Training & Development

Louder for the people at the back 🎤 Many organisations today seem to have shifted from being institutions that develop great talent to those that primarily seek ready-made talent. This trend overlooks the immense value of individuals who, despite lacking experience, possess a great attitude, commitment, and a team-oriented mindset. These qualities often outweigh the drawbacks of hiring experienced individuals with a fixed and toxic mindset. The best organisations attract talent with their best years ahead of them, focusing on potential rather than past achievements. Let’s be clear this is more about mindset and willingness to learn and unlearn as apposed to age. To realise the incredible potential return, organisations must commit to creating an environment where continuous development is possible. This requires a multi-faceted approach: 1. Robust Training Programmes: Employers should invest in comprehensive training programmes that equip employees with the necessary skills for their roles. This includes on-the-job training, mentorship programmes, online courses, and workshops. 2. Redefining Hiring Criteria: Organisations should revise their hiring criteria to focus more on candidates’ potential and willingness to learn rather than solely on prior experience or formal qualifications. Behavioural interviews, aptitude tests, and probationary periods can help assess a candidate's ability to learn and adapt. 3. Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Companies can collaborate with educational institutions to design curricula that align with industry needs. Apprenticeship programmes, internships, and cooperative education can bridge the gap between academic learning and practical job skills. 4. Lifelong Learning Culture: Encouraging a culture of lifelong learning within organisations is crucial. Employers should provide ongoing education opportunities and support for professional development. This includes continuous skills assessment and access to resources for upskilling and reskilling. 5. Inclusive Recruitment Practices: Employers should implement inclusive recruitment practices that remove biases and barriers. Blind recruitment, diversity quotas, and targeted outreach programmes can help ensure that diverse candidates are given a fair chance. By implementing these measures, organisations can develop a workforce that is adaptable, innovative, and resilient, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

Lessons I have learnt so far as a woman entrepreneur We all accumulate lessons through career pivots, late nights, setbacks, and honest self-reflection. Here are principles that have shaped my journey, ones I hope every professional, especially women, will keep close in today’s world: 🔹Prioritize Financial Independence. Financial security is not only about independence, but also empowerment and options. It’s important to distinguish real security from mere comfort. True strength is having the ability to walk away when your peace or values demand it. 🔹Value What You’ve Earned. Aspiring for a high standard of living reflects your self-worth and ambition, not superficiality. Never feel apologetic for desiring a life that aligns with your hard work and dedication. 🔹Embrace New Beginnings, As Many Times As Needed. Reinvention is a sign of growth, not failure. Others may have opinions, but your journey should reflect your own aspirations, not limitations set by fear or judgment. 🔹 Care for Yourself to Sustain Others. Consistently supporting those around you requires you to be well, too. Make time for healing and self-care, strength is found in balance, not burnout. 🔹Build a Circle Based on Loyalty and Values. Relationships, whether professional or personal, are about quality, not quantity. Surround yourself with people who encourage growth, offer honest feedback, and value loyalty over simple proximity. 🔹Discipline Over Drama. Sustained success stems from consistent, intentional action—not from chaos or unpredictability. Let reliability and focus be your brand. 🔹Allow Results to Speak for Themselves. There’s no need to constantly prove yourself to skeptics. Exceptional outcomes and a strong work ethic will always reveal your potential. 🔹 Invest in Substance Over Surface. Skills, strategy, and self-respect far outlast short-term recognition. Prioritize development and preparation over mere appearances. 🔹Trust Your Own Timeline. Progress is personal and non-linear. Achievements, relationships, and healing each have their own pace. Blocking out comparison and external noise is essential to staying true to your path. What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear the principles shaping your story. #WomenEntrepreneur #LeadershipLessons #CareerGrowth #GrowthMindset

Thousands of studies. Dozens of leading psychology researchers. Decades of experiments on why some people keep going when others quit… and I’ve boiled it down to the 7 biggest takeaways: 1. Action before motivation. Peter Gollwitzer’s work on implementation intentions shows that taking even the smallest step kickstarts a psychological commitment loop. Action fuels motivation more reliably than waiting to “feel ready.” 2. Make your goals specific. Locke & Latham’s Goal Setting Theory (over 1,000 studies) found that specific, challenging goals (“Run 3 times this week”) consistently lead to higher performance than vague ones (“Get fitter”). 3. Progress fuels persistence. According to the goal‐gradient hypothesis, motivation increases as we get closer to a goal. Studies in both animals and people show that small wins, like filling in progress bars or checking off steps, supercharge persistence. 4. Meaning beats willpower. Roy Baumeister found that willpower is finite, but Victor Frankl’s work on meaning and Kashdan & McKnight’s research on purpose show that a deep “why” sustains effort far beyond raw self-control. 5. Shape your environment. Wendy Wood’s research on habits shows that high self-control people don’t rely on willpower alone; they design their surroundings so the desired action is easy and temptations are out of reach. 6. Use social accountability. Harkins & Szymanski demonstrated the audience effect: people persist longer when others can see or expect their effort. More recently, Gollwitzer & Sheeran’s meta-analysis found that public commitments increase follow-through rates significantly. 7. Expect setbacks. Motivation oscillates; it’s not a flat line. Dörnyei’s process-oriented model outlines how motivation ebbs, flows, and needs recalibration. That shifting energy gives you data. And through it all, there’s one big takeaway: Stop waiting for motivation. Take action. Which one is most relevant for you?

I got fired twice because I had poor soft skills. Then, I became VP at Amazon, where my job was more than 80% based on soft skills. This was possible because I stopped being an outspoken, judgmental critic of other people and improved my soft skills. Here are 4 areas you can improve: Soft skills are one of the main things I discuss with my coaching clients, as they are often the barrier between being a competent manager and being ready to be a true executive. Technical skills are important, but soft skills are the deciding factor between executive candidates a lot more than technical skills are. Four “soft skill” areas in which we can constantly improve are: 1) Storytelling skills Jeff Bezos said, “You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn’t amazing, it won’t matter.” The same is true for you as a leader. You can have the best skills or best ideas, but if you can’t communicate through powerful storytelling, no one will pay attention. 2) Writing Writing is the foundation of clear communication and clear thinking. It is the main tool for demonstrating your thinking and influencing others. The way you write will impact your influence, and therefore will impact your opportunities to grow as a leader. 3) Executive Presence Executive presence is your ability to present as someone who should be taken seriously. This includes your ability to speak, to act under pressure, and to relate to your team informally, but it goes far beyond any individual skill. Improving executive presence requires consistently evaluating where we have space to grow in our image as leaders and then addressing it. 4) Public Speaking As a leader, public speaking is inevitable. In order the get the support you need to become an executive, you must inspire confidence in your abilities and ideas through the way you speak to large, important groups of people. No one wants to give more responsibility to someone who looks uncomfortable with the amount they already have. I am writing about these 4 areas because today’s newsletter is centered around how exactly to improve these soft skills. The newsletter comes from member questions in our Level Up Newsletter community, and I answer each of them at length. I'm joined in the newsletter by my good friend, Richard Hua, a world class expert in emotional intelligence (EQ). Rich created a program at Amazon that has taught EQ to more than 500,000 people! The 4 specific questions I answer are: 1. “How do I improve my storytelling skills?” 2. “What resources or tools would you recommend to get better in writing?” 3. “What are the top 3 ways to improve my executive presence?” 4. “I am uncomfortable talking in front of large crowds and unknown people, but as I move up, I need to do this more. How do I get comfortable with this?” See the newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/gg6JXqF4 How have you improved your soft skills?

In 2008, Michael Phelps won Olympic GOLD - completely blind. The moment he dove in, his goggles filled with water. But he kept swimming. Most swimmers would’ve fallen apart. Phelps didn’t - because he had trained for chaos, hundreds of times. His coach, Bob Bowman, would break his goggles, remove clocks, exhaust him deliberately. Why? Because when you train under stress, performance becomes instinct. Psychologists call this stress inoculation. When you expose yourself to small, manageable stress: - Your amygdala (fear centre) becomes less reactive. - Your prefrontal cortex (logic centre) stays calmer under pressure. Phelps had rehearsed swimming blind so often that it felt normal. He knew the stroke count. He hit the wall without seeing it. And won GOLD by 0.01 seconds. The same science is why: - Navy SEALs tie their hands and practice underwater survival. - Astronauts simulate system failures in zero gravity. - Emergency responders train inside burning buildings. And you can build it too. Here’s how: ✅ Expose yourself to small discomforts. Take cold showers. Wake up 30 minutes earlier. Speak up in meetings. The goal is to build confidence that you can handle hard things. ✅ Use quick stress resets. Try cyclic sighing: Inhale deeply through your nose. Take a second small inhale. Exhale slowly through your mouth. Repeat 3-5 times to calm your system fast. ✅ Strengthen emotional endurance. Instead of avoiding difficult conversations, hard tasks, or feedback - lean into them. Facing small emotional challenges trains you for bigger ones later. ✅ Celebrate small victories. Every time you stay calm, adapt, or keep going under pressure - recognise it. These tiny wins are building your mental "muscle memory" for resilience. As a new parent, I know my son Krish will face his own "goggles-filled-with-water" moments someday. So the best I can do is model resilience myself. Because resilience isn’t gifted - it’s trained. And when you train your brain for chaos, you can survive anything. So I hope you do the same. If this made you pause, feel free to repost and share the thought. #healthandwellness #mentalhealth #stress

A learning culture is not built by offering more training. It emerges where curiosity, connection, and purpose intersect. Andrew Barry, in The Curious Lion, describes learning culture as a lotus where several forces overlap. I find this framing helpful because it moves the conversation beyond HR programs and into the fabric of the organization. At the individual level, there is curiosity. People must feel invited to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and explore. Without individual curiosity, learning remains compliance. At the organizational level, there is mission. Learning needs direction. When people understand what the company stands for and where it is going, their curiosity becomes focused rather than scattered. At the relational level, there is human connection. Learning accelerates in environments where people feel safe to speak, experiment, and reflect together. The fourth circle is continuous learning. Learning must be ongoing, not episodic. Not a workshop, but a way of operating. Continuous learning ensures that curiosity, mission, and connection reinforce each other over time rather than fading after the latest initiative. When these circles overlap, deeper elements emerge: Shared vision aligns effort. Shared experiences create collective memory. Shared assumptions shape how reality is interpreted. Shared stories transmit meaning across generations. At the center sits what we call learning culture. Not an initiative, but a pattern of how people think, relate, and evolve together. The question for leaders is not, “Do we offer learning opportunities?” It is, “Do curiosity, mission, and connection truly reinforce each other continuously in our organization?” That is where learning becomes cultural rather than occasional.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗔𝘀𝗸 𝗟&𝗗 𝗧𝗼 𝗗𝗼 𝗩𝘀 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵-𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗟&𝗗 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 Most organisations still approach Learning & Development with a simple request: “Can you run a training on this?” And on the surface, it sounds reasonable. But the truth is… That question is often the beginning of the wrong solution. Because high-impact L&D does not start with training. It starts with clarity. ▶️ What exactly is not working? ▶️ Where is the performance breaking down? ▶️ Is it a skill gap… or something deeper? ▶️ What outcome are we trying to change? Most of the time, the issue is not: -Lack of knowledge -Lack of content -Lack of courses It is: -Misaligned expectations -Broken processes -Weak manager capability -No reinforcement after learning And this is where the role of L&D changes. From: 👉 Delivering programmes To: 👉 Diagnosing problems 👉 Challenging assumptions 👉 Recommending the right intervention (even if it is NOT training) 👉 Connecting learning directly to performance and business outcomes Sometimes, the most valuable thing L&D can do is pause and say: “Let us not jump to training yet.” Because real impact does not come from how many sessions you deliver. It comes from what actually changes after the learning. 👉 Do people behave differently? 👉 Do managers lead differently? 👉 Do results improve? If the answer is no… then learning did not happen. Only activity did. If you work in L&D, here is a simple reflection for you: The next time someone asks for training… Will you design a programme? Or will you diagnose the problem? Because that choice… quietly defines your career. What do you think? Is L&D still seen as a training function in your organisation… or is it evolving into a performance partner? #LearningAndDevelopment #LearningStrategy #WorkplaceLearning #TalentDevelopment #FutureOfWork

✨ New resource: a PM Performance Evaluation template Throughout my 15+ years as a PM, I’ve consistently felt that ladder-based PM performance evaluations seem broken, but I couldn’t quite find the words to describe why. Early on in my PM career, I was actually part of the problem — I happily created or co-created elaborate PM ladders in spreadsheets, calling out all sorts of nuances between what “Product Quality focus” looks like at the PM3 level vs. at the Sr. PM level. (looking back, it was a non-trivial amount of nonsense — and having seen several dozens of ladder spreadsheets at this point, I can confidently say this is the case for >90% of such ladder spreadsheets) So that led me to develop the Insight-Execution-Impact framework for PM Performance Evaluations, which you can see in the picture below. I then used this framework informally to guide performance conversations and performance feedback for PMs on my team at Stripe — and I have also shared this with a dozen founders who’ve adapted it for their own performance evaluations as they have established more formal performance systems at their startups. And now, you can access this framework as an easy to update & copy Coda doc (link in the comments). How to use this template as a manager? In a small company that hasn’t yet created the standard mess of elaborate spreadsheet-based career ladders, you might consider adopting this template as your standard way of evaluating and communication PM performance (and you can marry it with other sane frameworks such as PSHE by Shishir Mehrotra to decide when to promote a given PM to the next level e.g. GPM vs. Director vs. VP). In a larger company that already has a lot of legacy, habits, and tools around career ladders & perf, you might not be able to wholesale replace your existing system & tools like Workday. That is fine. If this framework resonates with you, I’d still recommend that you use it to actually have meaningful conversations with your team members around planning what to expect over the next 3 / 6 / 9 months and also to provide more meaningful context on their performance & rating. When I was at Stripe, we used Workday as our performance review tool, but I first wrote my feedback in the form of Insight - Execution - Impact (privately) and then pasted the relevant parts of my write-up into Workday. So that’s it from me. Again, the link to the template is in the comments. And if you want more of your colleagues to see the light, there’s even a video in that doc, in which I explain the problem and the core framework in more detail. I hope this is useful.

The answers to these 7 questions can change your life: 1. The two-week test The way you have lived your life in the last 2 weeks; if you live the rest of your life the same way, will your life become better or worse? Our daily habits are the building blocks of our future selves. 2. Fear vs. desire Is there something you are afraid of doing because of the world but you really want to do it? Our deepest desires often hide behind our biggest fears. 3. Unspoken words If you die tomorrow, is there a person whom you wanted to tell something to but could never tell them? What do you want to tell them? Tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Speak your truth today. 4. Life's true priority In the remaining time you have left on Earth, what is the most important thing for you? And do you work towards it every day? Our actions, not our intentions, define our priorities. 5. The parent paradox How many times did you meet your parents in the last month? And in the time they have left, how many more times can you meet them? Will that be enough for you? Time with loved ones is a finite resource. Spend it wisely. 6. The paralysis of potential loss Is there anything that you don't want to do because you are afraid of losing? Sometimes, the fear of losing prevents us from ever winning. 7. Identity stripped bare Without your name, your designation, and your status, tell me who you are. And did you like this answer? Our truest self exists beyond our social constructs. These questions forced me and will force you to confront uncomfortable truths about your life, relationships, and identity. They aren't just thought experiments; they were catalysts for change. What's the toughest question you've ever asked yourself? Image from SeffSaid.

Inexpensive token generation and agentic workflows for LLMs open up new possibilities for training LLMs on synthetic data. Pretraining an LLM on its own directly generated responses to prompts doesn't help. But if an agentic workflow implemented with the LLM results in higher quality output than the LLM can generate directly, then training on that output becomes potentially useful. Just as humans can learn from their own thinking, perhaps LLMs can, too. Imagine a math student learning to write mathematical proofs. By solving a few problems — even without external input — they can reflect on what works and learn to generate better proofs. LLM training involves (i) pretraining (learning from unlabeled text data to predict the next work) followed by (ii) instruction fine-tuning (learning to follow instructions) and (iii) RLHF/DPO to align to human values. Step (i) requires orders of magnitude more data than the others. For example, Llama 3 was pretrained on over 15 trillion tokens. LLM developers are still hungry for more data. Where can we get more text to train on? Many developers train smaller models on the output of larger models, so a smaller model learns to mimic a larger model’s behavior on a particular task. But an LLM can’t learn much by training on data it generated directly. Indeed, training a model repeatedly on the output of an earlier version of itself can result in model collapse. But, an LLM wrapped in an agentic workflow can produce higher-quality output than it can generate directly. This output might be useful as pretraining data. Efforts like these have precedents: - When using reinforcement learning to play a game like chess, a model might learn a function that evaluates board positions. If we apply game tree search along with a low-accuracy evaluation function, the model can come up with more accurate evaluations. Then we can train that evaluation function to mimic these more accurate values. - During alignment, Anthropic’s constitutional AI uses RLAIF (RL from AI Feedback) to judge LLM output quality, substituting feedback generated by an AI model for human feedback. A significant barrier to using agentic workflows to produce LLM training data is the cost of generating tokens. Say we want to generate 1 trillion tokens to extend a pre-existing dataset. At current retail prices, 1 trillion tokens from GPT-4-turbo ($30 per million output tokens), Claude 3 Opus ($75), Gemini 1.5 Pro ($21), and Llama-3-70B on Groq ($0.79) would cost, respectively, $30M, $75M, $21M and $790K. Of course, an agentic workflow would require generating more than one token per final output token. But budgets for training cutting-edge LLMs easily surpass $100M, so spending a few million dollars more for data to boost performance is feasible. That’s why agentic workflows might opening up new opportunities for high-quality synthetic data generation. [Original text: https://lnkd.in/gFF2AsZ9 ]