How I make sense of all the conversations that take place at work [1/2]
Dear SJ,
As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, what I’ve noticed regardless of sector, company type, size, team, or country is that conversations are the part of work that all of us need help with.
Conversations going well or badly ultimately influence expense areas like:
- employee satisfaction and retention
- onboarding
- knowledge sharing
(We’re not even considering the conversations that happen between the business and customers!)
In order to orient you on where I’m coming from with future advice, we should start with how I make sense of all the conversations that can take place at work:
As an owner and leader, “teacher” is one of your many roles. It is a competency that you can break down into mechanics, and strengthen.
Where did “teacher” come from?
Once upon a time, I went from tech worker into a PhD in learning technologies because I saw that software development — more specifically, IT support around a software tool — felt like teaching. Many of the calls I handled were walking people through how to create an account or navigate once logged in.
I figured, “What if these obvious problems were worked out waaaay back at the beginning, before money was spent on making and shipping bad software, if the product team had thought about these users as learners and themselves as teachers?”
This led to: “What kind of innovative software design could happen if we looked at the field of teaching and learning theory?”
That PhD work landed me a role back in tech, in a then-new team in Uber’s engineering division, where I applied an unlikely connection — teaching and learning theory — to engineering.
I worked on how to share knowledge amongst thousands of employees spread out globally, and how to quickly and efficiently onboard vast numbers of new employees at a time.
Thanks to that opportunity, I solidified my thinking into an HR-friendly framework I called teaching as a professional competency. Here is the diagram that goes with the link just above:
Although this diagram and thinking were born in a tech environment, the “human to human” bit, I could argue, is more widely applicable.
In your role as teacher, you have three mechanics for practice: explaining, listening, and facilitating. We’ll get to each of those in turn, since this post is getting a little long.
For now: you might see yourself as business owner, a leader, a boss, etc, but you are also… a teacher.
⭐ Key action: Try on “teacher” in your business context.
▶️ How to do it:
- Choose a memorable interaction you have had recently at work. Could be good memorable or bad memorable.
- Think back on that interaction: which of the above mechanics were you mostly doing? Explaining? Listening? Facilitating?
- What happened during your explaining, listening, or facilitating?
💭 Think about it: When you consider the role of “teacher,” how do you think that interaction might have changed?
Update: Here is part 2!
