#596 3 ways teams can learn when they are not together

Sarah Ellis (0:00)

Hi, my name's Sarah. And in this Squiggly Shortcut, I'm going to be talking about how do you borrow brilliance from the people that you work with.

In particular, I'm going to talk about three ways that you can learn and grow from the people in your team and in your organization, in particular, when you are not in the same place. So there is lots of discussion at the moment about maybe what younger people might be missing out on when they're not in the office. So people talk about this idea of learning by osmosis.

You're sitting next to someone, you're in the same conversations, those overheard conversations, and how helpful they are for learning, like learning how things get done, learning maybe what not to do. And that was definitely my experience. When I started working more than 20 years ago, that was definitely a big way of learning for me.

But one of the things that I feel that we are getting wrong is feeling like we have to go back to old ways, sort of revert back to old ways for that learning by osmosis to happen, rather than thinking about, okay, well in a world where hybrid working is much more possible and has lots of advantages, where you've got global organizations, organizations like ours that work, where everyone pretty much works remotely. We still want that learning by osmosis to happen across a team. We want everyone to borrow brilliance from each other, but I don't think we need to rely on is everybody physically being in the same room or the same place for that to happen. So we need some new ideas. We need some alternatives. We want the outcome to be the same, but perhaps the process to be different. So here are three ideas that I've come up with, and I'd love to know other examples that you might have, other ideas that you might have based on your experiences. So my first one is watching someone work. Now initially, that does sound a little bit creepy, but really what I'm talking about here is I want people to show their workings. I don't know about you, but when I was at school, particularly in things like maths, you know, we were often told like show, show how you've worked something out because then even if you get the number wrong, at least you've shown your workings. And I think when you see people's process, that's often where you do a lot of that learning by osmosis. So that could be things like joining calls, where you're just there to shadow, or you can be there silently to sort of just watch and like listen to the conversation.

Even things like, and we've started doing this much more in our team now, going online, so joining a virtual call at the same time. And if you're, let's say I'm amending a document, a proposal for some learning that we're going to do, and actually somebody in our team watching me make those changes. Now, initially that does feel admittedly a bit uncomfortable and awkward. And I'm probably thinking, if I really want to show my workings, because it always feels a bit messy and you might get something wrong the first time. But I think once you get used to doing it, you can just see how everyone learns much faster because of it. And then the next time that person in a team is doing one of those learning proposals, they've sort of seen how I've done it. It doesn't mean they have to do it in exactly the same way, but perhaps they picked up some hints and some tips or some things that they kind of hadn't thought of. So I think we've all got to get better across a team, sort of showing our workings, being unapologetic as well about the fact that that will feel a bit messy, will probably take a little while for us all to get used to, but actually ultimately is really helpful. And giving each other the permission to say to each other, oh, can I just, can I see you do that? Can I watch while you write that? Can I see how you might phrase that email or how you would approach that meeting? Can I join that meeting? So that's the first action, show your workings. The second action is I think it is even better if you want to borrow brilliance from someone in your team is if you can work with them to support them on something that matters to them. So this might be a priority, a project, or actually it could be something loads smaller like a niggle or something that's annoying that needs to get fixed. If you can volunteer to work with someone that perhaps you wouldn't normally work with or who you just think they're great, I feel like I could learn a lot more from them. Is there a way of you making that happen, you taking the initiative and you creating that opportunity, volunteering, putting your hand up for something that just means you'll get to spend more time with them, you'll get to see that person in action more frequently than you do today.