Learning and Sharing Lessons

One of my managers from earlier in my career said to me, “the day we stop learning is the day we die”. How true is that!

To grow and develop we need to learn from our, and other peoples, actions, both positive and negative. We actually do this whether it is conscious or not.

However, as a leader, we should facilitate an environment which makes the conscious learning possible and the sharing of the lessons an everyday occurrence. With each individuals growth opportunity there is a further opportunity to share that learning and hence enable wider growth to the team and beyond. This, in turn, means that the organisation benefits and thrives through the improvements that can be introduced as a consequence.

Creating the right culture and workplace environment starts with the behaviour of the leaders. Facilitating growth and learning in a non-blame way can mean that employees are more likely to share experiences with their colleagues.

To enable this, the leader should:

- Show themselves to be vulnerable and open by sharing their experiences, good and bad, and discussing the lessons gained from them.

- Accepting feedback and providing non-judgemental feedback to others.

- Using team meetings to encourage sharing and discussion on how to improve processes.

- Implementing a system for reporting incidents and near misses and investigating how to prevent recurrence with the team.

- Encourage risk taking as long as it is not reckless. Provide guidelines to your team to understand the difference. Ensure that they know that it is ok to fail as long as lessons are learnt from it.

- Actively look for opportunities to learn from others in your own work. Share with the team and recognise the individuals who have helped you. Remember, you don’t have to have all the answers, just know that there is a way of finding them and that it often resides within the team members, who know the job better than anyone else.

How do you enable such a culture in your workplace?