Lesson 5: Help Employees Reflect on Their Learning

In a good organization, everyone is constantly learning. The marketplace is always changing, customers want new products and services, a new technology comes along, etc.

Due to this constant change, employees have to acquire new skills regularly. Managers and coaches may or may not be in charge of the training itself, but they will be in charge of following up on the training and making sure employees retain the information and grow their skills.

Reflection is one of the key elements of learning, and it’s often left out of the process. Good managers and coaches know this, and they schedule follow-up conversations with employees that allow the employees to reflect on their learning.

To get at the heart of what employees have taken away from a training session, ask what Michael Bungay Stanier calls “the Learning Question”:

“What was most useful to you?” 

This question forces the employee to hone in on her key takeaways. It also lets you know if she somehow missed some key points from the training, which allows you to do some targeted follow-up training.

Exercise:

Again, the best way to get in the habit of following up with employees after a learning experience is to practice doing so.

This may be easier or harder to implement, depending on your situation. So, here are some options for this exercise:

If you’re in a management or coaching position in a company that does regular training but hasn’t built-in follow-up reflection sessions, see if you can get the company to do so. If they go for it, use the Learning Question in your follow-up discussions.

If the company won’t go for this suggestion company-wide, ask if you can have permission to do so with the employees you work with directly. If the company will allow this and schedule these follow-ups, go for it. If they tell you it’s a good idea, but don’t want you taking regularly scheduled time to do the follow-ups, find small chunks of time (if the employee gets to work early or stays late, during a coffee break, at lunchtime) to squeeze these discussions in.

You can even practice these after-learning discussions at home. For example, if you have school-age kids, instead of asking the old, “What did you learn today?” question, ask “Out of everything you learned today, what was most useful to you?” This focus on usefulness may very well elicit an answer that you can then follow up on to create a full-scale discussion. Of course, you may still get the old standby answer, “Nothing,” but it’s worth a try.

Whatever the context is in which you have your after-learning reflection discussions, use the worksheet provided to get your thoughts down about the usefulness of these follow-up discussions.