Knowledge and expertise are similar to capital. If you don’t make deposits regularly, you’ll miss out on most gains. Your team—and you—should be learning regularly, not just once a year during a “hackathon” or when things are on fire and demand learning rapidly. Let’s learn how the best teams learn.
Learning Disorder
Being able to learn regularly and in an effective manner is probably one of those things that set the top 5% of teams apart. Unfortunately, it’s also a skill that seems to be almost completely lost. At small startups, they tend to think they can never take a second off “hustling.” In bigger companies, there are L&D budgets that counterintuitively box learning time and make it scarce.
Continuing with the capital analogy, we make the mistake of investing in our learning rarely. Either because we decided to limit learning to hackathons or because we have to keep shipping at a breakneck pace. We’re taking the people who have the most potential in the team and forcing them to while away in a “checking account” in the form of the Jira hamster wheel.
Some companies are different and actually allow these learning investments too sparingly, without any real strategy or guidance. When each person gets 10% (or whatever amount) for personal time and projects, we usually get a huge mess. Even if people learn things, those experiments rarely gain momentum. In fact, you’d be lucky if it even had anything to do with their work.
And I’ll add that even though we usually think about ICs when discussing learning, this applies throughout the ranks. The managers in the organization have to regularly learn and invest in themselves as well. The management seniority average is usually lower than a company’s IC seniority average, and these are the people who get the least learning time. You can do better.
Back to School
As I’m writing this article, my kids are about to start the school year in a new school, in a new country, in a new language. We’re still finding out a lot of new things regularly about how things work here. One of the nice ones is that they invest hours a week in “learning to learn.”
Being an autodidact, I always viewed this ability as one of my greatest strengths, but also something I’ve taken for granted. In my mind, it was obvious every smart person was capable of learning regularly, spicing their days with little learning moments. Only after witnessing how many brilliant people need more structure to learn regularly did I realize that learning to learn is a critical skill for everyone.
Here are some ideas I’ve seen work to make learning habitual.
Group learning: In a world where too often we realize an hour flew by because we wanted to open our phones for a second while something was loading, group accountability is an invaluable incentive. I like the concept of group learning, like book clubs. Having these happen on a regular schedule and expecting everyone to share insights and thoughts is key. Of course, you can replace books with a tech talk or an article. It doesn’t really matter—it’s the time thinking about it together that makes most of the impact. By the way, these groups shouldn’t just be for ICs, but also for managers.
Spread the gains: When someone picks up a new skill in the organization and keeps it to themselves, you’re missing out on a bunch of the benefits. Tech talks are great, though having those regularly might be too demanding for smaller teams. Make it a habit to incorporate a “what did we learn” section in your retrospectives. Then, if someone learned something interesting, task them with sharing it.
When I first learned how to profile slow loading times in web apps because we had a major issue, I didn’t just stop at pushing the fix and people telling me “good job.” I turned it into a workshop session that I gave to the team. We also recorded that session for future reference.
Link learning to real work: Rather than let people run whatever experiment they want whenever they feel like it, let’s bind learning to what we’re actually doing. If someone wants to learn a new framework or try something, that’s fine as long as it is part of some work that needs to be done anyway and can be boxed at only adding X% more to the work. Otherwise, it should be part of an intermission/innovation week (more on those in the free chapter of The Tech Executive Operating System available at the bottom of this article).
Leaders go first: Lastly, managers and senior staff have to make time to learn things and share their learning regularly. Learn in public. Your senior team must be a role model. You can start right now by sharing this article with them!