Creating a Learning Organization

Part 4 of Building High Performing Teams

This is part four of a four-part series on the basic building blocks of high performing teams. In the first section I introduced the concept that high performing teams must have a maniacal focus on three fundamental areas: Hiring, Training and Learning. In this final section I dive a little more deeply into becoming a learning organization. Part two focuses on Hiring and part three focuses on Training.

The third leg of the triad……learning. How can you possibly improve and get to the highest levels of performance if you cannot learn, adapt and perfect what you do? Every high performing organization I have been a part of or have a working knowledge of, has been a learning organization. Learning organizations take the desire and practice of learning, growing and improving and weave into their DNA. It’s part of everything they do, every day.

I spent the first 11+ years of my career flying jets in the U.S. Navy. It was a fun and exciting time. But beyond that, it was also an incredibly impactful time for me, laying the foundation for how I lead and operate to this day. Some of those foundational elements are integral parts of creating and fostering a learning environment: 1) how to properly debrief and learn from mistakes and 2) how to accept and deliver feedback.

DEBRIEFING

Naval Aviation is definitely a learning organization. We debriefed everything. I mean it. EVERYTHING. We trained constantly and we endeavored to learn from every mistake and every success no matter how trivial or how great. Part of that process was the flight debrief. Every time we flew (from basic training flights to complex exercises to real world combat missions) we went through the same learning process:

1. Prep and research

• Planning what, where, when, how, etc.

2. Brief

• Everyone involved in the flight or exercise spent 30 to 90 minutes talking through exactly what we were going to do, when we were going to do it and how were were going to be successful (and avoid mistakes).

3. Flight / Mission

• We would execute the mission or planned flight.
• As with anything else in life and work, things would never go exactly as planned.

4. Debrief

• Once everyone was back on deck we would convene in a meeting room for the debrief.
• Rank was checked at the door. Everyone was equal in the debrief.
• The flight leader would guide the discussion, covering how we did what we did, from prep, to planning, to brief, to execution, to debrief. That’s right, we debriefed the debrief! We covered every action, every mistake, every good move and every bad one.
• People owned-up to their mistakes and learned from them so that we could prevent them from happening in the future. This served two purposes, it helped us LEARN and get better at our trade. And it helped us prevent accidents and deaths in the future. That second piece may not be that applicable to the commercial world, but the first part certainly is.

I’ve tried to bring the operational culture of briefing and debriefing into every team I’ve led or been a part of since. It’s applicable to business teams in so many different ways. You can debrief presentations, projects, analysis, business planning, client meetings, internal meetings, negotiations, sales pitches, you name it. Making this practice a part of your normal operating rhythm will help ensure your teams are constantly learning from what they do. Their day-to-day jobs and tasks will becoming learning opportunities. Over time, that learning will result in the entire organization up-leveling it’s skills.

FEEDBACK!

“The purpose of feedback is to help people achieve more success, and it’s one of your core responsibilities as a boss. Creating a strong feedback culture means soliciting it, giving it, and encouraging it between others.”

— Kim Scott and Russ Laraway of Candor, Inc.

The second and equally important key to creating a learning organization is developing a strong culture of giving and receiving constructive feedback. In order to develop and uplevel their skills, people must know and understand how and where they need to improve. You can’t hit a target if you don’t know where to aim, and feedback provides that aim! Additionally, people need to feel safe receiving feedback and understand that it’s natural and OK to need improvement in different aspects of their job performance. People need to feel equally safe delivering feedback to others including their peers and their managers.

Creating an environment that has all of these elements around feedback requires a multi-faceted approach.

1. Cultural norms

• In order to have a group of people that are comfortable giving and receiving feedback from one another, you have to start by focusing on cultural norms. Cultural norms don’t come overnight and they don’t come from only one source or leadership action. They are developed over time by focusing on a number of different activities. How?
• As a leader, have you made it known that your team is a safe environment for feedback? At both Google and Twitter, I met 1:1 with every new person who started on my team or in my group. In addition to just getting to know each other, we talked about a number of different things related to the cultural and operational norms of our team, including feedback. I let every person know that we were a learning organization that believed deeply in the power of feedback. And then went into detail on what that meant.
• Meeting one on one with each person and telling them about feedback is, of course, not enough to establish and foster cultural norms. It’s just one step. That message must be repeated often and from different people at different times to really sink in. And then, of course, you have to practice what you preach. People must see all of this in action at all levels within the org.

2. Formal review process

• Every high performing org I’ve ever been a part of has some sort of formalized, comprehensive review process conducted at least once a year, and better yet twice.
• The process should be fully transparent with everyone involved understanding the criteria for evaluation.
• Feedback should be collected (and provided) from all angles: self evaluation, peer evaluation, manager feedback and upward (direct report) feedback.
• Training people on how to write and deliver feedback is crucial! Don’t assume all of your managers understand how to do this. Don’t assume they all do this the same way. You need to establish norms and expectations around how to write and deliver reviews and make sure that everyone is on the same page.

3. Regular informal / verbal feedback

• A formalized review process is key, but that alone won’t create a culture of feedback. People within your team must be conditioned to giving and receiving feedback informally in one-on-one meetings, debriefs and after action reviews on a regular basis.
• But once again, don’t assume everyone understands how and when to do this. You’ll need to train your teams and make sure they’re delivering the right feedback in the right way so that it’s effective, impactful and positive! My friend, Kim Scott literally “wrote the book” on this subject and she and another friend, Russ Laraway have started a company called Candor, Inc that is focused entirely on teaching organizations how to excel by learning to care, provide effective feedback, and collaborate. If you want a high performing team, you need to get this (feedback) right. I highly recommend you read the book!

4. Briefing and Debriefing & Training

• These two other parts of this article are obviously closely related to feedback as well. Making sure you have a culture and operational norms around debriefing and training will also help to create a team that is familiar with learning through feedback and coaching as well.

SUMMARY

A learning culture is hyper critical to building any kind of high performing organization. You have to create an environment where people are allowed to make mistakes and are open to learning from those experiences, where they are comfortable giving and receiving feedback; and ultimately, a culture where everyone constantly strives to improve at what they do. A daunting task? Yes. But totally doable if you devote the right focus and energy to it.

Building high performing teams is a challenging and demanding process. But it’s most definitely worth the effort. Aside from being simply more enjoyable and more fun, high performing teams ultimately require less management effort in the day to day and allow you to zero in on creating and implementing the right long term vision and strategy for the business. To get there, you’ll need a maniacal focus in three key areas (highlighted in previous articles): Hiring, Training and Learning. But as I stated in the first part of this series, your work doesn’t stop there. Those are just the table-stakes. High performing teams must also place a premium and a healthy focus on Leadership, Transparency, Planning, and Professionalism. I’ll dive into those subjects some other time.