Some years ago, I became a certified facilitator for a process improvement methodology that the organization I was working for was implementing.
I came away from that experience feeling that I’d acquired an important skill that would be significant for my career, the groups I’d be facilitating and the organization. Over the next year, I facilitated several groups and received feedback that indicated these groups had positive experiences, as well as a lasting personal interest in and commitment to the learning and development profession.
Since then, I’ve reflected on how this process resulted in that kind of impact. The learning journey it revolved around was rooted in the organization’s stated mission and included methods like peer coaching, reflection periods and relationship building.
But I concluded that the impact was, in part, having tapped into a sense of purpose and connection as well as having acquired new knowledge and skills. It was the person in me that mattered as much as the practitioner.
External perspectives
There is a consensus among learning leaders, human resource strategy, providers and organization development practitioners that engaging the human spirit promotes learning and performance—encouraging purpose, meaning, growth and connection.
For example, organizational development practitioners have identified human connection and finding meaning in work as significant motivators for high performance. HR professionals highlight human experience, human sustainability and leadership identity as key elements of human capital strategy.
Additionally, surveys of learning and talent leaders include human capabilities as an area of emphasis in their strategies. This agreement points to the opportunity to engage elements of human spirit to inspire the kind of performance that lends power to knowledge and skill—performance characterized by capabilities like purposeful action, engagement and contribution. Those capabilities can take performance and the business impact it generates to a higher, more focused and sustainable level.
Engaging the human spirit in learning
Expanding the use of specific developmental practices can enable L&D organizations to engage the human spirit more strongly. Below are examples.
- Connect everything to purpose. Link all programs and initiatives, including technical and functional, to aspects of purpose like mission, vision, customer impact, employee growth and societal contribution. Make the links explicit and consistent.
- Commit to in-person learning. In the growing environment of online and artificial intelligence-enabled learning, intentionally design mission-critical programs to be primarily in person. Use highly interactive methods and facilitative delivery. A deeper in-person communication and sense of community can help create shared meaning, purpose and connection that carries over to performance.
- Increase your use of learning communities. Methods like learning circles, peer coaching and leadership cohorts can promote deeper collaboration and durable relationships that foster creativity, shared meaning and connection. Use them as stand-alone initiatives or as part of learning journeys.
- Promote periods of deeper reflection. Commonly focused on identifying the new knowledge and skills that have been acquired through a program, reflection periods can be structured to include deeper impacts with questions like “what does what I learned mean for me as a person as well as an employee,” and “what can I do to make this experience meaningful to others as well as myself.” Add it to programs, job-based development and feedback processes.
- Develop advanced capabilities in the learning organization. Emerging competencies like collective intelligence facilitation, capability consulting and contribution design can help learning organizations promote human spirit in the broader organization. Define them clearly, include them in goal setting and provide development opportunities to help learning professionals develop them over time.
- Highlight human-centered capabilities. Create a separate domain in competency models that includes capabilities like judgement, ethical decision making and envisioning. Their presence in models can help drive development to an extent equal to the technical, functional and people skills already there.
If you pledge to fully integrate these and other practices into your learning strategy, you can better enable learning functions that build organizations to engage what is uniquely human in your people, and to inspire performance that fulfills mission, achieves goals, grows and nurtures well-being within and outside of their boundaries.
