Make Learning Part of Your Job

January 21, 2019

My employer was recently named one of the 2019 Best Workplaces in Technology by Great Place To Work United States and Fortune Magazine. Some people wonder if we offer excellent benefits and perks such as health insurance, time off, and professional development opportunities, which they think are essential to reach the top of the list. Although these things are all good to have, and I am happy to take them, I always bring the dialogue back to the learning culture that I could not find anywhere in my past experiences.

A true learning culture is an environment that supports an open mindset, an independent quest for knowledge, and shared learning directed toward the mission and goals of the organization. — Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a subsidiary of Gartner

Learning is a significant portion of my life at work. The most effective way that I have found is to regularly meet with people, collect meaningful and constructive feedback on my work, and give back by reviewing my colleagues' work.

Have Regular One-on-one Meetings

Even if you are not a manager, you can set up one on ones with your peers. You are excited to tell your peer what you are working on, try to get a sense of whether they like what you are doing, find ways to work better together, and build rapport. A trusted peer can tell you the gaps and what you are doing wrong, and not afraid of having difficult conversations with you. When you do this, you acknowledge that you have blind spots, and you want your peers to help you.

Source: getlighthouse.com

Peer One-on-one

Find ways to work better together.
Share perspective and knowledge.
Build rapport.

Contribute To A Group

I encourage you to form or join a group that uses the Community of Practice (CoP) approach. Wenger defines CoP as a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Sources: Gartner, Yammer

Communities of Practice

Purpose: Creates common identity, meaning, purpose and value. Inspire participation, mutual exploration.

People: Creates a social fabric of learning, fosters mutual respect and trust, willingness to share, ask, listen, be vulnerable and courageous.

Practice: Creates domain-based knowledge the community develops, shares and maintains — frameworks, tools, ideas, stories, and documentation.

If you want to learn more about CoP, read this research paper.

Start Learning and Experimenting

While we have all heard great leaders learning through their mistakes, what they really mean is that you will have to be willing to take risks. Not all failures are the same — some are good, and some are bad. You don't just make mistakes by doing a lousy job. You don't try something based on gut feeling or opinion over getting evidence. You learn using the Scientific Method by creating experiments to test your hypothesis, using learnings from these experiments to pivot, testing your assumptions in the right order, and focusing on evidence, not debate.

Source: Science Buddies

The Scientific Method

For example, you want to improve your facilitation skill. You rate yourself on the outcomes you want to see before facilitating a group meeting. After the group meeting, you ask the group to rate and comment on how the meeting went. You then identify the gaps using the ratings. You ask yourself a question about one of these gaps, research on best practices, and construct a hypothesis on a new approach. You experiment with it and then collect ratings again. Each experiment gives you insights into whether it works. As soon as you complete all your tests, you share the results with others.

If you are in the world of agile software development, you can apply this method in the Agile Retrospective as well.

All of the things above require you to practice every day. As you do them, those become your habits. As others are seeing you doing and talking about them, they will start to follow. When many people are doing it, learning becomes part of your company culture.