Learning to Learn: Perfecting Practice

Coaching is one of the most important skills that a manager can utilize.

Welcome to People Management, my latest podcast that covers the essentials of what every manager needs to know to effectively manage the people who work for you.  People are the key to success in the modern knowledge economy and yet they are also often a manager’s biggest headache.  Why?  Because people are unpredictable, capable of both stunning success and tragic failure.  We have learned that human beings are literally capable of anything, both for good and for evil. Hello, I’m Dr. Don Ford, a Human Resource management consultant who has seen the good, the bad and yes, the ugly when it comes to human relations in the workplace.  In this podcast series, I will share insights from a lifetime of study and working with people of all backgrounds and dispositions.  While I can’t guarantee success in every human interaction, I can assure you that some strategies and skills clearly work better than others.  The more prepared managers are to deal with the full range of human emotions and behaviors, the better you will be able to successfully navigate the challenges that leading others presents to every manager, no matter their level in the organizations they serve. First up, I will discuss the all important issue of helping employees set effective work goals.  Later podcasts will address feedback, teambuilding, hiring, evaluating performance, strategic planning and other people-centric issues that managers confront every day. Enjoy the learning journey and never stop improving!  

Learn the fundamentals of teambuilding and proven strategies for creating high performance teams that produce results and high morale among team members.

A truism about learning new skills is that the more we do it, the better we should become at that skill. While it is true that practice yields positive results, it turns out that all practice is not equally effective. To get the most out of practice time, I will present three strategies that have proven to be effective in accelerating skill and competency development. They are: 1. Use Blocked Practice techniques to hone micro-skills 2. Use feedback to improve 3. Develop your inner coach to direct your practice

No greater thrill excites the super learner than discovering new knowledge. Research is the main way this is accomplished today.  Knowing how to conduct research, how to locate and curate research material and how to distinguish fact from opinion are critical skills in the digital world we inhabit. The internet is a vast treasure trove of human experience, but it is filled with equal parts  fiction and fact. Super learners know how to evaluate sources of information and how to create new knowledge through research.

Webinars have become popular now that the Coronavirus Pandemic has forced cancellation of live classes and seminars.  Learn seven best practices for designing and delivering effective webinars as part of Training Education Management's Learning to Learn podcast series.  Dr. Don Ford guides you through the best practices for webinars.

In this podcast on memory, I explore effective techniques to help us remember when we need to.  I will describe the most common memory techniques in detail in this podcast, but in general, memory is enhanced when we can associate something known with something unknown or something simple with something complex.  This podcast describes memory techniques like mnemonics, assocation, repetition and chunking.

We have all experienced the frustration of learning something new but being unable to remember it when we need it.  Memory is clearly a key ingredient in learning, since it is our ability to remember that allows us to apply new learning.   In this two-part podcast, I will first address how memory, recall and recognition work.  In Part II, I’ll share proven techniques that help people develop a better memory.

Learn how metacognitive skills can make you a Superlearner.

Our attitudes drive our behavior and the results we achieve.  In this podcast, Dr. Ford talks about three attitudes that are foundational to learning.