If the employees in the team always fail to have a clear and accurate understanding of their work ability and cannot fully understand the job ability requirements, they are likely to misjudge their own abilities. They either feel that they have not learned anything or that they have learned too much. At this time, a “learning map” is needed to let them fully understand the “upgrade panorama” of their positions from basic to advanced and then to proficient. With the “learning map” tool, you can first draw a suitable learning map according to your business and team situation, and then let employees use it well and grow on their own.
Three elements of learning map: key challenges, hierarchical learning goals, and deliverables
(1) Key challenges. Learning maps must start with key challenges.
Typical e-commerce operations have four major categories of tasks, namely: traffic operations, store operations, product operations, and event operations. In each task, there are several real challenges that keep the team awake. For example, the event operation category can be subdivided into event preparation period, event warm-up period, event outbreak period, and event review period, a total of 16 challenges. When it comes to the specific tasks of event operation, the team has many specific problems that worry the team. For example, “Black Friday” is coming soon. How to integrate cross-departmental resources during the event preparation period? How to prepare internal and external resources during the event warm-up period? How to monitor abnormal events during the event outbreak period? How to conduct effective review during the event review period? And so on. These are all part of the learning map. You need to divide these challenges into several major and minor categories so that employees can learn in a targeted manner. Knowing what they know and what they lack is like putting together a puzzle, and their learning will be more purposeful.
Generally speaking, the key challenges behind the task should be controlled at around 15. If there are too few key tasks and the granularity is not enough, the topic will be too big. For example, how to operate an e-commerce event well? This topic is too big: if there are too many challenges, the team will easily “grasp everything at once”.
(2) Define learning goals in layers to let employees see an upgraded growth path.
Employee learning should be divided into levels. The content to be learned at different levels is of course different. According to the goals, it is necessary to define the behavioral changes that employees at different levels should make under the same challenge. To distinguish the level of employees, don’t just look at the company’s job title. All employees can basically be divided into four levels: basic, advanced, senior and proficient, corresponding to the traditional job level sequence of specialist, supervisor, manager and director. Specialist-level employees or basic employees generally work under the guidance of others. The planning cycle of their work is to complete tasks in a single day or a single week, and they are still novices. Supervisor-level or advanced-level employees are people who can work independently. Their planning cycle is to complete tasks with a granularity of months, and they are experienced. Manager-level or senior employees are experienced in a certain field. They can guide others’ work, and they have to plan in years or at least quarters. Director-level or proficient employees can guide the work of multiple departments and systems, and can make strategic plans for one year or even more than three years. They should already be cross-domain experts.
Take the challenge of “How to monitor abnormal events during the outbreak of activities?” as an example. Specialist-level employees need to master “how to find abnormal problems according to the abnormal event handling process.” This belongs to working under the guidance of others. According to the “abnormal event handling process”, he can find problems, which is considered to be up to standard. What supervisor-level employees need to master is “how to use the abnormal event handling process to handle abnormalities”. This shows that supervisor-level employees can work independently. What manager-level employees need to master is “the ability to design abnormal event handling processes for product lines”. This shows our requirements for manager-level employees. They are no longer satisfied with just doing execution, but are able to guide others’ work by designing processes. What directors need to do is to be able to work with the technical department to develop an abnormal data monitoring system. They should not only be proficient in operational issues, but also have some understanding of cross-domain knowledge such as systems and data. After stratification, the development requirements for employees are clearer.
(3) List the “deliverables” that each level needs to master.
For example, manager-level employees can design abnormal event handling processes during activity outbreaks. So, how can we prove that a supervisor has such qualifications and can be promoted? A “Abnormal Event Handling Process Document” is a proof. Documents that can prove work results are called deliverables. Every time an employee is about to make a promotion report, find the list of deliverables for the level he wants to be promoted to and ask him to take out the deliverables one by one to prove that he can complete the deliverables. Otherwise, he cannot. Everything is based on evidence.
2. Make good use of the three things in the learning map: the task force, the learning system, and the learning atmosphere
Define the three things in the learning map: the challenge task, the level, and the deliverables, and a “panoramic map of the upgrade” is ready. If you want members to make good use of this learning map, you need to do three more things, namely the task force, the learning system, and the learning atmosphere.
(1) Take turns to serve as the “task force” and let the team “self-learn”.
After each challenge, put a topic task force and select a member of the management team to lead it. Then put the best managers, supervisors, and specialists in the talent pool in, let them regularly publish the latest research results, and serve as lecturers to train all employees.
The benefits of doing this are: on the one hand, it provides deliverables to these talent pools to prove their improved capabilities; on the other hand, the experience comes from excellent front-line employees. Only by being practical and down-to-earth can the best employees lead the training of better employees.
Let different learning groups take turns to arrange learning time. Just go through all the challenging topics in turn. Iterate and review once every quarter. Teams teach each other, and everyone’s learning participation rises all of a sudden.
(2) Establish a team learning system.
After having the map, subordinates are not as willing to share as expected. There are several reasons: managers are unwilling to share because they are too busy with business and the company does not have any assessment in this regard; excellent employees are unwilling to share because they are worried that “teaching apprentices will starve the master to death”. Why should they use their own unique skills? To solve these two problems at the same time, there are two tools to build a system and atmosphere for learning sharing. One is “hard” and the other is “soft”. Both should be grasped.
There was an article that went viral on WeChat Moments, titled “How do Haidilao store managers earn 120,000 yuan a month?” It mentioned Haidilao’s talent system: Haidilao store managers’ salaries come not only from their own store dividends, but also from the performance of their apprentices and even apprentices’ stores. Therefore, at Haidilao, there is basically no such thing as a store manager unwilling to train new people. Of course, this does not mean that a system that directly uses money to motivate is a good system. Mature companies such as P&G and Huawei also have similar systems. For example, training others is a necessary condition for employee promotion assessment. When I was a middle-level manager, I also issued a hard rule: for each employee, “sharing experience” accounts for no less than 30% of the total performance. These arrangements are all made clear at the system level about sharing experience and training others.
(3) Create a learning atmosphere.
Of course, if you always rely on the system to pressure employees, they will easily rebound. You also need to learn a softer hand, which is to build a team learning and sharing atmosphere. At P&G, there is a good habit of writing success case emails. After each classroom training, everyone had to write a successful case email after applying the knowledge they learned to their work. A newcomer applied the knowledge he learned, “How to effectively manage store shelves,” to his customers and achieved a breakthrough in performance. The newcomer wrote an email about this case and sent it to his superior. The superior thought it was a particularly good application, so he forwarded the email to her other five subordinates and copied it to the marketing director of the South China region. After reading it, the director thought that this case looked good within the entire South China region, so he forwarded it to all colleagues in the entire market and copied it to her superior, the channel sales director. In the end, the case email was shared within the entire channel. This was a great honor for a newcomer who had just stepped out of the campus at the time, and it also influenced other employees to work hard to bring out their best cases in the next work, hoping to be seen by more colleagues. Those cases and best practices from the front line flowed continuously within the organization.
In summary, drawing an “upgraded learning map” should include three elements: key challenges, hierarchical learning goals, and deliverable proof. Of course, to make good use of the learning map, we must also do a good job of three things: the research group, the learning system and the learning atmosphere.