Here’s the thing about growth:
We change our identity when we learn something new. It shapes our worldview, but most fundamentally, it shapes our view of ourselves. Learning how to play tennis causes you to identify as a tennis player. Learning how to cook makes you the de facto family chef.
At work, learning doesn’t have as fundamental an impact on our identity because we don’t see ourselves as our work. That’s a problem. This article will outline an approach to learning that does work at work.
Transformation at work requires transformation in life.
We work with sales teams, so let me use that as an example.
What sellers are currently taught:
How to stick to call scripts
How to handle objections by memorizing them
How to apply rubrics to qualify leads
What we should be teaching sellers:
How to tell stories
How to be resilient in the face of change
How to solve complex, open-ended problems.
This can result in them seeing themselves differently as
a storyteller
anti-fragile
creative
These identity shifts, and the skills that come with them, can be applied in almost any aspect of life, and they also help sellers sell more. It works at work!
We think about learning at work all wrong. We see them as separate things. We force people into having split identities. What we should be doing is integrating them. We should see work as an avenue for authentic self-expression.
How, then, do we help people grow at work?
Personal growth requires connecting with present reality, acknowledging dissatisfaction with that reality, envisioning a preferred future, and understanding the initial steps toward that future. This combined force must outweigh the resistance to change.1
The problem is you can’t start this process without stopping first. You can’t connect properly to your present reality without pausing to reflect. Numerous distractions prevent us from doing this, some of which we willingly invite into our lives.
We must teach people about distractions and emphasize the importance of presence and focus, even if only during brief moments of reflection on a video, podcast, or client conversation, to write down what we can learn from it.
Without time to reflect, connect with our thoughts and body, and process what’s going on, there is no growth.
Next, we must empower our teams by relinquishing control. They are responsible for their own growth, and learning cannot be forced. Focus on boosting motivation instead.
The best way to do this is to:
Establish a validated and shared vision of a more desirable future
Outline a clear, measurable path to achieve that future
Make the first step clear
Reduce resistance by eliminating the fear of taking action
Showcase noteworthy early wins (make good first impressions)
But you can’t stop there.
This is not enough for learning in a team, let alone an entire organization, to take place successfully. Learning is part of an ecosystem. You must address organizational learning as a system, or no independent learning intervention will ever realize its desired effect.
The best way to do this is to look at:
The people in the system and how they are treated.
The org design to understand the implicit rules of the game.
The vision to understand if people feel committed to it and if it provides clear direction.
The values to understand what governs interactions between people.
The leaders to understand what kind of behavior is modeled.
Each individual’s approach to personal mastery to understand the collective attitude toward curiosity and personal development.
The team approach to learning to understand how knowledge is shared and how people mentor and coach each other.
The approach to knowledge management to understand how the fruits of team learning are captured, stored and made easily accessible for others to benefit from.
Finally, we must incorporate a culture of coaching as the reinforcing mechanism in our system. A lack of effective coaching to help with implementation is the number one reason why teams fail to become learning machines.
All of this leads me to our approach at Curious Lion.
We build learning machines.
Our machine can be thought of as a cross between a talent academy and a knowledge pipeline. Revenue teams can use our machine to sustain a high-paced revenue motion and raise their collective ability to scale company growth. We can measure the efficacy of this learning machine and tie those results to metrics that matter. We can pull almost infinite levers to improve the machine once it’s working.
Other benefits our clients see from using the machines we build:
Provides a channel for consistent messaging, product knowledge updates, and skills refreshment
Clarifies career paths and attracts the kind of talent that seeks personal growth
Enhances engagement between companies and their people, as well as among employees
Fosters flourishing relationships and promotes a positive company culture
Contributes to a reputation as a special and unique workplace while promoting efficient revenue growth
What does your personal journey toward purpose look like?
This article is part of a bigger exploration on our website. I share my personal journey towards purpose based on five themes: forgiveness, challenges, vulnerability, health, and strong relationships. I show how I apply these themes to our business, covering leadership, team development, business strategy, and growth.
Our aim at Curious Lion is to create a community of learners and build learning machines for our clients.
What’s yours?
Ludwig von Mises explored the application of this concept in his book Human Action in the 1940’s. David Gleicher formulated the change equation in the early 1960s. Kathie Dannemiller refined it in the 1980s.