Mindset or skillset:
What’s really the problem and can you fix it?
Do you find yourself at the end of your financial year with a pot of unused learning and development budget and no idea why it hasn’t been spent?
You’re not alone. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests this is a common problem in many organisations and generally provokes a ‘use it or lose it’ state of panic as you try to spend the budget in time to prevent a cut in next year’s allocation.
Yet, by contrast, the CIPD Report ‘Mind the gap’ suggests that training budgets are being decreased and, as a result, businesses are A) trying to do more with less whilst B) failing to sufficiently prioritise learning and development of their workforce.
So, whether the former or the latter sounds familiar to you, there is one thing we can be certain of. Learning & development within many UK workplaces is in need of attention.
And the reality is, if you’re struggling to spend your learning & development or training budget (call it what you will) or have low take-up of training opportunities, you need to look at the reasons why.
Culture check
These days budgets are often cut to the quick and leaders can start the year wondering how on earth they’ll make it through the coming 12 months. However, come the end of the year, unused budgets for ‘nice to have*’ things like training are often symptomatic of a deeper problem that sits in the organisational culture.
Or rather the absence of a learning culture.
You see, in order for the people in your organisation to desire to grow and learn, it’s important that the organisation values growth and education. Not just in cash terms, but in the progression and developmental pathways that can open as a result.
The challenge of undersubscribed learning provision
I’d like to share with you a story that might sound familiar.
In my days as a full-time consultant, I was asked to help an organisation change the skill sets of its workforce in order to make them more future
focussed.
The client told me they wanted a series of learning opportunities that staff could attend. And they were willing to pay handsomely for those opportunities.
However, it transpired that staff already had access to an impressive selection of learning opportunities - which often went undersubscribed.
My question was, how would expanding the offer lead to increased uptake?
The importance of a learning culture
During my work to solve the problem of undersubscribed learning provision, I made two important discoveries.
As a whole, the organisation didn’t have a ‘skillset problem’. Or at least, not yet!
The crux of the problem came down to these two important points:
The organisation hadn’t instilled a convincing learning culture in their people.
As a result, the workforce didn’t have a learning mindset.
If you want your people to develop a positive mindset towards lifelong learning and development, your organisational culture needs to be supportive.
Creating a learning culture means making learning a priority throughout your business. To do this you must encourage your people to attend training and ensure that, when they do take time away from their ‘day job’ to learn, they don’t feel penalised afterwards.
In the example above, the staff felt strongly that time away from their job to pursue development opportunities would only make their professional life more difficult afterwards. This indicated their employers didn’t value the investment in personal and professional development and therefore staff felt that was a disincentive to ‘give more to the business’.
Human nature is to take the path of least resistance and, put simply if your teams feel that learning is a hassle, it stands to reason they won’t engage.
If this sounds like your business, how can you fix it?
Mindset meets Skillset
Having established the importance of creating a learning culture in the business, the next challenge is to understand how to marry mindset to the development of skill sets. Particularly if the people you are leading don’t think they need to develop existing or learn new, skills.
Mindset is determined in two ways; fixed mindset and growth mindset. Carol Dweck explains this concept brilliantly in her aptly named book “Mindset”.
Hugely paraphrased, a fixed mindset is a belief that intelligence is static and cannot be changed. A growth mindset, by contrast, is the firmly held belief that intelligence can be developed throughout your life. This article has a fabulous diagram that explains how different mindsets affect human behaviours.
As a business leader, you (I assume) have a strong desire to make your business, and therefore your people, the very best it can be within its field. To achieve this, I also assume, you understand that there has to be continual growth.
However, if you don’t engender a growth mindset within your workforce, the majority will likely trot along happily thinking their skill sets are perfectly adequate and there is no need to change.
Herein lies the importance of changing mindsets in order to create a desire to develop skill sets.
Mastering mindset to supercharge skillset
Do you have an unspent training budget at the end of the financial year?
Do you have teams, or individuals, in your organisation resistant to embracing personal and professional development opportunities?
Are your training and development opportunities persistently undersubscribed?
If so, you might have a mindset problem and mindset is something that can only be coached not, taught.
The good news is, I have a wealth of experience in coaching leaders with this very problem who have gone on to achieve great results. If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you, book a free consultation.
