James Tyer worked out pretty early on in his career that in order to help people do their jobs better, you have to listen to what their needs are and then design learning around that. What you don’t do is create blanket solutions to problems that you think exist. Sounds simple, but it’s easily overlooked.
Tyer realised this back in early 2008 when he was working as an instructional designer at the University of Columbia in Vancouver. He was in charge of a new managers programme, where he spent a lot of time creating content and workshops. “But I found that it wasn’t that helpful to people in their jobs. So instead I started taking people for coffee and asked them what they needed.”
This is a really important thing that all L&D practitioners should do, says Tyer: ask questions. You ask questions to find out the problems and only then do you look for the answers.
It’s how Tyer has approached his work ever since. He recently set up his own company called Togetherwise, partly because people kept asking him for advice on social learning and leadership in the digital age. There are three elements to Togetherwise – social learning, helping organisations to work collaboratively and executive digital coaching and leadership.
Tyer’s interest in social learning and collaboration started around the same time that he had his lightbulb moment concerning meeting people’s training needs. Why? As a result of his coffee meetings, he went online to find out about social learning and found a whole raft of useful information and advice. “I used a LinkedIn group that had interactions going on and I joined Twitter and found lots of support from people doing similar things.”
This led to Tyer leaving his job – “My boss didn’t agree with me that it was a form of high learning”. Ever since then, Tyer has been interested in newer, more collaborative ways of working and he enjoys helping others discover these ways of working too. “I don’t want to force change on anyone. I like working with people that are at least enticed by ideas of working differently and then helping them understand how to do it.”
The third element to Togetherwise – executive digital coaching and leadership – involves helping executives change their mindset and change their ways of working. “Before all this tech came out, people had their personal sphere of life, their internal sphere of work and their external sphere of work (customers, marketing, etc). Because of technology, they have all collapsed in on each other. Many execs need help at this. It is not part of MBA programmes, law degrees or if people have come up through finance. It’s a steep learning curve for them and they have to let go of a lot.”
Tyer helps executives think about all sorts of questions – How do you lead in a connected world? How do you engage with your customers? How do you connect with people? Are you directing from the top?
What Tyer doesn’t do is go into conversations saying he has a fix-it-all technology solution. That’s one of the things that drew him to Noddlepod – “Ollie doesn’t believe in forcing technology on people either”. Like Ollie, Tyer thinks there is often a tech solution, but users need to find the right one for them.
Something else that he really likes about Noddlepod is that it gets users communicating and collaborating in the way that they need to communicate and collaborate in their every day working lives. “It is a communications, conversation tool. If leaders don’t talk in the tool as well, you lose the value. This kind of technology requires people to practice what they preach.”
That’s what Tyer wants to help people do – work more collaboratively and effectively together and learn from each other. It sounds simple and everyone keeps talking about it, but for a lot of people, it is hard to actually start doing it. “You can hear about all this stuff, but when it comes to applying it for people, in say leadership development, it’s quite muddy.” Tyer thinks a lot of people, including L&D practitioners, talk about social learning and collaboration in very abstract terms. They are good at using the buzz words and repeating what experts say, but struggle to put it into a real life context.
That’s where Tyer thinks he can add real value. “I’ve done this and I’ve done it in a lot of companies. I’ve done it where I’ve had roadblocks put in my way and had to get around them. I’ve had difficulties and I’ve had successes so I can empathise with people and bring my breadth of experience to bear.”
It’s the small companies that Tyer wants to work with, companies that are growing and want to keep growing, but without losing their existing culture and “the good stuff”.
In a role such as his, running his own company and trying to help other companies succeed by doing things differently, Tyer thinks he needs to be two things: a futurist and an interpreter. “You have to be enough of a futurist to know where trends are starting and where they are heading. You also have to work as an interpreter - you know how companies can apply these trends.”
You can read more about James Tyer here.