By Luba Diasamidze
Team learning can significantly change the whole dynamics of the workplace.
Here’s a simple example. Last year, I started to work with a team. We had face to face sessions every other month. In between, we had virtual meetups every other month. We alternated between virtual and face-to-face. Before our first face-to-face session, I asked them to share what topics they thought they needed to address as a team. Some other questions were, “How do you think you can become a high performing team?” “How can you better support the organization’s mission, the team, the organization’s purpose?”
They gave me a lot of input individually. I took all their ideas, and I distributed them across the PERILL model of high performing teams, where we have internal processes, external processes, team purpose, team motivation, relationships, leadership, and learning.
Each team member tagged the topics that they wanted to talk about. One topic received zero votes. It was for team learning. That category was blank. There was nothing. They wanted to learn about all the other categories though.
That was when we started. Then, fast forward three months, we had one of our regular sessions. Again, I asked them about the urgent issues that they were facing. I asked more questions like, “What do we need to address all together? Where can I support your best work?“
As a team they tagged the categories they wanted to talk about. When I looked at their input, between 20% and 30% of votes were for team learning. They mentioned questions like:
- How do we do something as a team?
- What can we learn about ourselves?
- What do we need to discover about ourselves?
After three or four months, they started to value team learning!
How do teams actually learn
There are two ways.
- A team can learn internally. The learning has to be facilitated either by the team collectively if they decide to share this responsibility, or by the team leader, or by an internal coach/facilitator, if they are available in the organization.
- A team can learn with an external team coach.
It is curious to observe, who owns the learning in a team. Pay attention to who starts those conversations. Does the team rely on the team leader to start those conversations every time and push them to think about it? Or do they want to ask each other and engage with each other in these conversations?
How can you know your team is learning?
The evidence would be that the team starts to notice their own patterns, how they “do things here” and as a result of this learning improves their performance. Performance increase is a result of the purposeful actions that a team takes after reflecting enough on their experiences. Their ability to learn creates new helpful patterns.
Your team is learning when they have dynamic team conversations. There is no groupthink. There is always a certain level of a positive challenge where team members express support, but at the same time, they stretch the team and try to do better than they did before.
Another possible sign your team is learning may be in the topic they discuss together. What are they talking about? Are they only talking about numbers? Or are they actually talking about some patterns of behaviors? Are they talking about what causes the patterns and how those patterns affect them and teamwork?
Learning is a very natural process for all individuals. I always go back to this example of a parent and child. When your child is doing something that could hurt them, or something that isn’t right, he/she will experience a result. It’s common for parents to ask, “What did you learn from this experience?”
You want the child to generate their own learning. You want the child to come up with an answer. Maybe it’s “I should always tell the truth even if it is hard to admit” or “I always need to protect those who are weaker than me.”
Those are the conclusions of a child from life’s lessons. When your child shares that information, you know they will be alright. You know that when the same situation happens in the future that your child will know how to respond. The child has formed a general principle that will guide them.
This example serves as a perfect reminder to me: one of our main goals as coaches is developing a team’s capacity to learn and apply the learning.