Outlearn to Outsmart Competition
Learning as a Competitive Advantage
Imagine if your team was learning faster than your competition. Adapting. Becoming more productive. Sharper. More talented. Imagine if you developed a culture that emphasized learning to a degree that it became one of your competitive advantages. From market knowledge & strategy, to the ability to execute on vision and iterate on your product faster. Imagine the impact that it would have on employee satisfaction, retention, and cost savings from mistakes or simply being more efficient.
What would it do for your engineering team’s velocity?
How much more insight could sales provide on each prospect call?
What about your ability to recruit and develop talent?
Or, your capacity to on-board, educate, and make your clients more successful?
The problem is learning is typically seen as a nice to have rather than a must have. Learning can be overlooked because we focus on the time it takes to learn rather than the efficiencies and output gained from continuous knowledge adoption. According to a study by Oxford Economics:
Not enough employees get opportunities to learn. Only 41 percent of employees say they get opportunities to grow, and just over one-fifth of employees say self-directed learning is important to their employers.
Learning Attracts, Retains, and Develops Talent
The “talent war” is a distraction that causes us to forget the importance of learning. Why is learning important? Learning opportunities not only helps to develop talent, it attracts more talent. An example is the reason why many of the brightest engineers typically work at startups. They recognize that the rate of learning is simply much higher. Learning attracts talent. Talent attracts more talent. And, surrounding yourself with talent increases your rate of learning. KYLE TIBBITTS wrote a brilliant piece and explains that the:
Rate-of-learning is the velocity at which you are aggregating new insights and deploying them in ways that build value.