WLP264: Cultivating a Culture of Learning in Organisations
Today’s episode focuses on learning - because this is one of those things which does not happen by chance/osmosis in remote teams, and requires conscious cultivation and awareness.
We have a great range of voices to bring to you on this subject, courtesy of a panel Pilar chaired in October for Agile Tour London, with an amazing line up of guests for you to enjoy. And before that, a quick conversation, about moving a professional development event from the physical world to the online one.
5.35 Jennifer Riggins: Aginext Conference 2021
Back in March 2020, Jen and her team had less than 5 days to transition this annual event online, which was in itself a great experiential learning opportunity! This year they had time to plan it that way from the start, and reflect on the changes they wanted to create this time.
Jennifer Riggins
They wanted to generate a real conference, NOT a webinar, and stimulate genuine engagement. Of course the keynotes are still on Zoom, which works well for one-to-many delivery. Jen runs “lean coffees” in Zoom regularly, but she was keen to explore using something new for this larger and more flexible event, so for interaction outside of the talks, they are using a different app, Spatial Chat. This puts the experience more under the participant’s control to navigate, instead of being plonked in a Zoom breakout room.
Spatial Chat is a virtual venue where you can select a background environment, and people can move themselves (as an avatar) around the space, choosing where to drift in and out of workshops and conversations.
It supports the self-organising principles of Agile, so it’s a great fit for this particular event, which will also be filled with experimentally-minded Agile practitioners - hopefully a great opportunity for this cohort to explore the full potential of self-directed navigation within the virtual event space. And there are social and conversational areas too, with no recording but with set topics for this to encourage people to intentionally seek out the area, as well as slightly more structured participation opportunities like ‘fishbowl’ conversations.
Find out more, and all you agile folks, do register for Aginext 2021 today, for the 17th-19th March. Meanwhile, connect with Jen on LinkedIn and Twitter, to keep up with her work and learn more.
19.21 Panel: Agile Tour London, October 2020
Pilar really enjoyed facilitating this conversation, with contributions from a wonderful selection of professionals associated with learning and development in remote teams.
Beth Maguire, Marcus Wermuth, Gonçalo Silva and Morgan Legge
Beth Maguire from Hubspot brings a background in neuroscience and psychotherapy to learning and development, helping people unlock their personal and professional potential to thrive. Speaking from Dublin, Beth sees learning as solutions orientated, and she loves learning from others and their experiences.
She often finds learning stimulated from a place of discomfort, needing to create change in a situation. Learning is the first stage in unsticking a problem, and working out how to solve it. So learning is closely associated with change (including for herself a transition from consulting to an in-house role).
Marcus Wermuth, engineering manager at Buffer, joins the panel from Munich. He likes to learn by living - but he reads a lot first, so he can apply this knowledge to new situations - such as his current professional focus on leadership and management, and the building of psychological safety in remote teams. He came to his present role from an engineering background and had to learn the people side fast, from reading and working with a leadership coach, learning as much about himself, as the principles of managing teams.
Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist (creators of the Todoist and Twist apps) is in Porto, from where he champions asynchronous collaboration and leading remote teams. He prefers to learn by doing, and by focusing awareness on the different stages of learning and developing competence. He enjoys the risk-taking aspects of learning - experimenting and exploring - and the serendipitous outcomes this can lead to.
Morgan Legge is at Convert.com and presently heads up sales and success for their 100% remote organisation. She is located in Montreal (with her dog), and she learns first by robust and dynamic conversations - mapping things out visually, before doing things for real.
Learning in a distributed organisation has to be accessible - whether you are fully remote, or more hybrid, as Beth’s work is. It’s easy to exclude people accidentally and circumstantially, as Gonçalo has also found because learning takes time and effort to prioritise.
Leaders can set the example here, both in emphasising the need for learning, but also admitting their knowledge gaps and need for change. This makes it safe for others to identify and address their own needs. Leaders also need to create time and space for professional development, because we’re all busy… and Doist have recently introduced specific learning projects for all of their team, to focus deeply on learning something new for one month of the year.
Learning is vital for change, as Morgan discovered at Convert, when she originally joined them to lead the transition from a flat hierarchy to the completely new structure of Holacracy. She too identified intellectual humility, the ability to make and own mistakes, in order to grow, as essential. She had to learn so much along the transformational journey, and the process was not linear, for her or the organisation.
For learning to happen, particularly when the route from A to B is unclear, a culture of embracing innovation and celebrating it must be in place, because in a remote team particularly there needs to be structure for sharing knowledge and amplifying it. At Buffer for example, they have individual learning budgets, but some people need to be actively encouraged to use theirs, and to see how their individual professional development contributes to the goals of the team and the organisation.
Learning can also be embedded in processes and routines, as they do at Doist, where their check-in procedure encourages the sharing of their ‘most important or interesting thing learned this week’ in a messaging thread, as well as things done or planned - reinforcing the importance of learning, as well as creating a direct mechanism for cascading the knowledge internally.
Beth is reluctant to overtly formalise the learning process in her teams, in case that is perceived as onerous - but she appreciates depth and self-direction in learning. It’s easy in fast-moving tech teams particularly to want to learn fast, but sometimes it’s better to discover for ourselves, and then share that more widely afterwards.
The transparency of Holacracy gives nowhere to hide - which includes what happens if leaders aren’t modelling good learning and coaching behaviour, as Morgan points out. Allocating time and attention to personal and professional development needs to be overt and deliberate, celebrated and encouraged, whether these are small shifts in thinking or huge transitions to a new organisational structure.
Being encouraged to share and distribute learning in the team is a good way to encourage the reflection and consolidation of learning for the individual anyway, and Hubspot’s ‘grow days’ are contextualised with the expectation of updating colleagues afterwards. This avoids duplication and siloing of efforts, and means people’s experiences inform and shape those of others in deciding what to learn next. And there’s something powerful about learning from trusted peers instead of authority figures.
When organisations make it psychologically safe to learn, grow, and share, great things can happen, and there are many ways of nurturing this as a practice. At Doist they encourage long-form written sharing of new knowledge, in their asynchronous style, and at Convert they use Loom videos a lot to share feedback - conveying emotions and body language alongside the words, in a way which doesn’t disadvantage non-English native speakers. (Morgan has also used Loom to coach Pilar in applications of Asana, so she definitely walks this talk!)
Marcus encourages gentle probing of learning outcomes to encourage depth, during which leaders can show interest and ask questions in a curious way. This promotes reflection on the learning outcomes, however the sharing takes place, and respects the different learning styles and preferences of each individual.
The choice of tools itself is a learning curve to explore, but offers exciting potential. However, Beth reminds us to pick a few channels and focus on them instead of shooting off in too many directions, and as Gonçalo points out that what the leaders model, others will follow. Work louder, suggests Morgan - because the death of remote work is silence and isolation.
Interestingly this panel discussion did not mention the pandemic situation until the last few minutes, really underpinning the universality of this theme of learning in remote teams.
Gonçalo concluded with the age-old management dilemma meme:
“What if we train and develop our people, and then they leave?
When surely the corollary is far worse: what if we don’t train them, and they stay…?”
We hope you enjoyed this discussion, and encourage you to listen to it in full.
Pilar concluded with a quick shout out to some of our LinkedIn community, including Catherine, and also Amie who shared a fascinating research piece from Nicholas Bloom at Stanford, Why working from home will stick - so we’ll leave you with that interesting story to read, for some positive findings.
If you like the podcast, you'll love our monthly round-up of inspirational content and ideas:
(AND right now you’ll get our brilliant new guide to leading through visible teamwork when you subscribe!)