Creating a Strong Business Culture: Learning

To build a positive business culture, we embrace?learning?in addition to?trust,?purpose, clarity, and inclusion/community.

From the start, we’ve built learning into our business structure. Every other week, Shelley meets one-on-one with each employee individually, fielding questions but also asking her own and engaging in exploratory conversations. We have open, ongoing discussions about what our next best steps might be as a firm. And as partners, we’re asking ourselves how we can break out of the “leader box” so we can learn from our employees.

Sticking with our commitment to learning can be tough. More than the other values we’ve discussed so far, it requires quite a bit of vulnerability. Whether you’re in leadership or not, you can’t learn if you can’t admit you don’t know something. And you can’t admit you don’t know something unless you adopt a growth mindset. And you can’t adopt a growth mindset unless you’re willing to be pretty dang vulnerable.

Recently, we had an opportunity to practice living into the value of learning. Someone we sent on an interview didn’t get hired. When we asked why, we discovered that it was because this person hadn’t answered one question during the interview satisfactorily.?

We were surprised. But, more than that, we felt sheepish. We wondered: what role did our firm play in this outcome? How could we have prepared this person more effectively?

The question—which was centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion—was, admittedly, one we hadn’t been talking about much with our team. And it stirred discomfort in us as leaders. But because we’re committed to learning and to welcoming discomfort in order to grow and be better, we swallowed our pride and dug in.?

So did the person who was passed over for a great role. In fact, this person took the initiative by taking a LinkedIn course on DEI and consulting with a mentor to explore the many ways a business analyst should consider DEI. What really blew us away though, was the way this person took the time to email us their learnings and recommendations. Wow.?

Using this information, we asked ourselves how?we?would have answered that question. We asked our staff members at a roundtable meeting how?they?would have answered it.?

We ended up deciding that we have some things to learn and concluding that, if we want to improve our business culture and our outcomes, we need to be willing to learn and to change the ways we interact in the world. As a result, we and everyone who works for us will be required to take a training course on diversity, inclusion, and belonging. We all need a common place to begin.

Because we’re committed to learning, this experience ended up as a?positive. We didn’t back away. We leaned into flexibility and openness and stuck to our commitment to cultivating a learning ethic.?

That’s what building a strong business culture is all about: listening, learning, and?changing for the better.??

We’re also starting to think about how this particular situation will affect our approach to business, about how we will change our behavior to work within a new-to-us paradigm.

This was a challenging situation. But looking at the big picture, we’re not surprised that it has?led to deeper learning—and that our team was willing to take up the challenge. The individual who flubbed the interview question turned a negative experience into an opportunity to show us how they receive feedback, respond mindfully, and share knowledge—and we hired them immediately based on their integrity and character.?

Lessons are tough but having a learning culture is tougher. The more you infuse your business culture with a desire and openness to learn, the more resilient your work—and your people—will become.