Mentored Tasks: Support Learners Where They Are

Let’s play pretend. Imagine that you‘re a sales manager fora major pharmaceutical company. Six months ago you rolled out a new process tohelp your sales representatives assess RFPs (requests for proposals) and opportunitiesto determine the likelihood of winning the business. The process is builtaround reviewing a customer’s RFP, completing three Excel worksheets, and thendrawing conclusions based on your data. You introduced the process through aseries of webinars that seemed to go well, but your team is struggling toimplement the new program. You turn to your training manager for help.

She asks you and some key members of your team questionsabout the steps in the process, why people are struggling, and what outcomesyou expect to achieve. One week later she comes back with two options. Thetraining team can either develop a thirty to forty-five minute eLearning modulethat will provide clear instruction on how to work through the Excel worksheetsor they can design a half-day workshop to do the same. The eLearning will beready in eight to ten weeks and cost $25,000 to produce. The ILT will be readyin four to five weeks and cost $15,000 to produce plus travel costs.

You listen politely and tell her you’ll get back to hershortly. It’s a classic training solution, right? But here’s the problem—youcan’t wait even one week to get a solution in-place given the pressure you’reunder to improve sales. You don’t have any budget allocated to training, andthe last thing you want to do is pull your team from the field for moretraining that may or may not work. As you bury your head in your hands, youthink there must be a better way.

As this vignette illustrates, traditional training approachesoften don’t fit the needs of the business. This is especially true as the paceof change continues to accelerate. Many teams just don’t have the luxury towait a couple of months while training is developed. They need performancesupport now, and it needs to fit into the work they’re already doing, not be anunnatural step out of their workflow. As the 70:20:10 model tells us, most ofwhat we learn, we learn in the flow of our work through our daily tasks, not informal training. Like a child learning how to walk, we learn by taking ourlumps and then picking ourselves up and trying again until we get it right. Itjives with our own experiences and memories.

Five steps to support on-the-job learning

So as L&D professionals, how do we shift our focus tosupporting the 70 percent of learning and development that takes place throughday-to-day tasks? How about moving away from formal training interventions toproviding support for work in real-time through structure, coaching, anddocumentation? At Kineo, we’ve coined the phrase “mentored tasks” for thesekinds of experiences.

Mentored tasks typically include the following elements:

1. A breakdown of the process or procedure intodiscrete steps
2. Clear expectations for what needs to beaccomplished, including rubrics against which to evaluate performance
3. Checkpoints for the learner to present theirprogress and get feedback from an experienced mentor
4. Supporting resources and instruction on theprocess
5. Feedback loops throughout the process

Let’s revisit the pharmaceutical rep example to see how amentored task could play out for the sales team.

• In this case, the mentored task might be brokendown into five discrete steps. Step one occurs when the pharma rep reviews theRFP. Steps two through four occur when they complete each of the threeworksheets.
• For each step of the task, reps have access tosimple “how to” guides in the form of support videos. More than just how-toguides, these videos demonstrate how the thought process works. You hear anexperienced manager working through the worksheets and describing his or her decision-makingprocess. Remember, the outcome of the task is to determine the probability ofwinning the business.
• The pharmaceutical representative is expected tocomplete the worksheets to the best of their ability.
• As reps complete each worksheet, they presentthe worksheet to their manager who reviews their work and provides coaching,feedback, and insights.
• Managers have a rubric for each worksheet thatprovides guidance on evaluating the quality of input (Figure 1). The rubric canbe as simple as a Word document or annotated spreadsheet that helps the manageridentify what to look for, typical mistakes that reps make, and how to adjustthem for a better outcome. The rubric needs to be clear—something managers cangrasp without themselves having to do a lot of additional training.

Figure 1: This is an example of a stakeholdermap tool, a rubric that stakeholders can follow as they complete each task

With the mentored-tasks approach, sales reps start workingthrough the process immediately. Managers are prepared and willing to provideshort coaching sessions, both in person or through screen shares or videocalls. This agile approach gives the reps feedback at each step of the processand can be scaled back over time as the rep achieves mastery of the process.

An agile approach for agile organizations

Supporting today’s agile organization with trainingsolutions is difficult. And while ILT (instructor-led training), eLearning, andblended solutions will continue to be important parts of the L&D toolkit,we also need solutions that address pressing matters and move at the same speedour businesses move.

Mentored tasks enable training professionals to act like personaltrainers. Suppose a personal trainer’s clients want to lose weight and feelhealthier (they even get to the gym two or three times a week but aren’tgetting results). The personal trainer can come in and diagnose why they arestruggling, give them workout schedules, some dietary information, and tips onform and technique. After a few weeks of coaching, they are healthier andstronger. A few weeks later, they hit a plateau and the personal trainer comesback to provide more coaching—perhaps a change in routine, some new tips tokeep their workout fresh, and fresh motivation.

In much the same way, mentored tasks empower managers andfront line leaders to coach and lead their teams. Team performance improves,and your leaders get more experience in providing the expertise and supportthat your employees need for the entire business to succeed. It’s a win-win foreveryone. The L&D team’s role in this process is to set up the structureand find a solution that fits into the workflow in a natural way. Yes, it’sdifferent than creating a traditional eLearning or ILT course, but it’s lookingat ways to fit support and solutions into people’s natural ways of learning.Times have changed. It’s time we change with them.

From the Editor

To go further in your exploration of performance support in thereal-time workflow through structure, coaching, and documentation, join us at TheeLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium, coming up June 10 – 12 in Austin, Texas! The PerformanceSupport Symposium 2015 is the only event dedicated to the topic of performancesupport and the goal of delivering small amounts of information directly intoworkflows when and where it is needed to enhance on-the-job performance.

When you register for the Performance Support Symposium 2015, you willalso receive admission to all sessions at mLearnCon 2015, co-located with the symposium.  mLearnCon 2015 is North America’s leading mobile learning conference and expo, focusedon applying mobile technologies in the context of learning and support, thestrategies for integrating these technologies into the training mix, and the bestpractices for designing, developing, and delivering mobile content. 

Registration for Performance Support Symposium 2015 includesaccess to the mLearnCon 2015 Expo, anoutstanding opportunity to explore a highly focused collection of key vendors offeringleading learning technologies, tools, products, and services for mobileapplications!