Leaders ‘must step up and show the way in on-the-job learning’

NAB is fostering a learning environment in which its staff can be free to experiment.

Kate Nuttall: ‘We are trying to foster that coaching environment. Picture: Adam Taylor

Business leaders need to set an example to their staff and be willing to learn on the job, NAB executive general manager for people Kate Nuttall says.

Ms Nuttall told The Australian’sEnterprise Series Luncheonthe bank was trying to foster a learning environment in which its staff were free to experiment and develop their skills in the workplace, and to learn from each other.

She said NAB used a 70:20:10 principle, which says learning is 70 per cent from experience on the job, 20 per cent from interactions with others at work and 10 per cent from structured education.

But Ms Nuttall said leaders tended to put too much emphasis on the 10 per cent.

“I think it is always a challenge to help leaders think outside of the 10 (per cent), which is the technical, go to a course, training,” she said.

NAB was working with its leaders to help them see the value of informal learning experiences.

“We’ve been spending time with our leaders around coaching, around conversations, on-the-job experiences,” she said. “It has got to start with our leaders, because if they’re not demonstrating that behaviour, then it won’t permeate through the organisation.”

Ms Nuttall said millennials were open to learning from peers and learning from experience.

“There’s nothing more that they love than actually coming out and saying, ‘here’s an idea that I’ve got’, and then working on that with others.

“Their networking ability to pull in the right people to help them problem solve is a real skill that we need to encourage more of,” she said.

“So we are trying to foster that coaching, experimental environment to encourage people to learn.”

Ms Nuttall said millennials were naturally more experimental and tactile in their learning.

Jason McPherson, chief scientist at Culture Amp, which offers a workplace management platform to business, advised managers to create “really, really strong stories around the learning and development opportunities” they offered to staff.

He said he had seen companies that “really go out of their way to tell the stories … about how someone did X, Y, and Z, and ended up in another opportunity in the ­organisation, or even in another organisation”.

Mr McPherson said that getting the learning and development as well as the leadership environment right was critical for a workplace.

“ If you can get those two things right, you’re sort of 80 per cent there. But (training) is not what it used to be, so we’re seeing so many organisations struggling with how to give people the options that they need for training without it blowing out the cost and complexity,” he said.

TAFE NSW managing director Jon Black said his organisation had launched a program to deliver to business short, tailored courses to meet training needs for those skills that needed formal training.

“So if you’ve got a demand in your workplace for people to understand what blockchain is, we can do that. And if you want to understand how to do cyber­security — not just talk about it — we can do that,” he said.

Airtasker boss Tim Fung told lunch guests that in his company little attention was given to formal training.

He said his employees mostly learnt from doing, and being involved in projects the company was undertaking.

“So we don’t really think about formal training with such vigour,” he said.

However, he said Airtasker managers were involved in passing on skills to others via formal training because some of them delivered courses for training companies such as General Assembly.

“So they will teach user experience courses there, or coding camps and stuff. So a lot of that goes externally,” he said.

“But, if I was to be totally transparent, I don’t think we’ve thought much about how do we actually optimise formal internal training.”