrot, a reward, and the stick, a punishment. Both are two sides of the same coin -- incentives to achieve an outcome. Carrots are generally nicer, so let's talk about the types of carrots we can provide employees first.
In the workplace, employees take cues from leaders. Anything a leader says or does makes it implicitly okay for those under them to do. I notice this a lot where I see managers adopt the vocabulary of those more senior than them, then further observing this language cascade down to the most junior employees.
Employees, subconsciously or not, want to emulate those who are seen as more successful than them, which usually means copying what leaders say and do. If leaders work long hours, then that is a quiet signal they expect others to. I recall one of my earliest jobs: My boss was consistently in at seven AM every day. I would stroll in around nine with everyone else. Subconsciously or not, I wanted to mirror this behavior. I started showing up earlier.
Similarly, leaders signaling the importance of training and giving permission to take time from day-to-day to invest in formal learning is also a good start. To go further, work with leaders in the org to have them to complete and promote training opportunities. This signals the value of the time spent and provides an important social proof to the organization -- if a leader is doing it and says it's worth doing, employees will feel more inclined to do it.
We can go further than this -- rather than saying training is an extracurricular it's okay to invest time in, it should be reframed as a core responsibility or organizational tenet. This goes back to organizational values: If you identified "curiosity" or "continuous learning" or something similar as a core value, this is how it should show up in practice. Building organizational culture around training is the most challenging and long-term objective, and it has to be real. Teams can sniff out BS, so leaders need to believe in the value of this type of investment and do more than pay lip service to it.
Another way to help drive this is to involve leadership in the development of the training. For certain types of educational content, I like to frame L&D as a way to "scale the brain" of someone smart in the organization. For example, a Founder-CEO of a startup was likely able to personally coach new sales reps and be involved in every deal in the early days. This helped those early employees learn best practices and pitch the product effectively. As the company scaled and the Founder-CEO's time is split across many competing demands, new (and especially junior) employees likely get less access and need to learn from others second-hand. Without structural support, the learning isn't as high quality. Reminding leaders that their time involved developing the training is a way to scale what they know and what works to the broader organization. This not only improves the relevancy of the training to the population, it also incentivizes the leaders to promote it internally.
Building an organizational culture around investing in training is a long-term game and requires both top down vision and action to achieve. However, you can also take a bottoms up approach and provide positive feedback to peers.
For example, employees can celebrate those who complete their onboarding training. You can also offer prizes and competitions to help drive training completion. For example, everyone who submits a survey on a training could be eligible for a raffle to a prize like a gift card or company swag -- it doesn't need to be an incredible size gift, but some type of carrot to incentivize behavior while also signaling the value in training participation. Even better, provide rewards for those who score above a certain mark on certain assessments that test their skills or role knowledge.
These are just a few things you can do to help drive positive reinforcement. Of course, positive reinforcement tactics will not matter if the training we develop isn't useful to the team. In these cases, we risk losing credibility -- especially if leaders are seen promoting L&D programs that teams perceive as low value.
Stick -- Punish non-compliance
Positive reinforcement must be paired with negative reinforcement as well. In Daniels' view, negative reinforcement is best for getting a behavior started and achieving a baseline level of performance -- enough to avoid negative feedback, punishment, or other such consequences. Positive reinforcement then helps get discretionary effort, or "going above and beyond" what is expected of employees.
So in our case, we provide rewards and recognition for participating in training, what happens when employees do not do what they need to?
There's a few easy ways to do this. First, hold teams accountable. For time-bound initiatives, such as training on a new product launch, regularly publish completion metrics by team. You can also configure your LMS to send reminder emails to drive completion, cc'ing the employee's manager or director if they are delinquent. This "name and shame" approach may seem juvenile, but avoiding being on the "naughty list", especially if management is also aligned to drive participation, may be enough to get people to at least nominally participate.
Social pressures here may not be enough. If the organization doesn't care about training yet, you may need to explore other incentives. In general, people are motivated to do the things that are seen as core responsibilities in their job that influence their performance and pay. Weave training participation as part of the performance review process. For example, if a salesperson has a dedicated curriculum with a mix of training across different categories, part of their performance review should be influenced by their participation and any assessment scores. For example, if a salesperson is performing below expectations, but completed all of their training and did well on assessments, there are opportunities to be more lenient with them. In addition, it signals the training may be missing the mark. If the same employee did not do their training or score poorly, there may be larger challenges to navigate. Regardless, it is the measurement of these activities and signaling their importance to the overall performance review -- influencing compensation and future career growth -- that will also help make training seem more important. While negative reinforcement may not be seen as a value add, at least it will be seen as something worth engaging with, if only to avoid negative consequences.
Of course, these types of techniques should not be the crux of a strategy. We want the team to want to participate in training, know it's valuable, and feel that it makes them better. Fear of not doing their training or completing just to get a better review are not good motivators on their own -- but it may at least start getting people to participate in environments where this is a core challenge.
Conclusion
Building a culture of training takes time. It's okay to start slow. The more leadership is aligned to the notion that a good workforce continually upskills itself, the more comfort there will be in this investment and making it a cultural, organizational norm.