How They Learn Is How They’ll Work

Professional learning experiences aren’t just an opportunity for insurance employees to gain knowledge.

They provide real-time, undiluted signals about how people adapt, clarify, prioritize, and think. How individuals learn is often the clearest preview of how they’ll operate as work becomes more complex.

These signals were once sent consistently in office settings. But in hybrid work environments, leaders have less visibility on the informal cues that previously revealed performance gaps. What goes unseen often goes unaddressed—until it becomes costly.

Most training still concentrates on product and technical instruction. While essential, this narrow focus offers limited visibility into how people process information, navigate friction, and apply judgment in real-world conditions.

This perspective is informed by work with more than 1,000 professionals across agencies of all sizes through GenuineShift’s Client Service Academy. In those learning environments, patterns emerge quickly—not just in what people know, but in how they engage, where they hesitate, and how they adapt. Professional learning surfaces assumptions, friction, and habits that are often invisible in daily work but are critical to strengthening performance.

Managing Priorities

One of the first signals learning environments reveal is how people manage competing priorities.

We don’t just track attendance in our program cohorts; we’re looking for project management patterns. There is a meaningful difference between someone who flags a conflict early and works around known commitments versus someone who cancels at the last minute due to a “client emergency.”

Actual client emergencies are rare. More often, last-minute conflicts demonstrate difficulty planning, negotiating priorities, or adapting to new demands on the calendar. Left unexamined, these patterns show up at work as chronic reactivity rather than the proactivity that clients crave.

Creating space to slow down, plan, and adapt to new demands requires skill. Learning environments illuminate these patterns early, before they quietly undermine execution, client experience, and the success of future initiatives.

Overfunctioning Causes Burnout

If missed sessions can signal poor planning, the opposite pattern is just as revealing.

Some participants attend every learning session and complete every assignment without rebalancing priorities across their broader workload. Learning gets layered onto already overloaded schedules, stretching into nights and weekends.

These are often high performers. They care deeply. But they find it difficult to integrate new demands into existing work—treating everything as additive rather than making deliberate trade-offs.

Organizations reinforce this pattern by rewarding “doing it all” regardless of cost. When completion becomes the goal—irrespective of when the work gets done—burnout rises and learning quality and client work suffer.

Learning environments show who can make thoughtful trade-offs and who struggles to adapt priorities when new demands are introduced.

Speaking Up

In live learning sessions, it becomes clear who’s comfortable asking clarifying questions and who isn’t. That silence is a signal. In client and carrier meetings, the ability to speak up, redirect an agenda, or clarify an assumption is essential to delivering good work.

When account managers lack the skill to navigate these moments, producers and account executives are often unnecessarily pulled into routine calls. This performance issue directly impacts your team’s capacity. Leaders shouldn’t expect people to manage more clients or more complex workflows without addressing these foundational skills.

The Hidden Cost of Inattention

One of the most misunderstood signals in learning environments relates to attention.

When someone struggles, peers often step in and do the work themselves to save time. From a distance, everything looks fine. In reality, the team is quietly absorbing capability gaps.

In learning environments, similar patterns emerge when inattentive participants skip instructions, miss key information, or reach out to multiple people for answers that have already been provided. It is tempting to label this as carelessness, when it is often driven by pace. Asking feels faster in the moment, while slowing the system around it.

That assumption creates hidden costs—more interruptions, more unnecessary communications, and more work for everyone else.

Attention is a professional skill. Physical presence without attention creates the illusion of engagement even as focus is divided. Leaders can develop this skill by modeling it, setting clear expectations for employees in assignments, and being honest about which meetings and initiatives require full participation.

Learning environments make attention, or the lack of it, visible before it impacts client work.

From Optional to Operational

Many organizations unintentionally undermine their own initiatives by failing to set clear expectations.

When engagement with training or a broader business initiative is implied rather than explicit, people are forced to guess. Some workers assume everything is mandatory and must be done perfectly, and then burn themselves out. Others conclude that training or new initiatives are optional, especially when managers do not ask about progress or outcomes.

Leaders often say they want someone to be “more technical” or to have more “boardroom presence.” When that happens, ask these practical follow-up questions about the desired outcomes of learning programs:

• How will we know if we (the trainers) are successful?
• What will the learners stop doing, and what will they start doing?
• What will they do differently in 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days?
• What do they need to put that learning into practice?

Without that clarity, feedback remains subjective and professional development becomes guesswork. When expectations are concrete, people have something to aim for. When they aren’t, even capable and hardworking professionals struggle to close the gap between their existing status and leadership expectations.

When new initiatives are inconsistently enforced, a familiar pattern emerges. A subset of employees does the work, notices others do not, and eventually disengages from the next initiative altogether.

Clear expectations reduce friction. When organizations define what successful participation looks like, satisfaction and engagement often increase.

Not Just Risk, But Opportunity

It is tempting to view learning behavior only as a means to catch problems early. That misses half the picture.

When veteran employees are given space away from constant urgency and invited into structured learning, their curiosity often reappears. They approach client challenges with renewed creativity and become valuable partners in new initiatives.

Just as importantly, veterans model learning behavior for newer colleagues. When they engage, it reinforces a culture where development is normal, not remedial.

Learning environments reveal not only who needs more support, but who has been misjudged or underestimated within an opaque system.

Planning for the Year Ahead

As leaders plan for the year ahead, there is a simple place to start.

Talk with your managers about your learning and training investments, both internal initiatives and external professional development.

• What does success look like?
• What level of participation is expected?
• What team members can give learners space to put new skills into practice?
• What behaviors should managers watch for during and after that training?

These conversations matter because your most important assets are your people’s time and attention, alongside your precious budget dollars. When expectations are unclear, those assets are often diluted by guesswork, uneven follow-through, and quiet frustration.

When expectations are clear, managers and their team members share reference points, learners understand what is required, and teams are positioned to turn that learning into better work.

Learning behavior is not just extra information; it is early information. Using that information well is one of the simplest ways leaders can support stronger outcomes for their teams and their clients this year.