How approaching learning and development as a team can improve productivity and culture

By Kelly Lee (delivery) and Steve Messer (product)

Working on the GOV.UK Design System can be pretty daunting. Its scale, influence and reputation apply a unique pressure to the individuals who work on the team. Whilst being incredibly proud of the work we do, it’s fair to say we feel somewhat uncomfortable in the “limelight” and this has sometimes held us back.

The role of the delivery and product manager is, in part, to get the best out of the team. One way we do this is through learning and development (L&D).

On most teams, the emphasis is on the individual when it comes to L&D. They will draft their own objectives and facilitate their own skills development. And in previous years, we fell into that very pattern where we would create space for individual or discipline-led L&D. This still has its place but we’ve found that a scaled programme of coaching, which involves the entire team and is designed around shared goals, can be hugely beneficial.

We’re going to talk about what we tried in 2023 and the impact it had.

The setup

Imran, our community designer, first spotted the potential for a programme of coaching and how it could enable the team to feel more confident when collaborating with the wider community. He identified a highly regarded coach who had experience in the government digital space so would be able to understand our context quickly. We then built a business case to secure buy-in from our senior managers, articulating the needs, objectives and expected outcomes. This was pretty challenging as a request of this nature hadn’t been made in the organisation before, so we had to do a lot of convincing. We outlined the work we had been doing to change the culture on the team, and highlighted how bringing in some specialist expertise could help us deliver on our new strategy.

Our coach, Stefan, was brilliant. He started by holding one-to-one meetings with each team member, getting to know them and understand the challenges they were facing in their work. He then collated this evidence and shared it with the team leads.

Themes emerged and it was from this that we built a programme of coaching, working closely with Stefan to plan each session to ensure we achieved the outcomes the team required. Many of the themes were already on our radar but there was real value in those discussions being facilitated by an experienced coach. Coaching is a skill and we’re often so busy that it’s difficult to dedicate the time to training in that skill.

An external coach also has the added benefit of being removed from the team and can give an unbiased opinion, unlike ourselves who are deeply immersed in the details and complexities. Over the course of 6 months, we explored each of the themes as a team, using day-long workshops and dedicated ceremonies we introduced to our usual ways of working.

Stefan ensured there was an emphasis on showing gratitude to each other throughout the journey, so that individual efforts were recognised. We also made time for workshops as team leads with Stefan, where we could check we were happy with the outcomes the coaching was generating, could grow as a leadership group and build our coaching skills.

It’s made a difference

Having looked at what we’ve delivered and comparing it to previous years, we believe the team has had one of its most productive years to date. We’ve noted a definite increase in the pace of delivery since the coaching began and people have stepped into spaces they previously considered uncomfortable.

There has been a healthy tempo to multi-faceted work streams such as releasing version 5 of GOV.UK Frontend and updating our library to meet WCAG 2.2, with contributions coming from across the entire team. The reflection practices developed within the coaching programme has meant retrospectives are more beneficial and better focused on learning, tackling issues constructively with proposals.

Make the juice worth the squeeze

Delivering products and services used by millions of people fills up our days. Conducting a 6-month coaching programme alongside that is also a big undertaking. We knew that prioritising this may result in fewer improvements to our library in 2023, but we hypothesised that taking the time to “sharpen the axe” would allow us to move at greater pace on future work. We wanted to know that we’d get a return on the investment of time, energy and brain-power put into coaching. There were pre-existing conditions which gave us confidence the juice would be worth the squeeze.

The right mindset

Our team regularly finds improvements to make about how we work. People are comfortable with asking what could be better in agile retrospectives. Being open about what didn’t go well and things we can improve is natural to us. That mindset was essential for the coaching to work well, it allowed us to find things we could gradually make better.

Autonomy over working practices

Improvement happens through regular reflection, goal-setting and reviewing progress. It’s true that can happen in our agile ceremonies. But we needed to create moments where people could reflect and set goals personally. We were able to introduce these opportunities into our regular working week because we’ve got autonomy over how we work.

Improvement is important

As mentioned before, we had lots of work to get done this year. But improving our skills as a team was going to help ensure all that was successful. But don’t underestimate it: coaching takes a lot of thought and energy! So we considered the coaching as important as any other roadmap objective, which our senior management team supported.

Learning and development as a team sport

As mentioned previously, developing your skills as a digital and design professional is usually seen as a personal endeavour. Something you need to do yourself. Organisations provide budget and direction to help you learn and develop, but the onus is on you to get it done.

Approaching learning and development as a team helped us to collectively identify the gaps. And we could hold each other accountable to goals we set ourselves. By looking at this as a team sport, we improved as a unit. And, after all, the unit of delivery is the team.

There was another huge benefit of going on this shared journey too: it has bolstered our team’s culture. We’ve been vulnerable in front of each other, together, and watched each other act on feedback. This is something we’ve done together, not as atomised individuals, and it’s brought us closer to each other. It’s reduced the space between us.

For those reasons, we reckon it’s worth other teams exploring bringing in a coach. We’ll publish another blog later in 2024 assessing the ongoing impact the coaching has had.