Learning & Coaching

Well Richard Sauramba you said I should use the fresh Danish air to write another article so this one is for you ??

The World Championships I've been at since Thursday as spectator (click here to read that article) has come to an end, my daughter didn't win in the personal events nor did her team win in the team competitions. Here's my provocative question, does that mean she and her team failed ?

I've been a fierce competitor all my life, sport has defined me as much as my IT career and I never gave up. I was successful most of the time as an individual or as part of a team. I pushed myself to the edges of my physical capability resulting in many trophies & medals, injuries, 19 operations, points of sheer exhaustion and a few "Roy Keane" moments ??

I learnt so much through wining, its a sense of feeling that is like a drug as once you taste it you want more ... but I learnt way more in each failure or disappointment. You see the errors you made that could have changed the result and you go and work on them so that you don't repeat them. That's the first rule of failure, figure out what went wrong and don't make the same mistake again. Then you have to go and push yourself and prove you've learnt but then be brave enough to try something else new and know you may just fail again ... but failing in something new is a stretch goal and then you repeat the cycle of learning.

So, no my daughter and her team didn't fail. Far from it, its was collectively and individually the first time they had been to this event and they competed against people here for the 4th and 5th time. They put themselves into a learning stretch situation and now have to go through the cycle of learning to remove errors so they don't repeat them next time around and then push into new areas that right now they don't have skills in.

OK, so you're all ready now to be Horse Breeders ??and come to the event in 2 years. No hold on, it's for "Young" Horse Breeders so I'm guessing most of you won't qualify??

So can we use this in IT ... well in fact we use it all the time in Flooid and specifically it's a topic that myself and my leadership team look at when we're developing our people. We always have times when something goes wrong, new people may not understand our process, people maybe using new technology, writing in a new language or have picked up something that they need help on. This is stretch learning, taking the baseline skills you have and then pushing yourself outside of the comfort zone to have to learn and ask questions.

So when we do this with people we're not expecting perfection and honestly we're expecting issues ... the only thing we're looking for is learning through exploration and the honesty to reach out and say "hey, I'm really struggling on this can you help me through this problem". When I see that happening I know it's working, we have experts that can do it so if you're in the learning zone soak up their expertise. What you don't want to see is the cycle of despair when someone tries to figure it out and can't but doesn't put their hand up for help. It's soul destroying for the person and me when help is on hand. It's not a failure to ask for help. With one of my team Mike Beaty we put in place the 2-hour rule..."If you've been spinning your wheels for 2-hours in a staring competition with your screens (and losing) reach out for help".

We don't just have experts but we also have learning materials, lots of them. We use Confluence @ Atlassian Jira here and like most we have a gazillion pages of information and knowledge. One of our biggest pushes in the last 2-years has been micro front ends (MFE) and we have great materials on here to help develop our people (and to enable our clients to develop their own extensions). We have also partnered with Udemy to enable us to build our own internal courses but also to allow out people to explore technology courses for themselves and to further their own skills. So I know through people and knowledge management that I have the tools people need to develop (and learn from failure).

What I truly love is when someone internally comes and says "hey, I've done this course on TypeScript and really enjoyed it so can I join the next hackathon or get a chance to do some part of MFE development". Not everyone is that confident even when they are ready so some people may need a little nudge out of their comfort zone but give them a safety net of support to allay their fears or anxiety.

So my advice here has 2 different perspectives:

For the learner, don't be afraid to challenge yourself and put yourself out there knowing that some form of failure is going to kick you in the butt. That's the exciting part of stretching yourself. Try, fail, recover, learn, try again. Main thing is make sure you ask for safety nets to be in place and remember that 2-hour rule as it will save you hours of despair.

For the leader/coach, make sure your people are supported as you stretch them and offer them the guide rails and safety nets when they inevitably hit issues. If you see someone spinning remind them of the 2-hour rule. Perhaps let them explore off the critical path and don't get frustrated when they fail.....it's only when someone is constantly repeating the same failures that you have a problem.

It's a really good job my wife doesn't read LinkedIn as my last performance review at home did point out some repeating failures on my part ??

#Learning #Software #Udemy #Flooid #Coaching #StretchTargets #2-HourRule