Offbeat
Monthly publication/newsletter giving you insights on the latest things that happen in the Learning & Development Space.
Nifty Learning SRL
Bd. Carol I, nr. 23
700507 Iasi, Romania
RO37878850
J/2124/2017
Highlights:
* Most work contexts are well served by teams with a balanced skillset due to the company’s mission, which is often ambiguously defined: grow the business, create new products.
* The likeliness to have at least some team members that can deal with this level of ambiguity is very high in a team with multiple types of personalities and skillsets.
* Regardless of team composition, the most crucial goal is to reach a level of maturity that allows everybody’s skillset to shine in the right moment.
* This requires effective communication and a healthy dose of constructive conflict.
* But skill balance in a team isn’t always the goal: there are situations when you need a spike in a particular skillset to resolve more complex challenges, crises, critical problems.
* It’s essential for leaders to invest energy early on to help teams reach that level of compatibility and effectiveness that makes them perform.
* If something isn’t broken, you don’t fix it – this is applicable in most high-performing team situations, even if there is no skill balance. This stable approach is helpful in the short or mid-term to maintain the same level of productivity and predictability of results.
* In the long-term, however, it helps stir the pot and create off-balance teams with a broader context in focus. They might bring the proper insight and ability to observe significant changes that could impact the company (market changes, new technologies, new competing products).
* Leaders can prevent business plateaus and consistently push for progress in day-to-day work by making small changes. Teams can try out new technologies, approaches, tools without exposing their project or the company to significant risks while still taking on something new.
* Incremental changes are the most effective way to de-risk innovation.
* A diversity of opinions, personalities, and skillsets is what leaders should look for when shaping teams. The task of navigating these and facilitating effective communication falls on the shoulders of the leader. The leader’s goal should be to foster constructive disagreement and reach a state of “the total is greater than the sum of the parts”.
* Conflict is information, and, in a team with a high level of maturity, disagreement is welcomed as an excellent method to reach the optimal solution for the task at hand.
* Leaders shouldn’t enter difficult conversations with their minds already made about what the solution to the problem is. They must listen to the team and enter the situation with a problem-focused approach instead of a solution-focused one.
* The immediate leader is the first person employees will look to when difficult situations arise; the leader must display the values that the company stands for and act accordingly.
Traits of excellent leadership:
– caring
– lifelong learner, deliberate learner
– entrepreneurial
– welcomes diversity of opinions
– has a growth mindset
– facilitates effective communication
– not ego-driven
– recognizes the skill and personality gaps on their team
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We're joined by Andrei Postolache, founder at Xeriously, leadership & soft skills consultant, and author of Fun & Fearless Leadership. Our conversations explore the intricacies of being a good leader in a complex working environment, the discipline and skillset required to put together and lead high performing teams and how that ties into L&D initiatives in the organisation.
Create and maintain your company’s catalog and advertise it to your employees. Assign courses and pre-work, manage materials, and configure all of the pre-requisites for a specific course.
Have a real-time overview of your training plan. Create, schedule, and track in-person or remote training events. Register participants, mark attendance, and automate the pre- and post-event communication.
Forget about manually managing your waitlists and approval flows. Your L&D team doesn’t need to constantly go back and forth to handle last minute cancellations and unresponsive managers.
Move as fast as your organization needs you to. Plan training events rapidly by looking directly at the real-time training requests submitted by your department, line managers, or learners.
Automate communication with learners. With our beautifully designed training newsletters, your learners are notified about new opportunities for learning and professional development.
Gather in-the-moment feedback from your training participants, to get actionable information that improves your learning offer and to get more engaged audiences.
Track training event expenses in real-time. Add delivery costs, venue fees, and others as soon as they are paid, so you don’t have to go through piles of paperwork later. Extract info such as price per learner, business unit budget, cost breakdown, financial efficiency, etc., in seconds.
Use learning items as building blocks to create targeted learning programs. Organize your learning content to satisfy a multitude of business requirements (such as a new job role, a program that the employee must go through).
Publish your learning materials (SCORM, PDF, video, etc.) and send them to your learning audiences.
Assign learners to custom groups automatically, so they have access to the right learning at the right time.
Instantly see and share the data that matters with the help of automated reports. Gain visibility over your training operations using fully detailed reports.
Get a real-time overview of what’s up, what’s next, and what’s left to do for the L&D department. See the data change over time in Nifty’s intuitive Analytics dashboard.
Navigate local, national, and international learning requirements with automated tools and reports that take the effort out of compliance, wherever or whoever you’re training.
Simplify your team’s user management and access.
Securely manage your most valuable asset. However large or small your training database is, we’ve got the controls in place to handle your employees’ training data safely.
Our dedicated product specialists will have your teams up and running in days, not months — and will keep being available to answer questions at any time.
Every Nifty Learning customer has access to our Customer Success team to create, build, and deploy great learning experiences.
We provide an integration API, and we can integrate with any of our customer’s 3rd party systems (HR system, ERP, CRM, calendar, room booking system, content provers, learning platforms, etc.) to provide a seamless merge between our platform and your current tech stack.
The platform allows the L&D manager to decide how much of the workflow can be automated.
Either fully automated actions, where the L&D manager only adds a new session and the platform does the rest until completion, or manually managing each step of the session management process.
