Creating a Culture of Learning

This post is about how Evolutionary Action Learning* moves people to #collaborate better towards meaningful results. It is part 1 of 3 articles about #PURPOSE and #WORK.

Leadership is a mindset, not a title, and every leader needs to prioritize collaboration and communication in the interest of achieving sustained and outstanding results. Good organizational design optimizes the creation and execution of product and service, as well as the experience of work itself. This focus on HOW work gets done is where I apply my skills in team coaching and transformative learning. My graduate research is about how to make the habit of work health enhancing.

Aligning with a clear purpose and strategic objectives is a foundation for success. But when market demands and customer needs shift quickly, as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, teams and organizations are pressed to be responsive. Here I wish to illustrate the importance of people growing as individuals, and committing to team learning priorities such as empathy and psychological safety. There is a way to accomplish performance and well-being simultaneously.

Getting Things Done

Ideally, purpose drives cooperation within an organization. Vision, mission and purpose bring people together in the first place, yet fulfilling promises that have been made to customers and investors is the daily grind.

Within teams in the workplace (or more broadly, the marketplace) people come together to coordinate action to fulfill agreements. Promises have been made:

• In public service, teams work to provide services to citizens.
• NGO teams work to achieve an impact in underserved populations that the public sphere is unable to reach.
• Business teams work to sustain profitability so that their clients come back and continue to utilize the added convenience and value provided.

Teams are dynamic fields of human relationship fueled by trust. You don’t have to like the people you work with, but you do need to trust. Without it, the culture is too weak to sustain effective action. When agreements are not fulfilled, clients lose confidence and may begin to look towards your competitors for solutions, and so on. 

People need to grow and learn how to collaborate better. Developing people to work well together is easier said than done. PWC studied the future of work and explained the diverse needs and expectations of employees. They included an online quiz which helps you sort out which world of work you belong to. Here’s my result:

"You find relevance working for organisations with a strong social and ethical record — where individuals come together to collaborate on projects or to deliver on an idea, for as long as it takes. You’ll enjoy being part of a bustling and creative ecosystem with a strong emphasis on ethics and fairness."

Many people value rules and structure over freedom and autonomy, stability over creativity, monthly earnings more than alignment with purpose. It’s is great to know where you stand inside a workplace culture, and dynamic and targeted learning and development helps create the ideal climate for collaboration and engagement.

Individual Skill Building

If you want to get in shape, reduce the stress from your growing to-do list, or start a company, you can pick up a how-to guide for any them. Understanding why those helpful hints don’t always work, or why you are stuck, often requires inner work. Together we look at successes and failures. Both are important measures of growth and learning.

The diagram illustrates the distinction between two axes of leadership development. By your side, a transformational leadership coach goes below the surface of behaviors and brings hidden beliefs and values to light. With new awareness comes the wisdom to choose and act differently. It still takes practice, but self-understanding and more importantly self-compassion, contribute to lasting and satisfying change.

I enjoy the focused time with individuals in my conscious leadership coaching sessions. The face time is rich with insight, however the learning and growth of my clients comes from practice in their daily lives. Individual growth and development is important and useful, yet the benefit of inner wisdom is actually put to the test in the relationships that we have, inside and outside the workplace.

Team Learning Priorities — empathy, clarity, diversity, integrity, and psychological safety

How to create a growth mindset and a culture of learning? One entry point is coaching and facilitating teams to become competent at feedback and listening. Here is where team coaching (a form of action learning*) really pays off. In the presence of a skilled facilitator, learning happens in real-time, during the course of real work getting done. Please refer to my Lead With Purpose program for more information about six learning modules designed to create high performing teams. When all goes well, the group thrives and everyone feels psychologically safe.

Since team members have varying capacities for speaking directly, handling conflict, and being vulnerable, a team facilitator becomes a learning partner that coaches the team and helps them build higher capacities of relating. The role of the facilitator is to:

• Sense the needs of the team
• Assess where they are
• Implement methods and tools so the team learns how to negotiate (and not avoid) relational and communication challenges.

The diagram above comes from a recent Forbes article by Shane Snow. In it he breaks psychological safety apart in detail and acknowledges that achieving it is challenging.

“Psychological safety is actually a commitment to treating each other charitably. Just telling people that anything they say won’t be used against them doesn’t automatically convince people that that’s actually true.”

Be patient. Growth and behavior change takes learning and practice.

In moments of intense conflict, I also intervene at a deeper, personal level. A brief dive into compassionate caring for an individual is like pushing the reset button. Sometimes reconnecting at a fundamental level — love, connection, belonging — is needed to bring someone back to their performance potential. I will work with an individual, pair or group long enough to reestablish empathy, so they can return to purpose, tasks and output.

Is your team or organization responsive and adaptive enough to navigate the challenges of the next 12–18 months? Let me know; schedule and appointment with me. We can simultaneously build performance and well-being at work, online and in-person.

One More Challenge: COVID-19

Suddenly many of us find ourselves living in a blended online-offline world, but without much practice in how to be effective at it. For independent and contract workers the shift to working from home and convening via video conference is nothing new. We already have adequate examples and lessons learned to build upon. In a future article I’ll share methods in more detail and address this new challenge.

*ADDENDUM - What is Evolutionary Action Learning?

Action learning is an established disciple of problem solving that engages stakeholders in repeated cycles of action and reflection. Since teams and organizations tend to rush towards solutions, the reflective time necessary for learning often gets forgotten.

An action learning coach/facilitator is a pivotal role that is responsible for creating the time and space for learning. During an interview for a people development and learning position in a Berlin tech startup, the interviewer asked “why this job, why this company?”

“I want to see the fruits of my efforts in the culture. I want to be the change agent that not only implements personal growth and learning for the workforce but also manages the feedback and refines what is offered. With enough time to understand relational interdependencies, I will build trust, collaboration and well-being throughout an organization.”