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It is important to encourage your team to take a proactive role in furthering their own development and to share valuable knowledge and skills with each other. However, when it comes to creating a culture of learning within your team, it can be difficult to know where to start. This guide offers some practical steps you can take to create a positive learning culture within your team.
When to Use This Guide
If you would like see some individuals in your team taking ownership of their professional development, then this guide can offer you a fresh approach. For example, you might want to encourage your team members to:
- Share knowledge, skills and learning from each other
- Seek out learning opportunities
- Learn from their mistakes
- Prepare for their performance reviews
- Draw up their personal development plans
Suggestions
You might find some or all of these suggestions useful for helping to create a proactive learning culture:
1. Agree Clear Goals With Your Team
Your team members will need a clear sense of direction and an idea of the ‘bigger picture’ to be able to accurately identify their training and development requirements.
- Involve team members, where possible, in the business planning process for your team.
- Ensure each individual understands their personal objectives and how these fit into the business objectives for the team and organization as a whole. You could share this information at team meetings or individual review meetings, or you could send written information and updates.
- Ensure that your team’s personal objectives are reviewed as often as required, particularly when any developments or staffing changes take place.
- Personal objectives should describe what should be done, under what conditions, and how well it should be done. Objectives should also be challenging, and you should try to give individuals, where possible, an opportunity to stretch their existing responsibilities.
2. Promote Training and Development
You can promote training and development activities within your team by:
- Including training and development as an agenda item at all team meetings
- Encouraging team members to take advantage of any resources that your organization has, such as a library or learning center
- Designating a half day or day per week or month to allow team members to focus on their development , if possible
- Informing team members of any relevant associations or network groups that exist, and encouraging membership
- Always planning time in your diary to meet with individuals before and after training activities and clearly explaining how they should prepare for these meetings
- Being aware of all training and development opportunities that exist in the organization, including in-house courses and any form of study assistance for individuals working towards a relevant qualification
- Setting a good example by planning time for your own personal development
3. Create an Open Working Environment
Positive, constructive feedback is highly important as a learning tool, but it can only be fully given and received within an open working environment.
- Be positive. Encourage the attitude that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Promote an environment in which people react to mistakes positively by turning them into opportunities for learning.
- Give feedback at every opportunity and always use positive language. It is a good idea to follow the ‘BOOST’ model when giving feedback, i.e. feedback is:
- Balanced: focus not only on areas for development, but also on strengths.
- Observed: provide feedback based only upon behaviors that you have observed.
- Objective: avoid judgments and relate your feedback to the observed behaviors, not personality.
- Specific: back up your comments with specific examples of the observed behavior.
- Timely: give feedback soon after the activity to allow the learner to reflect on the learning.
- Ask your team to give feedback. Encourage team members to learn from each other by giving each other useful feedback.
- Set a good example by being receptive to feedback yourself and showing that you can learn from it. Remember that if you seek feedback, it is important to be seen to take it on board. If employees take the time to assist with feedback, they will expect to see a response in order to feel that they have been listened to.
- Celebrate achievements and recognize good performance at every opportunity to motivate people into finding ways to continually develop themselves.
- Encourage openness and honesty. Encourage team members to be open with feedback and ideas at team meetings and in their day-to-day work.
4. Take on a coaching style of leadership
By adopting a coaching style, you can develop individuals in the course of your normal day-to-day leadership of the team.
- Encourage team members to challenge themselves and to work towards goals, and take every opportunity to pass on your knowledge and skills.
- Be prepared to delegate. Delegating isn’t just about offloading your workload. The tasks that you delegate should be genuine opportunities for people to develop. This will increase confidence, encourage people to take the initiative, boost motivation, increase productivity and allow you to focus on longer-term strategies and people development.
- Have a positive attitude about what your team members can achieve. This is the first step towards being successful at coaching and delegating. If you believe that everyone is capable of learning new things and has the resources and potential to be excellent in their job, you’ll be more effective in helping them to develop, and your positive attitude will boost team members’ confidence in their own abilities.
- Be approachable. Let team members know that you can always be approached and are happy to provide support whenever they need it.
- Set a good example. Your coaching style of leadership can act as a positive role model for others, encouraging them to take on a coaching style of working with each other. Experienced team members will have valuable skills and knowledge. Encourage them to coach and act as a ‘buddy’ to new starts or less experienced team members. You might want to train them in basic coaching skills, or your organization’s training department might be able to offer a course.
5. Promote Teamworking
Look for opportunities that you can use to encourage your team to work and learn together. For example:
- Acknowledge strengths. Encourage team members to recognize each other’s strengths and learn from them.
- Promote open communication and encourage team members to share information, knowledge and skills.
- Provide opportunities which promote teamworking. Set tasks that pairs or groups of team members can work on together to help each other to learn. You could do this with inexperienced or experienced team members, or a mixture of both. In fact, it would be a very useful way of helping new team members to learn from their more experienced colleagues.
