Helping your team to learn [2019 Update]
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If you are keen to develop talent in your team and your organisation, then thinking about how you will develop people is a priority. How can you create a fertile learning environment in your team?
1. Learning involves messing up sometimes.
Do you have a team culture where people feel comfortable to try things and get them wrong? Pretty much anyone who has achieved great things has also made big mistakes. Are you too perfectionist to allow people to make mistakes? How did you react the last few times people “messed up” – do you make them worry about messing up again, or do they know that it’s a safe environment? One of our favourite sayings is “Sometimes you win, and sometimes you learn. There is no downside.” Try making this catchphrase the norm for your team – especially those who beat themselves up over mistakes. When mistakes are made – focus on the learning, so that you create a culture of ‘positive mistakes’.
2. Do you celebrate success?
All too often, our meetings focus entirely on the problems, the setbacks, all the work still to do, the new demands. Create a balance in your team by asking them to focus for 10 minutes on progress, their achievements, the best thing that has happened since you last met, things your team have experienced that made them feel proud of individuals, team or company. Setbacks are a lot easier to bear in the context of feeling successful.
3. Do you allow people to be thrown in at the deep end?
Some people like being out of their depth and having to really work hard to figure things out – it focuses and motivates them. Let these people take on a big challenge, and talk through with them what they’ll need to do, and who could guide them. Make sure that you set up rapid feedback loops – so that they update you frequently and you know if problems start building up. Can you create a safe playground where taking a leap in responsibility or learning something new is not that risky? For example, giving people sole responsibility for a small job, or for a customer with whom you have a great relationship.
4. Do you let them find ways of learning that work for them? Allow them to do it for themselves.
Let people be self-directed about how they find out new things. Tell them the developmental outcome you want, and let them find a solution to meet that objective. Only offer them a solution if they’re really struggling after they’ve considered it. Sometimes, allowing people to buy a book from their expenses or to go for coffee with an expert, or to have an hour of time on the internet to research something is the right thing to do. Judge whether it worked by the output rather than by how the learning took place – did the different approach work? If you need to offer solutions, think about what they need to learn, as it might not be “conventional” – one manager I worked for suggested listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to get a different view on life and the world – and it worked!
5. Help them broaden their network.
We learn best and quickest from other people. How could you increase the range of people your team learn from? Can you allow people time to invest in increasing their network? Encourage them to approach people for a small piece of help, so that they use a series of advisers who can act as a sounding board on specific tasks. “I’m taking on a project that involves a lot of politics – could we meet up for half an hour a week for the first 3 weeks, so I can run my thinking by you, as I know you are really good at this?” Often these people will become informal mentors over time.
EXPERIMENT
What are you doing at the moment to create an environment where people can grow and learn? Take one of the ideas in this article that is new to you – try it out, and see what results you get!