MBA1083 Guest Teacher: Jakob Heuser- Learning & Development on a Shoestring Budget

Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. The best business lessons coming straight to your ears every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And today's lesson is a guest teacher lesson. On our guest teacher lessons I bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. And today's guest teacher is Jacob Heuser. Jacob's gonna be teaching you how to deliver learning and development for your business on a shoestring budget. How can you train your employees? How can you make sure there's opportunities for them to grow and to learn and to get better so your business gets better without breaking the bank? Well, that's what today's guest teacher lesson is all about. Your business is only as good as the to help you run it. So make sure they're at their best. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Support for today's show comes from Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm takes the nightmare out of mattress shopping and gives you peace of mind when you buy because you can sleep on it for 120 nights to make sure it's perfect. We all know how sleep influences our day to day and how productive we could be as entrepreneurs. So let's make sure you rest affordably and comfortably when you with Mattress Firm. Mattress Firm is giving you 10% off when you use promo code podcast10. That's podcast10@mattressfirm.com podcast let Mattress Firm find the mattress tailored specifically for your body all inside your budget. Shop now and sleep better Tomorrow over@mattressfirm.com podcast Jacob Huser is the man when it comes to developing your team in a very specific way. Human centered instruction. His unique blend of experience of instruction and engineering delivers a different kind of training. A type of training that's optimized for the learner and not the instructor. By applying these principles in your business, you're going to allow your team members to be lifelong learners. But as the leader of your team, you got to make sure you carve out the time and the instruction to make sure they're getting better. And that's what today's lesson is all about. How to do that on a budget in your business. Plus, at the end of the lesson, I'll be sharing with you a goodie bag that Jacob is going to be giving you a page that you can visit where you can get access some great materials created specifically for his lesson. So without further ado, let me pass it on to Jacob to teach you today's guest teacher lesson learning and development for your business on a shoestring budget. Take it away Jacob.

Awesome. Thank you Omar. Hey everyone. Jacob Heuser here, creator of Human Centered Instruction and a champion of the modern learning and development movement. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today's lesson is going to focus on employee development and give you three different things you can do today that will improve your employees skills and their abilities with minimal cost. Today's lesson is called Learning and development on a Shoestring Budget. Ready? Let's get down to business. The workforce is changing. By the year 2020, the millennial workforce, those born after 1978, are going to surpass all other generations in the workplace combined. More than any other workplace shift. It's the largest we've seen since the post war boomers. And this next generation of the workforce is demanding more than just salary. Gallup found that 87% of the millennial and post millennial generation cited growth and development as the most important aspect of their job quality. Even more than salary and benefits. The data makes it clear companies that want to build an advantage must make development a priority. Most companies, however, haven't even started on that journey. So today we're going to talk about three strategies that, if you implement them today, get you on track for meeting the needs of a workforce that demands and values their growth. And it begins with making time. Just creating the time for development to occur makes huge strides in your progress towards making development a priority. The problem is, without any intervention, employees spend less than 1% of their weekly devoted to training, learning and professional development. For any kind of skill development, that simply isn't enough time. But when it comes to allocating time for development in the workplace, it's the first thing to go. If we want to be a company that values self investment, we have to consciously make the time. The most straightforward way is to just block out an entire day for the entire company focused on self improvement. This means people can focus on their growth without a fear of missing important business conversations. And I say an entire day because in my experience, it's always more difficult to allocate blocks of time on a daily or a weekly basis. One day a month is both lightweight enough to not impact the business, yet it's also a significant enough amount of time for folks to make meaningful strides in their professional development. The next thing we're going to do is embrace the individual and we're going to do that with something called an Individualized Learning plan, Self investment days are a great way to bring the entire company together to focus on growth. But what about all of the opportunities that happen between those investment days? For every employee, they're going to need a plan. The ILP is a tool that helps employees and the employees managers map learning goals to opportunities. Iops in the professional workplace are relatively new, though they've been in use in education since around 2002. K12 educators realized early on that a one size fits all curriculum often would miss an individual's differences and needs. And while you couldn't change the curriculum itself, you could change the pathway towards achieving the curriculum. And that pathway, different for every individual and articulated in a consistent form, is the ILP moving away from their academic application. If you start talking about career goals instead of curriculum, an ILP provides a way for an individual's professional development to be clearly stated. And it's really easy to get started. The simplest of ILPs is three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column labeled Outcomes are the employee's goals. The second column, Criteria, both the manager and employee list out what success looks like for each goal. And in the third column, opportunities is where the magic happens. Both employee and manager keep a running list of the opportunities they uncover. And with every opportunity there's a chance to connect that work back to the employee's goals, showing how every opportunity links back to their development. The easiest way to start using an ILP is to make one for yourself. Use a three column method of outcomes, criteria and opportunities. What you're instantly going to notice is that you become more aware of the opportunities around you and how they map to your own personal learning goals. Finally, we need to create a growth culture. Our third strategy is about valuing those self investment days. In the individualized learning plan, it's about rewarding and recognizing the people that are embracing their growth. To understand how rewards and culture are related, we need to take a brief detour. Take a moment and think about the last accomplishment you celebrated. Chances are that celebration was centered around impact, something you shipped, made, produced or delivered. Most companies have never thought about celebrating personal growth and development. But if you want a culture that values and makes time for development, you're going to have to recognize it. You do that starting at the top. If you want a culture of growth. If you want to value self investment days, if you want to value individualized learning, you need to commit to it as a leader as well. And that means showing up on self investment days, building your own ILP sharing your learning journey with the company as a leader, it's an investment of your time that sends the strongest message that you value a culture where self development happens. The second thing is to begin celebrating that development. When we celebrate self investment, whether it's formal or informal, we begin to value the individuals who are invested in themselves. Others are going to see that and they're going to rise to the occasion. Aligning opportunity with newly acquired skills is a near zero cost, and it's the fastest way to create a feedback loop that values a growth culture. Imagine spending several months working on your public speaking skills, having it recognized, and then being given the opportunity to put that speaking to use. So value growth, be a part of the movement and then celebrate it. And that's it. Self development days, individualized learning plans and rewards and recognition to create a growth culture. Three things you can do today that can make developing people a priority There's a lot to unpack from today's lesson, but you don't have to start from scratch. You can actually go online to leadsv.com mba where I've put together a bunch of resources from today's lesson. You'll find a year's worth of topics for building your own self investment days and an ILP template you can copy and customize for your own organization. If you've already got a learning and development program, there's even a self assessment you can take to see where you can start making improvements. Employee growth and development is critical to every company, even more so with the next workforce generation who's made personal development a top priority? It doesn't take much to get started. The total cost of everything we covered today, the self investment date, the ilp, how to reward and recognize individuals has a total cost of zero. This is how you can get started on making learning and development a priority on a shoestring budget. Thanks for listening to today's lesson. I'm going to let Omar take it from here.

Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Surface. I'm a big believer in making sure you're as productive as possible when working on your business. One productivity hack that really has worked for me is creating an environment of focus. Sometimes when you work in the same place day in and day out, like your home office, you slip into bad habits that derail you from your to do list. A good way to shake it up is to change your location. If you feel like you're getting distracted, get up and go to a cafe. Go to a co working space. Change your environment so you can get refocused. That's why I'm so pumped to share with you the all new Surface Go, the smallest Microsoft Surface ever. At just over a pound and with a 10 inch touchscreen, the Surface Go gives you laptop performance and tablet portability. From running office to taking care of your everyday tasks, the Surface Go easily adapts to all your needs no matter where you are. And with prices Starting at just $399, it also adjusts to your budget. So what are you waiting for? It's time to go. What a great lesson by Jacob Heuser. You can check out his website@leadsv.com and make sure you check out this special page that has some really great materials that goes along with today's lesson over@leadsv.com MBA I love the point that Jacob makes about making the time, having that day in the month where you can do a all team training, but also having a way for them to improve on their own self study. In my experience, the hardest part of all of this is just setting this up, getting started. Once you get started and you get the ball rolling, your team kind of takes care of itself. You just gotta nudge them along the way. Thanks for that great lesson Jacob. If you want to hear a guest teacher lesson, if you have a suggestion of somebody you want to have on the show as a guest teacher, email me@omar00mba.net I would love to hear your suggestions. We're always looking for feedback. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. That wraps up today's lesson. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Let's say, for example, your business has a team of 10 people right now. You have a vision of where you want this business to be in five years. How do you think you're gonna get to there? How do you think you're going to fulfill that vision? Well, in order to get there, you have to improve as a team altogether. Everybody's got to up their game, not just you. So it's your responsibility to make sure everybody's getting better. Not only that, if your employees don't feel like they're growing and getting better at their job, they're going to look elsewhere. They're going to look for better challenges elsewhere at a different job. And turnover is not fun. You don't want that. You want to make sure you keep your great employees happy. And part of being happy is being satisfied, feeling fulfilled. So even if some of these tips that you put into play cost a bit of money, to implement. It's a great investment because you're going to be saving so much money in the long run as you improve your team. Thank you so much for listening to the show.

Thank you.

I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. See you then.