Why Sharing Everything You Know at Work is Good for your Career
As Jim Collins’ team wrote Good to Great, they found that ‘great’ companies have one thing in common: Leaders who mentor others.
While many senior leaders will speak to the influence their mentors have had on their careers, many will also point to the role that mentoring others had in their own personal and professional development.
Now, let’s take this one step further. What defines a mentor? Someone who can give you a different perspective to the challenges you’re trying to tackle and who you can learn from — often from what they have discovered works and from the things that haven’t. This can happen in a few minutes or over the course of weeks or months. Good sponsors and peer-mentors help you avoid the mistakes they have made in the past.
In today’s dynamic and ever-changing business climate, everyone has something they can teach. Learning happens so quickly and people are looking for such different skills sets to learn from that a graduate, mid-level manager or senior executive have all got something they can teach and share.
Wondering why it might be worth your limited time to seek out opportunities to help solve other people’s problems in the organisation? Here are 5 reasons:
1. Continuous learning for you
Teaching your peers ensures deeper and more permanent learning. For the person who’s sharing their knowledge, the ‘peer teacher,’ you are required to repeat and organise internally what they are planning to explain to your co-workers. Because of this process, you gain a deeper understanding of the instructional content.
2. Gain credibility and fans
When you help others and share your knowledge, you gain positive visibility, are seen as a higher performer, granting you higher credibility. Being a resource to others makes you more valuable to your team and the organisation. Your fans will be people who will advocate for you and be your champion.
3. Enjoy the feeling of paying it forward
Successful individuals accept that they were supported by one or more people who guided them — by cheering or showing them the way. By becoming a mentor or a peer teacher yourself, you can enjoy the satisfaction of doing the same for someone else. It feels good and makes work more enjoyable.
4. Improved performance
Innovation happens when different perspectives collide. By learning different information and approaches, you are more likely to discover new ideas for how to improve your work.
5. Build soft skills and become a better leader
Teaching others requires you to build empathy and it will help you to build an understanding of what your team and peers need and appropriately adjust your style. Moreover, coaching is a skill that must be learned and developed. A large part of sharing your knowledge and helping people solve challenges is coaching.
About Talking Circles
People learn best from other people. The Talking Circles social learning platform matches coworkers to share unique expertise, helping them become more productive at every stage of their career. During the on-boarding phase all employees complete their profile and enter skills they can teach and skills they need to develop — the goal is to help organisations integrate a culture of continuous learning and empower their workforce to take ownership of their career development.Talking Circles extends beyond traditional content-driven solutions, which, while scalable, are largely ineffective on their own. Talking Circles learning experience:
- Encourages action-oriented learning that supports skill mastery on-the job
- Let’s your workforce drive talent management and learning
- Connects employees with peer-mentors to facilitate true social learning
- Gives HR teams and heads of departments real-time analytics allowing them to impact learning and engagement on-demand
If you’d like to find out more about making a difference and implementing a successful peer to peer learning solution in your organisation, please get in touch with Dimple and request a demo at www.talkingcircles.co sayhello@talkingcircles.co
