Tool 5 – L&D Playbook for Enabling Busy Managers

The fifth tool in the series tackles the persistent issue of management engagement.

Year after year in survey after survey, L&D leaders claim that manager engagement is one of their biggest challenges. Manager’s opinion counts when it comes to influencing learners. They are also busy building and running their teams and few have time to take on the role of L&D manager as well.

Principle: equip managers to do their job

This playbook was created to help L&D managers do their jobs better, and in doing so create the space for their team to learn how to do the same.

This L&D playbook harnesses the evidence from high performing learning teams and converts it into a series of ‘plays’ to help L&D leaders challenge the status quo by working smarter with managers. The goal of these plays is to help you enable busy line managers to play their part in helping their teams to grow, adapt and change.

Getting started

These plays work because they are short and sharp, prioritise everyone’s common agenda and fit within the flow of work rather than add to it. They are also evidence informed, each one links back to business success. The plays are simple ways to help us:

Engage with managers around a common agenda 

Act – help managers take action within their own teams to support growth

Improve – help managers encourage reflection and continual improvement within the team

A tool to help!

The L&D Playbook for Enabling Busy Managers contains 9 new tools and techniques for you to experiment and try when you want your managers to:

• Support team conversations about learning
• Ask questions that encourage practice and learning transfer
• Build psychological safety
• Create time and permission to learn
• Encourage self directed and team learning

Check out the next tool in the series for a deeper dive: the Power Hour tool

* The L&D Playbook for Enabling Busy Managers was co-created by Michelle Ockers, Laura Overton and Shannon Tipton as part of the Emerging Stronger toolkit to help L&D professionals thrive in the ever changing world of work. It was initially published in conjunction with our publishing partner Go1.