The Management Theory Toolbox

Episode 10: Merging Minds—The Dance of Individual and Organizational Learning (Part 2) with Dr. James McKenna

• Season 2 • Episode 10

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Unlock the secrets to a thriving learning culture within your organization as Dr. James McKenna peels back the layers on why traditional training methods often fall short. With a focus on creating environments where upskilling and reskilling become second nature, we engage in a dialogue that challenges the conventional wisdom on workplace learning. You'll walk away with a new perspective on the Universal Design for Learning framework and how it can revolutionize your team's growth.

Dr. James McKenna [Guest] is an award-winning educator, speaker, and consultant with more than 20 years of experience in learning design and development, inclusive practices, and teaching and training. He is the author of Upskill, Reskill, Thrive! Optimizing Learning & Development in the Workplace (2023).

Travis C. Mallett [Host],  received the Masters of Liberal Arts (ALM) in Management from Harvard University Extension School, where he has also earned Professional Graduate Certificates in both Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management. Travis previously received undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering, General Mathematics, and Music from Washington State University. He also served as an Engineering Manager at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, where he led a team responsible for developing and maintaining SEL's highest-selling product line. An innovative force in engineering, Travis holds numerous patents and has authored papers and books across diverse subjects. His passion for continuous learning and organizational excellence propels him to explore and illuminate the intricacies of management theories. Through his podcast, "The Management Theory Toolbox", he offers valuable insights on effective leadership, business innovation, and strategic methodologies. 

Speaker 1:

I'd like to say that work is learning and learning is work. Learning happens everywhere, not just in training, but happens best when it's intentionally supported, it's shared and it's transferred into actual performance improvement.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to the Management Theory Toolbox, your top destination for the behind the scenes of the management and business world. Now, this isn't your typical business podcast. Yes, there are plenty of resources out there that will give you specific tips and tricks to manage your employees or create a strategic plan, but here we believe that management is too complex to be summarized in a few tips and tricks. At the Management Theory Toolbox, our mission is always to go a layer deeper, uncovering theories and tools that you can adapt to your unique situation, making you more effective than trying to follow some cookie-cutter behaviors. More effective than trying to follow some cookie-cutter behaviors. Over the course of our journey, we've developed an analogy of organizations as living human systems and we've found that organizations mirror many of the features of the human brain. While exploring that analogy, we realized in episode 9 that organizations, like the human brain, have the remarkable feature of being able to learn and adapt, both organically and intentionally. But that's only part of the story. The people that make up the organization are also learning and adapting. Sometimes individuals learn from the organization, are also learning and adapting. Sometimes individuals learn from the organization and sometimes the organization learns from the individuals, creating this perpetual interconnected dance between the individual and organizational learning. In our last episode, we talked with Dr Ryan Smerek about individual and organizational learning at a high level, discussing three metaphors for understanding individual learning, as well as learning in an organization versus learning by an organization. Today, we're going to dive even deeper into this topic and add some new concepts and terminology to our toolbox.

Speaker 2:

One angle to this topic attempts to directly grapple with a space where individual and organizational learning meet together and interact, and that's the concept of a learning culture. Typically, the idea of a learning culture is described something like this Learning culture promotes continuous development, adaptability, individual ownership of learning, organizational support, learning from mistakes, personalization, alignment with organizational goals and a mindset of curiosity and innovation. If you're like me, you've heard generic descriptions like this a thousand times and personally, I've never really found them to be all that helpful. Thousand times, and personally I've never really found them to be all that helpful. Sure, the overall idea of a learning culture makes sense. We want to create an environment that promotes both individual and organizational learning and, yes, we want to make sure our employees feel safe in learning and failing as they advance the envelope of possibilities for the organization. But I'm willing to bet that if we just stop there, most of us will go into the office tomorrow and completely forget about the concept, as more pressing concerns such as a factory defect, customer complaint or an employee's performance issue command our attention. It seems there's no time to develop a learning culture, whatever that means. So what's our solution? We create a learning and development department which is tasked with creating training for employees, perhaps even sometimes tasked with fostering a learning culture.

Speaker 2:

Unfortunately, l&d teams usually have neither the influence nor the authority to truly create a learning culture, and providing effective training while being disconnected from the actual work of employees is not always very effective. Recently, dr James McKenna of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence wrote a Harvard Business Review article titled Build a Strong Learning Culture on your Team, in which he summarizes the issues. First, training is often developed too late and not kept up to date with current needs. Every learner is also unique, and the result is a one-size-fits-none approach. Training can impart knowledge, but often that doesn't produce new skills which require coaching instead. And finally, there seems to be this cultural disconnect. Leaders can say they value learning, but the reality is workers actually perceive that they have less than 1% of their time available for learning.

Speaker 2:

Dr McKenna offers some remedies, which we'll discuss. These include upskilling, reskilling, becoming experts at learning, not just experts in the specific tasks or fields of work as well as a framework called Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, which was devised under the direction of the neuropsychologist David Rose of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a co-founder, anne Meyer. So let's dive in and explore these topics. But instead of me explaining each of these, why don't we ask Dr McKenna directly? So let me introduce our guest for today's episode, dr James McKenna. Hi, james, and welcome to the show. Hey, travis, thanks for having me on. Before we get started, go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and your work.

Speaker 1:

Sure thing. So I'm James McKenna and I'm the Assistant Director of Professional Learning and Leadership Development at the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, which I admit is a mouthful. Here I work with partners across the state to develop professional learning resources and supports for approximately 400,000 teachers and administrators in California public schools California public schools. And then I also have my own learning and organizational improvement consultancy, mcjenna Learning, where I help organizations both in business and education. As for my background, I've been working with adult performance improvement for over 10 years. Prior to that, I was a teacher for eight years. I have a doctorate in education leadership with a focus in ed psychology. So how we learn and what motivates us, from the University of Southern California right on any Trojans out there. All that to say that I've done a lot of thinking and work on helping people learn and be their best selves in the workplace, both in education and the broader world of work. So I put a lot of that thinking and lessons into a book I wrote called Upskill, reskill, thrive Optimizing Learning and Development in the Workplace.

Speaker 2:

Excellent, Thank you for joining us. So in today's episode we're exploring the topic of learning, both at the individual level and the organizational level. But before we dive into that topic, can you tell us a bit about how traditional methods of corporate learning might have hindered the development of a more adaptive and proactive workforce?

Speaker 1:

Much like education. A lot of the traditions of learning in the workplace crease back to an industrial model, one size fits all, one right way of doing things. It's what I call a center-out approach. So people far from where the actual work happens decide what those workers need to know and do and then coach out content instructions, often without really understanding the individual needs and context of the people. And so there's multiple problems with that, as your audience can likely identify already. Multiple problems with that, as your audience can likely identify already.

Speaker 1:

First, a one-size-approach doesn't really fit anyone because we all learn and leverage learning differently. Second, people far from the center, like the learning and development department, the leadership, can't possibly reduce content at the pace necessary to contend with the rate at which workers' needs change, because the world of work changes too fast. And finally, that center-route approach is one that says to people learning is something done to you rather than something done by you, and it demeans people's experiences and their capabilities. And you also miss out on a lot of good ideas by not engaging the people you're supposed to be supporting. Now, that's not to say that you're on a lot of really dynamic people in the L&D community. Even those people often have to work against an organizational culture focused on legacy beliefs of what learning and training look like. And these beliefs and these processes and systems are there and it's hard to break that institutional inertia.

Speaker 2:

So the traditional model doesn't sound all that bad for some types of learning, for example compliance or corporate values, where you do want some consistency across the entire organization, you want it stemming from one source. Are those appropriate uses for the traditional learning models?

Speaker 1:

It's not to say that one area of content isn't related to everybody's experience. Everybody in the organization should know about what the organization believes and what its mission is Absolutely, though there could be some contextualization where you go and say how does that show up in my work? What is my connection, what is that sense-making between my work in there, as well as compliance, there's legally obligated or morally obligated things that people need to do. But if it's done in a one-size-fits-all way or one way of learning that very important thing, you might run into problems, like if the entire organization runs on a computer-based model for delivering learning, how does that show up for people in the field who may not have ready access to devices? They're using human, outdated equipment.

Speaker 1:

I worked with a person who worked at a large-scale restaurant chain and the learning device that was for everybody was in the corner of the kitchen next to the oven, and that's where everybody was supposed to learn. So who cares how good the content is? That's not a conducive place for everybody to learn what they need to know. So it's not to say that there aren't things that everybody needs to know, but it doesn't mean we all have to learn them in the same way.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that makes perfect sense. Now you talk about the fact that upskilling and reskilling are keys to both individual and organizational growth. Can you explain to us what is meant by those terms and how do they overcome some of those challenges of traditional corporate learning models?

Speaker 1:

Upskilling is learning how to improve in the work you currently do, For example, waitstaff at a restaurant learning how to use a new point of sale system or new approaches to customer service. This helps them be more effective in their current jobs as waitstaff. Reskilling is learning how to do new jobs, so those same servers cross-training in other areas in the restaurant or learning the necessary knowledge and skills to move into a managerial position would be examples of reskilling. Now, often upskilling is offered out to everybody in a position, whereas reskilling we select who we get to do those things and with that selection bias sometimes we can run into problems. But growing talent internally is a lot more cost effective than trying to hire new talent as your needs shift and it also boosts retention, because when you invest in the learning and the growth of somebody, you're demonstrating that value to people. We value you, we see potential in you, we want you to grow and we're showing them that this is an organization where they can grow and succeed. If there's no clear path for okay, how do I go beyond what I'm doing now or, even better, what I'm doing, people are likely to look elsewhere because they know the world is changing. I'll give you an example. Let's say a lot of our value for managerial positions is based on people's ability to communicate complex ideas, and the way we look at that is how they generate reports. Okay, Seems valid, Except I'll give you a very personal example.

Speaker 1:

My dad is now retired. He's an engineer. He also has dyslexia. I didn't know this until I was in the service, but he would write me letters and I'm like Ma, why does dad not know how to spell very? He's using two R's and why doesn't it read like the way that he talks? Because his writing was much more simplistic.

Speaker 1:

And I asked my dad once when I was a kid. I said what do you do for work? He said I sit in meetings and people talk about machines that they want to build and I sit there with a sketch pad and a pencil and at the end of the meeting I hold up the pen and say you mean this? And they say yes, and I go build it. This guy has dozens of patents. He's one of the key reasons why we have what were chat. Scanners are now scanning people's luggage in the airport and spotting explosives and saving people, and we might have missed that if the organization said okay, but I really want to see how this person writes and has this one right way of showing them that this person is smart.

Speaker 2:

Now you also talk about the concept of employees becoming expert learners. Can you tell us a bit about the characteristics of an expert learner, and how do those traits contribute to an individual's and organization's resilience in the face of change?

Speaker 1:

So expert learners it's not that they're experts necessarily in everything they learn. They're experts at learning. They're people who have the will and skill to learn and improve and to take ownership of that improvement. They know how to learn, how to determine what they need to learn, where to get sources and support for that learning, and they can make plans to further their learning cycles and monitor their progress towards those goals. And finally, they take that learning and they get hard things done. So what's important? To understand that expert learning is a two-part function. Part of it is the person's capacity, them building that skill, but also their context. People will need access to resources, they'll need time to learn, they'll need timely feedback that helps them monitor their progress, they need support for applying their learning and they're honestly going to need freedom to experiment and fail small and innovate. So expert learning is really a way of operating. I can have all the will and the skill, but if the situation does not let me for time, resources, psychological safety, what have you then I can't operate in that way. So we have to set systems in place and practices that develop people's capacity, which may be changing their preconceived notions of what learning is and their responsibility for it with shifting their paradigm not just leadership or management, but the individual learners' paradigms around learning and ownership of learning and then creating the conditions that build that capacity and allow for that operating to happen.

Speaker 1:

As I write in the book, learning is a survival skill. It's a key driver for change. Why do they have to learn? To keep up? What do they have to keep up to? Because other people are learning and changing things right. Even if your organization isn't committed to learning, the other ones are, your competitors are, and you have to keep up with that. So it's not just the key to surviving, but it's for thriving. People know where the problems are. They often have ideas on how to solve them. So if you can partner with your people, give them the learning support they need, give them the grace and the space to try new things and share those ideas and incentivize that sharing, they can do the good work that they want to do and everybody wins Got it.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So just make sure it's clear for the audience. We're not talking about becoming experts in a particular content area so much. We're talking about becoming experts in the learning process, developing that growth mindset.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's the ultimate soft skill. We think about things that are interpersonal or transferable between contexts. Learning is applicable anywhere, right? Being able to learn and own your own improvement is applicable anywhere. I call it the skill to close the skills gap.

Speaker 2:

So in the process, of developing our expert learners. Can you talk about psychological safety? What strategies can be used to ensure the failures are seen as learning opportunities rather than setbacks?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's really important. We talk about valuing innovation, but show me 10 places where it's worked before. That might be an early adopter, but that's not learning the new thing. So that's freedom for experimentation, what Amy Edmondson and Harvard calls psychological safety. It's crucial. That's how innovation happens and the folks at Google, for example, have done plenty of research and they found that the number one driver of high performing teams that adapt, that innovate and get hard things done is psychological safety.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of expertise in my team, but if I don't feel safe to say, hey, I've got a problem, then the problem doesn't get solved, or I solve it, maybe not as optimally as I would If I had the vulnerability and the safety to go ask the other smart people with whom I work to help me with this problem or to venture a new idea. I know we've always done it this way, but what if we tried this other thing? Could we run a small test on this? That takes safety to try these things. Now there are several things folks can do to promote that safety. The first one is giving people explicit permission to try new things. I worked in special education. I would have these wonderful aides Often. I'd get new ones every year. We worked with different teachers before. Some of them would have a very different idea around the idea of taking initiatives, even though I thought it was obvious sure they can try this new thing we had to explicitly tell them. And still now I have to explicitly tell people you have permission to try a new thing. Let's give that a whirl, because even if you think it's obvious, you're dealing with sort of the legacy of previous managers, previous organizations, and you'll have to work to unpack that and do away with that. One way you can do that is you can model experimentation. Hey, I'm going to try this. Let me know how this goes. Let's test this out. How does this land for you? And vulnerability. I don't know how this is going to go, but we're just going to try this and let's see. It's okay, let's just try that.

Speaker 1:

Modeling that experimentation and vulnerability is very powerful because you, as the leader of a team or of an organization, you're setting an example. It's one thing to say we value experimentation and vulnerability. It's another thing to show people. Any parent knows that you can tell your kids a million things, but they're watching all the time. I'm not trying to infantilize the workers of the world. But it's the same thing. We get a lot from observation, not just what you explicitly say right, and so openly communicate when there are problems you're trying to solve, get people's input, share your ideas, let those ideas go from mine to ours. My idea becomes our solution, our innovation, and there's safety and power together. Maybe back to that concept of self-efficacy. I don't know how strong I am on this, but I know if I work with other smart, dynamic people, I'm more likely to get these things done.

Speaker 1:

And you create norms around learning and the value of learning. I do that in my house with my own kids. We don't say win or lose. We say win or learn, that even when we fail, there's an opportunity to learn. Why did you lose that volleyball game? Oh, we weren't talking to each other, okay. So what's the next thing we got to do? We've got to talk, We've got to communicate, we've got to commit Okay, next game. Now let's apply that. And so I think really it's about that environment and the safety you provide. Now there are some things that are absolutely certain that you can't experiment with. There are safety procedures and things like that that you don't want people iterating on the fly in a hospital. You can give them safe spaces to experiment so they build the confidence that once they go into that real-life setting they're going to get it right every time and people are going to be safe.

Speaker 2:

All right. So the Universal Design for Learning, udl, is a possible solution for inclusive, impactful learning within the workforce. Can you tell us what UDL is and how might an organization begin to implement its principles in its existing learning programs?

Speaker 1:

So Universal Design for Learning UDL is a research-based framework for supporting expert learning in any context. It comes from a non-profit in Massachusetts called PAST and it started as an effort to help students with disabilities achieve better academic outcomes, but over time they realized all the research this is leveraged on is not based on how kids learn or just kids with disabilities. This is how people learn and that's how I came to it. When I finished my doctorate program and I was asked to develop a blended learning course on UDL, I looked at these guidelines and principles. I said it's all this research. I have just spent all this time learning fancy things like information processing model and self-efficacy and what have you. But it's putting it into a workable framework that is then actionable, and the beauty of a framework is it's flexible. So it's not a list of just to do all these things, but it's a lens at which we look at the learning environment in the things that we're doing and what can we do about those barriers and get them out of their way. And so UDL takes those barriers and chunks them into three principles based on the three collection of neural networks in the brains that are related to learning. First one is engagement. Where would people have challenges in becoming initially engaged in the learning, sustaining that engagement when the learning gets difficult and they have to persist through challenges? And ultimately, how do they see their role in their improvement or their lack of improvement? You didn't learn. Why is that? What was your part in that process? It builds ownership, and so what could get in the way and what could we do about it? What are things that we can do? How do we make it more relevant, authentic? How do we provide feedback? What are you that allows people to stay continuously and authentically engaged in learning?

Speaker 1:

The next one is representation. How do people take in, process and make sense of information? So one we make sure that it's something that everybody can take in. So we think about is it too fast for some of our people? Is it only in visual format? And some of our folks will struggle with that because of a disability or audio? What have you? And then, does everybody have the background information that helps them make sense of this? Are we making it authentic to what they're doing? Are we helping them really process what's coming at them? And, ultimately, why don't we connect it? Why don't we help them see what the new content they're learning is connected to what they already know and what they want to do, because ultimately they have to put that learning in action or they lose it. Learning is done through experience and practice and it only endures over time the more we use and put that learning into practice and reinforce it. The third one is action and expression. First off, we make sure all the tools are accessible so that people can interact with each other and with the content we're trying to give them. And then we allow people the space and options so that they communicate authentically.

Speaker 1:

Back to my example of my dad and writing. What if I had to be writing, could use speech to text, or let people demonstrate the proficiency around something. Say, you're teaching a new concept. Are there ways besides this? One way that people can demonstrate that they understand the concept? And finally and this is where it really becomes helpful for the world of work is thinking about the 50 terms.

Speaker 1:

Executive functions like getting hard things done. So how do you help people think about their improvement, set goals for themselves, create plans for how they're going to improve, give them ways to monitor their progress, shift their plans as things change so they can still get that hard work of learning done, which those are skills then transfer into work. I have a task I need to do. How do I break this down? How do I think strategically about the things I need to have paired? Who do I need to bring in to get this thing done? What happens if these other things go wrong? How are we going to shift and how do I know that we've gotten where we need to be or exceeding where we need to be? And so that's what UDL is all based around. Is these three principles People who know how to do these things. That's going to work in any environment, whether it's in education, if it's engineering, medical construction, what have you so?

Speaker 2:

what advice would you give to organizations who might be hesitant to completely overhaul their learning and development programs?

Speaker 1:

First off, you don't necessarily have to completely overhaul overnight. I love the saying comes from when I was in the Navy slow is smooth is fast. Small, incremental changes can build proficiency over time, especially for an L&D department. I don't want to blow up all our programs. What are small changes? You can think about the way that you support people's engagement, their ability to process and connect information and their ability to show what they know, share what they know and get hard things done. What are small tweaks you can make?

Speaker 1:

Ultimately, learning culture starts at the top. There's a great article that I love by and it's probably the article I've shared with the most folks is by Melissa Deimler in some Harvard Business Review. It's called why Great Employees Leave quote unquote great cultures, and she makes a great point that not only does the organization need to clearly state what it believes and values, but the leaders have to model and reinforce them. Otherwise people think, yeah, you're full of it because you say this, but that's not how you act. The leaders not only the most empowered, they're the most visible to the bulk of the organization. Both leaders need to model and reinforce them, and then they need to ensure that there are systems and processes in place that turn those beliefs and values into the way things are done around here. If we value learning, we have to look at our systems and processes and say are we creating enough time for learning? Are we creating enough safe space for learning? Are we incentivizing people to share their learning? So how is the way that we're operating supporting or hindering learning? And you can take that and put in what's called a learning philosophy what learning means to the organization? It communicates to everybody that we place explicit value on learning, value tied to organizational success. Learning is not something we just do because it's a thing we have to do. It helps us get better as individuals, as teams and as an organization.

Speaker 1:

The Marine Corps has one. It's called the Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7, or MCDP 7, learning, and it's a great example. You can get it for free. They can look it up and download it. It says that, in short, learning is a strategic advantage on the battlefield and it's every Marine's responsibility, from the newest private to the commandant of the Marine Corps, to learn and support the learning of their fellow Marines. Learning is something that every Marine does. It also talks about how learning happens and how people create the right context for learning and improvement, and once you put that philosophy in place, you can then reference. Now we've said what we believe, and that facilitates that examination of systems and processes. Are we creating the right supports? Do we incentivize the things we need to do? Are managers trained to be effective coaches? In other words, look at the learning ecosystem and see how it can be optimized to create and sustain expert learning in line with your philosophy.

Speaker 2:

Now can you discuss the potential disconnect between a leadership promoting a learning culture and employees' actual time and resources available for learning, and how can organizations realistically integrate continuous learning into their daily operations?

Speaker 1:

Josh Burson in his center at Deloitte, did this study on the modern learner, and when they surveyed thousands of folks across industries, they said they had less than 1% of time devoted to learning, and one that speaks to a prioritization of learning, but also speaks to people's perception of where learning happens. I would think most of these folks are thinking, oh, when I specifically went to training or when I specifically had to do this e-learning module. So it's important to understand where and when learning happens. In short, it's everywhere, all the time. Sure, learning happens in training, or at least it should, but it also happens in meetings, in impromptu conversations between colleagues and in the doing of the actual work. It can happen anytime someone runs into a problem they need to solve, and the key is to create the conditions that support that learning, which includes communicating the value proposition for learning, what's in it for me to learn and share my learning with other people, instead of just doing things the way I always do it, even if I think they don't work very well, and make sure we have the practices, processes and systems in place that facilitate continuous learning and improvement. It's an ecosystem approach.

Speaker 1:

So, yes, you should have training, but you should also think about your managers as coaches. You should think about how do you best promote collaboration and communication among your people. It's looking at your knowledge management system and can people find the things that they need in the moment that they need them, which might save them from some disastrous experiments or at least some redundancy, and allow them to do the things that they want to do? It's solving those problems and having them in place, rather than relying on this idea that learning happens in this one specific place or during this set time and then, when learning happens and performance improves, highlight that Show how that happened.

Speaker 1:

This is what happened when Travis and James talked about this and shared it, and they brought in these other folks. Look at the good things that happened and we're proud of everybody, not just Travis because he had the good idea, because if I feel like I have to hoard my ideas, then I'm the only one that benefits from them, and so you show that, and then the learners see the value of learning, the managers see the value of learning, and maybe you're not the leader of the organization, but if you can do that within your team, then culture can spread laterally and ultimately upwards for people to notice why are things in Travis's department going so much differently? What could we learn that we could then start to scale across the organization? I like to say that work is learning and learning is work. Learning happens everywhere, not just in training, but happens best when it's intentionally supported, it's shared and it's transferred into actual performance improvement.

Speaker 2:

This was very enlightening. Before we sign off, can you tell our listeners how they can find you and your work?

Speaker 1:

Third thing you can find me on LinkedIn at the username DRJMcKenna Don't confuse me with the sleep expert or the other James McKenna's on there or on my website, mckennalearningcom. You can also find my book on Amazon, barnes Noble, and directly from my publisher at castorg, and I'd be happy to connect with all of you. Travis, thanks for having me on. Thank you, this was a lot of fun. Awesome, same for me. Thanks, travis.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that was a lot of information. Well, we're almost out of time, so let's do a quick recap. A learning culture is more than just something to be assigned to an L&D department. Critical components include upskilling, reskilling, universal design for learning, and psychological safety. Upskilling refers to enhancing current job skills, while reskilling is about learning new skills for different roles, both crucial for adapting to changing work environments. Udl is a framework that supports diverse learning needs effectively, and psychological safety is essential for fostering an environment where employees feel safe to experiment and learn from failures, thereby driving innovation and growth. Together, these elements contribute to a resilient and adaptive organizational culture.

Speaker 2:

But, as usual, the goal of this podcast is to give you some of these concepts, not just so you can apply them verbatim this week. Think about how this week. Think about what members of your team may benefit from upskilling, and take the time to discuss with them, get their insights and opinions so that you can help them succeed in their individual and unique ways. You probably already know which member of your team would be interested in learning a new skill or even changing their field of work. Try opening the dialogue with them and make a plan. This may just improve retention rates, not just for your team but for your company as a whole. And lastly, spend some time assessing how you can implement UDL principles in your training programs. Encourage a culture of psychological safety where everyone can share ideas freely and learn from each other.

Speaker 2:

Whether you're leading a team or looking to grow personally, remember learning is a continuous journey that drives both personal and organizational success. Act now, innovate your learning strategies and build a future-ready workforce. So with that, thank you for tuning in to the Management Theory Toolbox, your top destination for the behind-the-scenes of management and business theory. In our next episode, we're going to take inspiration from Alice in Wonderland and continue following the deep rabbit trail of the topic of learning, opening a whole new angle with significant theoretical and practical implications for managers and leaders. In the meantime, keep learning, keep growing and keep building your management theory toolbox.

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Travis Mallett, ALM

Host
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James McKenna, Ed.D.

Guest