What are the best practices for creating a culture of continuous learning and development?

Putting learning at the heart of organisational culture is vital for people development. Way too often learning is perceived as “waste of time” and hence not embraced throughout the organisation. For cultural foundations that should be embraced are: - Dedication to learn: Embrace a dedication to absorb new knowledge and follow ideas - Empowerment to teach: Encourage to actively share knowledge and ideas - Openness to experiment: Challenge to break patterns and explore something new - Desire to understand: Foster to seek deeper understanding

One important aspect of empowering learners, when you allow others to use their creativity in a learning culture you allow them to express their ideas in ways that are authentic to them. In my experience, this leads to much more creativity in the solutions they create, the repercussion being a greater sense of empowerment to the individual, especially if they have created a viable solution for the business. That gets cemented when you allow them to take the lead in taking it to the business with your support.

Foster a culture of development. You empower the team by establishing a road of learning by giving them opportunities to apply that new knowledge within the organization e.g. lead new projects, initiatives and teams.

On a monthly basis I had team members set goals for creativity and innovation days. Making time , one day a month minimum, for them to work on their passion projects helped create a growth mindset and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in efficiency and cost savings. That included client facing solutions that increased stickiness.

Having team members share their passion projects during weekly team meetings allowed for collaboration amongst the team. Everyone from entry level to senior staff were part of this exchange. It developed junior staff and reverse mentored senior staff.

Unpopular opinion maybe, however; I've found that learning aligns perfectly with career goals, and performance when a Supervisor understands their team and objectives very well. By aligning those objectives, and learning objectives together, it can really amp the performance of the entire team. An example might be this: - A company is launching a new larger more complex product - The existing Field Service team must get better, while servicing the old product at the same time - By aligning performance objectives, and a learning curriculum as part of the performance review - A good leader can provide expectations, timelines, metrics, and a training program - While protecting employees, and employers at the same time