Does your organization encourage a growth mindset and a culture of learning?
When our teams continually engage in learning new things and approaching everything with a curious mindset, innovation and creativity will flourish. Team members question old processes and find ways to make them better. Employees are highly engaged and motivated. Their emotional intelligence and soft skills expand. And your company’s employee retention will also improve.
Team members, especially younger ones, also put a high preference on learning. They value the ability to train for new skills for their current position, as well as to develop skills they will need for their future desired career growth. And when they aren’t getting these opportunities in their organization, they’ll move to another company in order to further their growth.
Your team will definitely encounter many opportunities for learning as they go about their daily work and improve processes that help them do their job better and improve the organization.
But what about learning just for the sake of learning?
Google’s 20% rule suggests that we should spend a regular portion of our time exploring new ideas or working on projects that “show no promise of paying immediate dividends but may reveal big opportunities down the road”.
Free, unstructured learning allows our team members to focus on building soft skills, improving their critical thinking abilities and exploring ideas from another perspective. These skills allow us to move past what is “now” and work towards a better workplace for tomorrow; and are equally beneficial for both the team member and the organization.
But it’s a challenge to make space for free and unstructured learning, especially in fast growing organizations. Employees must balance their current workload with making time for learning, which doesn’t immediately pay off in their goals.
How can we, as leaders of people, ensure that each of our team members are actually allocating a portion of their day towards this “free learning”?
Free, unstructured learning allows our team members to focus on building soft skills, improving their critical thinking abilities and exploring ideas from another perspective.
Read: How to practice and train soft skills regularly Creativity, critical thinking and communication skills are the top soft skills US employers have the most trouble finding, according to a recent study. And these soft skills tend to be highly related to an organization’s culture. Read: Using peer-to-peer learning to increase learning opportunities Less than half of organizations have any type of formal peer to peer learning programs, according to HBR, but these can be highly effective for skill building and learning. Explore:Training to build soft skills Just because your team members excelled at their jobs doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll innately have the skills to be a great leader! Here’s how to empower them
How To Be More Productive AND Less Stressed Out (an RTB Community Workshop Series)
Our Raise The Bar Community Workshops are a valuable and free resource that you can utilize to help your people build soft skills and explore new ideas. These interactive workshops are facilitated by our expert team of coaches and take place monthly at noon. We invite you to share these with your teams!
There doesn't have to be a tradeoff between performance and our wellbeing. Join Coach Julie Bronsteatter on September 15th as she explores how to be a more productive person without also generating more stress. In this workshop, we’ll explore an easy and effective tool to increase your impact while staying energized. Cheers! Aaron
