Roxana Milas, Microsoft Romania: “The traditional role of managers has evolved to enablers and supporters”

“The global labour markets are going through some major transformations and we all have seen it. If I look at some data from the World Economic Forum, it says that 54 percent of the employees will require significant reskilling and upskilling. Yet the skill gap is growing ten times more in the last four years,” Roxana Milas, People Experience Director, Central East Europe, Microsoft Romania, said during the fifth edition of Learning & Development Conference organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“All leaders have a role in creating a learning organization. Only with a learning organization we will able to push the agenda of learning forward and close the skill gap we are talking about.

Another great way of understanding how the others are feeling and overcoming potential resistance they may have is to test it on ourselves. I think it’s very important to experiment the meaning of reskilling or upskilling. You cannot talk and preach learning unless you have understood what it means for yourself.

Reskilling takes reskilling, upskilling is much easier because you learn something in your function. Reskilling means that you learn something outside of your function.

The managers will still exist in their formal way, but their role has transformed. They are now enablers and supporters at every work level for their teams.

The empathy and the ability to understand what others may feel or think, to overcome the resistance, is just another tool in practicing the leadership. And a great way of doing this is to test the upskilling approach on themselves. From our experience, it’s worth for leaders and L&D managers to test different upskilling approaches on themselves. Also, very important within organizations is to enable the mentorship and coaching approach.”

Find the full event recording also on Youtube event page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dd8krztqgI