Create a culture of continuous learning

A culture of continuous learning is a core tenet of any high-performing team or organization.

The common denominator between companies of all sizes, from startups with just a few co-founders, to Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of employees, is that today's problems, are not the same as yesterday's, and will not be the same as tomorrow's. Using the same solutions that worked for you in the past, to solve future problems will not give you the expected results.

This means, arriving at any economic success is a continuous effort, even a never stopping process. And not something you can just achieve once and you are set. Gone are the time were achieving some market leadership allows you some protection, or being an unknown newcomer made you invisible for the competition.

In a global market, your competition is everywhere. There is always someone, somewhere on the planet, who is aware of what you are doing and eying your place. Inventing and reinventing new things and new ways of doing the same thing is the only way to achieve or maintain any market leadership. And for any company, to be able to do that, and do it in sustainable cadence, everyone needs to be constantly learning, the whole organization needs to have a continuous learning culture.

You need everyone on your team to be aware that they need to learn, and how they can do it. in other words, you need people in your workplace to speak up when they don't know something, to not be afraid to ask questions when something is not clear, or to request more information, when it is needed for the job. At the same time, you need those employees who have that knowledge, to freely share it with others without fear or hesitation. Yes, they may not be sure 100% that what they will say is the right answer, but having that information out there will start the conversation and the learning process.

Here psychological safety is the fastest and easiest way to solve these problems.

Do I need to learn?

When we make it the default for people to ask questions if they see the need for it. When we make it that telling others that you don't know something is as easy as telling them that you know it. It becomes possible for all of us to shine a light on the real scope of what we really know. We move away from just thinking that we know something, to validating if we do actually have this knowledge. It is easy for a lot of people to deceive themselves by thinking they know more than what they actually do, you can see this all the time, like, when you are in a meeting and a colleague said. That task will take me a day, maybe a day and a half, but in reality, the project ends up taking weeks and weeks.

As long as we are afraid of saying to other people that we do not know, we are blocked from learning by two barriers.

• The first one is practical, we do not get the chance to test that knowledge, and see if we have what it takes to do the job or we should acquire more skills.
• The second one is psychological, we cannot learn something we think we already know; it does not make sense so our brain does not accept it, this is why the most brilliant students are often the ones paying less attention in class.

We need to establish an environment where people are encouraged to talk openly about what they don't know and ask their leaders and other colleagues for help getting it. to be able to, consciously and unconsciously, admit when we lack some skills and easily obtain them so we can do our jobs in highly performing way,

Experience sharing

For some of us speaking up comes easy, we go to a meeting and we have no issues talking all the time if we need to. But this is not the case for everyone.

We all know of these colleagues that don't talk unless they must, and when they start speaking, they say as few words as possible and as fast as they can. And it is a shame since in some cases when these people talk, they have valuable lessons to teach us. Yes, they may not always have a piece of wisdom to pass along, but the truth is, in an economy moving fast and constantly moving faster, these few bits of real-world experience as small as it is, can be valuable when we are tackling the next problem we will face, and it does not serve the team, the company, or the person who is not speaking for that matter, to not mention it.

In today's world, where having a learning organization is not some luxury that can be nice to have, but a necessity that it is a must if we want to maintain or improve our market position. Company leaders from all over the world try to come out with some solutions to get their employees to start learning what they need to do a better job. But academic research and real-world experience are clear, and they agree on one thing. Employees need to be learning more, leaders need to do more to get their people to start learning either from each other or using some external resource.

You can see that we are not even achieving the number we set for ourselves, by simply looking at the millions of dollars left in budgets for employee training by the end of the year. And the pandemic did not make these numbers any better.

Yes, solutions are in place to bridge the gap between what is needed and the current situation. But they all seem to be following the same formula, either throwing more money at the problem or developing some convoluted approach, that is so complex that a smaller version of the problem becomes a part of the solution again, i.e., Learn why you need to learn.

Psychological safety offers a novel approach, that is based on organically making the need for learning more obvious and more urgent while making learning abundant and effortless so that your employees have no choice but to absorb it, and then seek more.

These simple principles work, because they are based on human psychology, mainly the same tactic that is used by ad agencies to make us realize that we have a need and how we can fulfill it.

Getting your employees to this point will make the creation of a continuous learning culture inevitable.

Start today, use Fiill to help create the kind of environment that will get your colleagues to speak up and learn.