5 Tools To Unleash The Potential of Your People
How do you leverage Apprenticeship and mentorship in your organization?
Last year, I had Emily Goligoski on the The Edge of Work Podcast to discuss mentoring. One part of the conversation caught my attention: If we want to be effective with mentoring, we need to be clear about what it is, what good it looks like, and what it’s not.
Mentoring is one of those topics that we all like on the surface. But when it comes down to making this come to life inside organizations, mentoring often falls short because we either don’t define it properly or we conflate it with many other things, like sponsorship, coaching, and other topics.
As I’ve written about before, I’m less dogmatic about the definition of what it is. I suggest that you actually take the time to invest in defining it, aligning around it inside your organization, and showing people “what good looks like.”
I’d been stewing on these thoughts, even thinking about how I could design a mentoring program from scratch that I could take into organizations when I came across this piece from Lisa Christensen, who heads up Learning Experience Design over at McKinsey.
The piece, titled, “embracing apprenticeship as a way of life” resonated with me as someone who grew up in a professional services firm where apprenticeship was fundamentally baked into both the culture and the business model.
When you think about apprenticeship, you might think about the trades or vocational school and how in order to enter a trade you must learn through observation and doing the thing. This is true whether you’re a welder, car mechanic, or perhaps working on machinery in a factory. But that isn’t the only definition of apprenticeship.
Here is what Lisa had to say:
“When I think of apprenticeship, I think about a teacher–learner relationship that happens in the flow of work. There is somebody who has skills who is teaching someone else those skills, helping that person move toward greater independence.
We know apprenticeship is working when somebody is able to start doing things more and more independently. Apprenticeship is an opportunity to transfer expertise from someone who knows how to do something to someone who is just learning.”
My Own Experience with Apprenticeship
Working in a professional services firm, apprenticeship is baked into the business model and the culture. From a business model perspective, firms rely on “leverage,” so having more junior resources “step up” and own more of the work makes the model work. This is why being a consultant can be such a great career accelerator - you are often getting exposure and experiences in your career that would take much longer if you were somewhere else.
But to do that, your employees need to know how to do things and how to learn things quickly and easily. While many professional service firms invest in learning and development, client service work is too demanding and too fast-paced for them to send people into formal learning environments every time they need to learn something. Enter apprenticeship.
Whenever I was new to a project, I often got asked to do things I didn’t know how to do. Early on, this gave me a ton of anxiety because it felt like I knew nothing. Over time, I began to realize that as a 22-year old analyst, I wasn’t getting paid to be there for what I knew (yet) but how I could learn, what I could learn, and what resources I could tap into so that I could complete a task, or deliverable that helped our team achieve our stated goal. And what I realized was that, many of the answers to how to do the things I was being asked were right around me, inside the minds of other people.
If I had to lead a client workshop discussion, I would ask the senior consultant if I could shadow them, take notes on what they did, and review the notes with them after the meeting. Over time, this helped me realize something: The more that I asked for help, the more that I learned. And the more that I learned, the more that other people started asking me for help as well. This helped me build my own influence and credibility inside my organization, in addition to helping me do my job effectively.
You might be wondering, why did other people decide to take time out of their day to help me? That’s where culture comes into play.
Because professional service firms rely on people as their product, the better they invest in the development of their people, the more value they can deliver (and thus make in return) Leaders at firms know this, and oftentimes will bake apprenticeship into their workflow and culture. People who teach and guide others are rewarded for this behavior, it's something they look for when they hire candidates, and in many cases, you cannot get promoted, unless you exhibit these behaviors.
Professional service firms are like talent marketplaces. Because you change projects, clients and teams so many times, you are always on the hunt for good engagement managers and partners. The engagement managers and partners who take their time to teach and apprentice their team members often are the most popular engagement managers and partners. So if you’re a smart engagement manager or partner, what do you think you are going to do?
As Christensen describes, at McKinsey:
“In our Leadership Development Model (LDM), the first competency listed for every person in the firm is “apprentices others.” We have defined what being great at apprenticing others looks like for different roles and how it progresses across seniority levels, so colleagues understand what is expected of them at each stage of their career. “
Note: Here’s a podcast featuring more of Lisa’s insights
This approach, in my opinion, is the best way to embed a behavior or action you want out of your managers and leaders from a strategic and cultural lens. It must be done at all levels, embedded into the culture, and rewarded through performance. (Note: this approach also works for transformation projects, culture work, and leadership development)
It’s powerful for two reasons. First, it gives an invitation to all people to participate. At McKinsey, they have defined what “good looks like” for leaders and people at all levels. Apprenticeship is something everyone can do and is expected to do. I often say that every person has two roles, to learn and to teach. Different from other forms of relationships, such as sponsorship or even mentoring, this provides people an opportunity for everyone from the new intern to the CEO to be both a learner, and a teacher.
Having language around apprenticeship unlocks so much learning and knowledge sharing. If you believe you hired the best people, why would you limit sharing knowledge and teaching to only the most senior? Telling people they are valued and smart and giving them tools to share their talent seems like a much more impactful approach.
Second, it emphasizes learning in the here and now. As a leadership development consultant & facilitator, I love training and leadership programs more than anyone else, and while they have a place, we need to provide self-service tooling to help employees learn and grow in a self-directed and natural way. People spend way more time outside of the formal learning classroom than within it, so if we don’t do that, we are severely limiting the reach and potential impact of our work. Apprenticeship can happen in quick and informal ways that don’t require a lot of time and space. It also helps employees develop their own self-learning tools they can use on their own, and builds a much more collaborative, curious, and cooperative kind of organization.
The 5 Tools Organizations Can Embrace
This definition of apprenticeship helped me come to the conclusion that what we really need to do is to help people understand the different relationships and tools they have at their disposal that can work right inside the day to day work.. Just like mentoring, other tools like coaching, feedback, sponsorship all sort of get talked about but never fully defined. Even making the language and definition more transparent can be helpful to employees just by letting them know that they too can participate.
Imagine a world, where you are assigned a task or deliverable, and instead of having to rely on yourself to figure it out, you can have both the A) language and B) confidence to ask for help in the form of any of the following:
Mentorship - A guide to share their specific advice and experience on how to tackle a challenge or solve a problem that you are currently facing
Apprenticeship - Someone to teach you specifically how to do a task, deliverable or action in the moment
Coaching - Someone to help you get you a decision or outcome through questions and reflections
Feedback - Someone to provide specific and direct feedback on something you’ve done or are doing
Sponsorship - Someone to use their formal position or authority to get you access or resources to an opportunity
Note: These are my definitions I use in keynotes, not dogmatic on these and open to feedback.
But this is why, defining what these terms mean, demonstrating what good looks like for them, and rewarding them can be so powerful. None of these are things that require massive investment of money and resources, and actually sit right within the capacity of all of your employees.
Conclusion
One of the things that I love about these tools is that most of them are things that all employees can use and participate in. I believe every employee has the ability to learn and teach. Whether it’s mentoring, apprenticeship, coaching, or feedback, defining, teaching, and rewarding these tools are a way to unlock the potential and skills of your people that can lead to better results for employees as well as for the organization.
The former CEO of HP Lew Plat once said: “If HP knew 50% of what HP knows, we’d be 3x more productive.” Consider these five tools as the way to unlock the knowledge and insights inside your people that fuels productivity and engagement.
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Consulting & Advisory Services - Do you have a leadership development or onboarding program that needs a refresh or audit? Let’s chat about how we can improve your program.
1:1 Executive Coaching - Are you looking for an executive coach for 1:1 leadership support? Let’s chat about how we can work together
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al