Design of a Highly Bespoke Adult Learning Program

THE CLIENT

DistroKid is an independent digital music distribution service.

They help musicians upload and distribute their music to major streaming platforms and online, while letting artists keep 100% of their earnings. The company has grown into a major player in the industry serving millions of artists, distributing millions of tracks, and generating tens of millions in annual revenue as one of the most widely used tools for independent music creators.

PROJECT SCOPE

DistroKid needed to build more intentionality and consistency in skills and mindsets across their 40+ manager workforce of a global, remote-first work culture. The Group Forward partnered with The DistroKid People Team to design a highly bespoke adult learning program that set clear expectations of what people managers need in order to be effective in their roles as stewards for DistroKid’s success.

The Group Forward created the people management by: defining clear program goals; thoughtful program design to meet the organizational context and learning needs of busy, smart, and capable people management workforce; and matching important content with world-class engaging workshop facilitation.

The Program Had Four Primary Goals

  • 1. Tools & Skills

    To provide practical tools, skills, and frameworks to support people managers in their management roles across the company.

  • 2. Expectations & Standards

    Establish clear expectations for what good management looks like at DistroKid.

  • 3. Learn By Doing

    This program is designed to ‘teach’ tools, skills, and frameworks that managers can apply right away and share your experiences with peers.

  • 4. Build A Learning Community

    Build a peer community of manager learners, designed to collaborate and learn from each other.

Based on survey data from managers, employees, the HR team, and external research, we built customized a manager training program that included learning topics and sessions covering 5 different deep dive skills around effective communication, strategic thinking, leadership and adaptive management.

How we created the manager training program:

  • Set up smaller cohorts and peer learning groups to promote community building and deep engagement for the learners

  • We ran six virtual learning workshops that invited clear intentions around the learning mindsets and behaviors we needed from those in the cohort. 

  • Asynchronous peer learning community: We set up a Slack channel for communication and resource sharing 

  • We designed the workshops for adult learning best practices of “learn,” “do/apply” and “reflect” to the way we learned together.

  • And we asked participants to take what they were learning in the workshops and apply them to their day-to-day work (so it wasn’t extra, it was included in what they are already doing).

The Result

Participant scores gave the program an overall net promoter score of 80, which is a “world-class” distinction! 

“I left with a lot of great ideas on how to take my ability as a manager to a better place. This was amazingly positive and I learned a lot of really interesting concepts that are being applied to both the support of our members and our team.”

—  Manager at DistroKid