Emerging Stronger Toolkit

Drive better business value through smarter upfront conversations.

Michelle Ockers from the Emerging Stronger team worked on this tool for L&D professionals to improve their impact through a simple, broad analysis process that starts with considering the need from a business perspective.

Use the Needs Analysis Tool to have an initial conversation to understand the real need when you:

• receive a request for a course or content
• are engaged to support a business project or change
• identify a performance issue or opportunity in the business

Move beyond simple aggregation to quality gathering and sharing of resources that aligns with the needs of your people.

Understanding the problem at hand was something we tackled in the Needs Analysis tool. Shannon Tipton from the Emerging Stronger team used this as the starting point and went on to develop this tool to help work through three stages of successful curation.

Use the Curation Decision Tool to help you:

• define curation goals
• source relevant content
• validate content as fit for purpose
• organise and contextualise content
• share content in a discoverable format

Build a communication plan to launch your learning program.

You’ve invested your time and budget in a new programme and initiative – so it’s important that it starts well. Shannon Tipton from the Emerging Stronger team created this plan to help you launch your initiative successfully. You should be planning ahead and thinking about how to effectively communicate throughout program development, creation and launch.

Use the Communication Plan Launch tool to help you:

• educate your audience
• motivate your audience
• plan what communication tools to use
• plan your follow up messages

How to develop and nurture learning that delivers a rich harvest.

The Emerging Stronger team had great fun working on this tool. We explored the evidence with a horticultural lens to help you ensure learning thrives in your online communities. We then developed this tool to lay out the steps to help you prepare, sow, nurture and harvest learning in existing workplace communities.

Use the Cultivate Learning in Workplace Communities tool to help you to support an existing community to:

• share relevant content to seed learning
• build and strengthen skills
• troubleshoot problems
• improve processes
• strengthen workplace practices or performance

Create the space for your team to grow.

Laura Overton from the Emerging Stronger team developed this tool to help surface the opportunity for teams to continually grow so they work smarter and at their full potential. Encourage line managers in your organisation to use it to build habits of reflection, sharing and team accountability for learning and growth.

Use the Power Hour tool when you want to help managers:

• carve out time and create rhythm
• build trust and create permission to learn and explore
• understand interests and create opportunity to practise
• accelerate results and create new pathways of success
• support self-directed learning – and create new habits for growth

Engage, act, improve.

The Emerging Stronger team developed this playbook to help enable busy managers to make time for learning and to support their people to grow, improve and perform. The L&D playbook harnesses evidence from high performing learning teams and converts it into a series of nine plays to help L&D leaders challenge the status quo by working smarter with managers. 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.

Use the L&D Playbook for Enabling Busy Managers 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

Improve the impact of learning solutions through smarter conversations.

Driving better business value through learning requires ongoing engagement with others, particularly managers, to create shared ownership of solutions. The Emerging Stronger team created this tool as a simple conversation guide to help you have ongoing conversations throughout the life of a learning solution to monitor and improve impact.

Use the Improving Impact tool when you need to:

• engage others, especially managers, to share responsibility to ensure that solutions create impact
• make intelligent choices about what, when and how to evaluate
• continuously improve a learning solution
• demonstrate the impact you have created together

Discover and strengthen team skills to prepare for the future of work.

In a rapidly evolving world skills are a top priority for leaders and people professionals alike. Addressing the skills agenda is a big task – and we can do everything. Shannon Tipton from the Emerging Stronger team created this tool as a framework to help us prioritise what matters to the business.

Use the four phases of the skills mapping process in the Team Skills Mapping tool to help you to:

• create a visual map of the priority skills needed to achieve the business goals
• gain clarity and insight into strengths, gaps, and interests within the team
• identify how everyone’s skills can be applied across departments and the organisation
• discover employees who need skills for internal mobility
• share knowledge across and within departments to help fill gaps in vacant positions

Identify the critical skills your L&D team needs to achieve your goals.

Today L&D need to support a continually adapting workforce in a rapidly evolving world. Our previously successful kitbag of capabilities is no longer enough to meet the needs of the contemporary workplace. Michelle Ockers from the Emerging Stronger team created these practical steps to help you audit your own L&D skills and prioritise those that will really matter for you and your organisation.

Use the L&D Skills Prioritizer tool to help you to:

• be future ready in a world of continual change, prioritizing the right learning for yourself
• cut through the overwhelm of the breadth of L&D skills that could be developed to identify what is most critical to you
• engage your team in a conversation about why they need to build their skills and what skills are required
• prepare to efficiently audit your team’s skillset

Help others successfully navigate change.

Many of our modern approaches to L&D involve change if they are to be accepted, adopted and embedded as ‘part of the way we do things around here.’ Laura Overton from the Emerging Stronger team created this tool as a framework to think through how to support and encourage the change journey.

Use the Change Journey Planner when you:

• do not want to leave change to chance
• struggle to engage others with new ways of learning
• feel unsupported by managers who do not make time for learning
• are frustrated by projects that start off strong and then fizzle out