5 WAYS TO ACCELERATE YOUR TEAM’S ABILITY TO LEARN

Now more than ever, organizations are relying on their teams to learn, evolve, and grow to meet new challenges. Teams must “learn how to learn” if they are to survive and thrive. Teams must develop their collective ability to leverage team member perspectives, knowledge, and expertise to continually learn and evolve to address complex challenges.

For any team to be effective there must be a solid foundation of common purpose, clear and aligned roles and effective processes for getting work done. The key differentiator that allows certain teams to succeed while others fail is their ability to learn, adapt, and evolve. This article shares 5 WAYS TO ACCELERATE YOUR TEAM’S ABILITY TO LEARN.

1. High-Trust Environment

Research confirms that the highest performing teams invest in creating an environment where teammates feel safe to take risks because they are confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, not knowing an answer, or offering a different perspective. Trust is the foundation that is needed for team members to allow themselves to be vulnerable in sharing challenges, mistakes and opportunities for improvement.

One of the primary attributes of high-trust teams is that each team member has roughly the same amount of time speaking during team conversations—showing value for all perspectives. An inclusive team environment that invites equal voice and values all member’s perspectives isn’t created by happenstance or accident.

A 2017 Gallup poll found that only three in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work.

An environment where team members feel safe to share challenges is a key component for accelerated team learning.

2. Quality Questions

Research conducted by Dr. Judith Glaser, author of Conversational Intelligence suggests that up to 95 percent of workplace interactions are instructions, or of a telling nature. The best teams understand that their time together should not be primarily focused on providing standard updates that can easily be shared electronically. The most effective teams use their limited time together to focus on learning and problem-solving in pursuit of achieving their most important goals.

Accelerated team learning and problem-solving is driven by taking the time to ask quality questions to leverage each member’s expertise, perspectives, and insights. This conversation shift, from telling to asking, helps create a team environment where members feel valued, empowered, and motivated—all key ingredients for continuous learning and performance.

Teams should regularly ask two types of questions in pursuit of accomplishing their most important goals:

• One set of questions is targeted at understanding relevant team members’ perspectives about challenges and opportunities (What is the main issue? / What are the biggest obstacles? / What are we struggling with? / How have we been addressing this issue?).
• The other type of question’s aim is to generate forward-focused solutions for those same challenges and opportunities (What do you think we should do next? / How should we move forward? / What solutions do we see?).

3. Growth Mindset

When teams master the art of asking Quality Questions, a main benefit is that they foster a growth mindset. This is a collective belief that everyone on the team is expected to actively learn and grow through the process of practice, feedback and reflection.

In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck shared her research that shows how the power of our beliefs about learning and intelligence can have a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our motivation and behaviors. Dweck says people can be split into two categories: those with a “fixed mindset” believe their capabilities are already set, while those with a “growth mindset” believe they can enhance their basic qualities through effort. Teams that have a growth mindset believe theirs and others’ intelligence can be developed, that the brain is like a muscle that can be trained. This feeds the desire to learn, grow, and improve (Dweck, 2017).

Teams that have a high-trust environment and regularly ask quality questions, in pursuit of achieving their most important goals, create an environment where team members collectively learn and relationships evolve. It is hard for a team to keep a fixed mindset when they truly have a desire to learn more about others’ perspectives and are working together to generate ideas for future success.

4.  Process for Team Reflection

The highest performing teams are skilled at learning from experience and have a clear process and dedicated time for team learning. This team learning process goes by many different names including After-Action Review, Post Mortem, Retrospective, Blameless Autopsy, or Team Debrief. Regardless of the name, the purpose of this exercise is to gather the team together to review and learn from work recently completed about what went well and what went wrong and then committing to any improvements identified.

An ongoing process of practice and reflection helps teams quickly assess past experience, make meaning of the experience, and decide what the experience means for future action. When engaging in reflection it is important for teams to understand that sustained team success require both results and strong relationships. This is why when teams take time to reflect they need be deliberate assessing both their team's results and relationships.

5. Turn Learning Into Action

There is nothing more frustrating for teams than to take the time to engage in a great learning conversation and then nothing is put into action. More often than not, this lack of follow through is because the team has not done a good job of creating clear and explicit agreements for next steps, timelines, and communication for putting the learning into action.

Below are some questions that help teams  generate clear accountability for action and updates.

• What are our next steps?
• Who is responsible?
• When will it be completed?
• How will we define success?
• How will the team be updated on progress?

Teams that are most advanced with team learning continually out-perform their peers. This is the ultimate competitive advantage for teams and their organizations.

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Tony Gambill is the founder and principal for ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Tony brings more than 20 years of executive experience in leadership development, coaching, and team effectiveness within global for-profit, non-profit, technical, research, healthcare, government and higher educational industries.