What does managerial training look like in action?

By Rob Cahill, Jhana CEO

When most of us think about remote work, we think of home offices or the occasional work-from-home day. We think of satellite teams operating in major global cities like London, Singapore and New York, a relatively easy flight from just about anywhere. We think, primarily, of employees in one urban center connecting to employees in another urban center.

It wasn’t until I sat down with Nick Handler, Director of Global Operations at One Acre Fund, that I realized how narrow our accepted definition of “remote” really is.

Developing the really, really, really remote workforce

For anyone not familiar, One Acre Fund is a fantastic nonprofit agriculture organization that offers farming inputs and training on credit to more than 400,000 smallholder farmers across Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi. The vast majority of their 4,500 employees work from rural parts of East Africa. Further, many of the teams on the ground are comprised of early-career East African workers who often have little to no prior business experience.

I asked Nick about their training model and how One Acre Fund has been able to address some of the challenges inherent with hiring, training and developing a highly matrixed, rapidly growing workforce.

Nick told me they subscribe to a 70–20–10 learning model that’s very focused on practical application — 70 percent of learning is through doing and hands-on experience, 20 percent though mentorship and manager input, and 10 percent through more traditional classroom training and tools. As you might imagine, the 10 and 20 percent approaches, while critical to talent development, have also historically presented a significant challenge in terms of both time and resources required, especially as the organization tried to scale.

Challenges of scale

In its early days, One Acre Fund handled employee and management development mostly through stretch roles and opportunities for challenging projects. As the organization grew, however, this approach began to show limitations. “We have a lot of people who move into their first or second management role, especially our local staff,” Nick told me, “and the organization’s rapid growth means that responsibilities also grow quickly.” That’s why it’s so important to have reliable resources to develop those managers.

Nick admits that helping first-level managers acquire the basic skills they need is something the organization perhaps didn’t invest in enough early on. “We’re seeing how critical that is now,” he said. “The common trap is that people get promoted once they’re good at their job,” not necessarily because they know how to be good managers.

Another challenge Nick encountered with growth: Many employees began to feel further away from leadership, making it more challenging to align them around a clear vision and purpose and putting morale at risk.

First-level managers are linchpins

In an organization where the majority of positions are out in the field, Nick recognized that first-level managers were the critical linchpin between executive leadership and on-the-ground employees. He began looking for a learning solution that would provide relatable, accessible, bite-sized content that its managers could use and apply on their own. And (spoiler alert), he landed on Jhana.

Jhana’s practical, bite-sized approach to manager development resonated with One Acre Fund’s emphasis on learning by experience. “Our organization tends to hire people who are biased towards action. Jhana fits that mindset,” Nick shared. He likes that managers can quickly find help without having to sit through a long training. “Our staff is busy, and Jhana works.”

Music to my ears! And the data proves it out: 40% of One Acre Fund managers actively engage with Jhana content every month and more than 70% every quarter. (By contrast, other eLearning providers typically only get 2–8% of managers engaging with content — across a whole year — which means Jhana delivers far more than 10x higher adoption).

I love hearing when Nick describes how Jhana helped him be a better manager to his own team. “I have a ridiculous number of 1-on-1s, and I’m always looking for ways to make them more effective. I remember some content that Jhana shared from a Google executive around 1) wins, 2) team development and 3) setting goals for the upcoming week. I used Jhana’s advice to adjust how I conduct them.”

Nick stressed the overall importance of 1-on-1s at One Acre Fund — every manager is encouraged to hold them “weekly, for at least an hour” — and praised a “high touch management model” as critical to the organization’s success.

On a personal note, it’s stories like the ones Nick shared, and the huge global change One Acre Fund is working to affect that inspire and energize me to continue Jhana’s work — improving the working world, everywhere, one great manager at a time.

Jhana provides bite-sized learning for anyone who leads a team. “Bite-sized” means content aimed at making them more effective as managers, but presented logically within the scope and context of everything else they have to do. Learn more at our website.

Rob Cahill is our CEO. This article originally appeared on his LinkedIn as well.