The Value of Sharing Within A Learning Culture

How to create spaces for new ideas and innovations within a team and an organization

Last week I had an amazing interview with Alice Quesenberry, Director Of Manufacturing Engineering at Lam Research, as part of my preparation to launch my podcast called The Engineer Whisperer Podcast.

During our conversation, Alice said something that blew me away. She, as a leader, is focused on creating space for her team to share their learnings openly and effectively with each other.

“Those companies who don’t figure out how to share what they learned will fall behind.”

I believe that is true. Let me tell you a story about how I know.

While I was working at Boeing, our organization’s leadership was struggling with an issue that seemed unsolvable and felt discouraging - and it was starting to cut into our organization’s overall performance and our relationship with our customers. The forecast, as we said it back then, did not have an upwards slope; more like a deep, downwards projection.

The real struggle was around not understanding how come all the training and learning classes we sent our team to have resulted in non-sustainable improvements. Leadership started to get impatient with the team and the team started to get frustrated. Those two in combination were not a good sign.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a leadership meeting as a guest one day. This was one of the “fun things” my senior manager introduced a while back as part of our learning culture. Every month, he would invite an employee of his organization to be his guest at his boss’ monthly leadership meeting. My role was to just listen and at the end of the meeting to ask him as many questions as I could about what I heard, and, of course, to respect everyone in the meeting and not misuse the information that was shared. I think that was more of an unwritten rule though.

In that meeting I heard how important that issue was for our larger organization and how much each leader cared about solving it the right way – honoring the team and our customers and respecting every relationship.

Of course, I just happened to be part of the team that struggled the most, but I had no idea of the magnitude of the issue nor of the consequences it might have had on the team’s future.

So, I set out to do some field research and I soon came up with an innovative yet simple idea.

I have discovered that the training was only focused on the process and on correctly applying the process steps. It transferred the “what to do when” knowledge but it left out the “how to do when” tribal knowledge.

My team members knew what to do but they didn’t have experience with how to do the process. It turned out that in order to learn the how to, the only space that was available for them to learn in was in front of our customers, in a live meeting, where the stakes were high. My team was responsible for delivering packages valued at any amount between $500,000 to $100 million dollars.

Every learning experience has a learning curve. Failing is part of learning.

My team’s performance wasn’t too bad but in such an environment where the price of the learning was too high, the process did not allow any mistakes nor any failures.

The process was built on expecting mastery from the participants. It was a closed process that did not allow for anything else then a pass.

I discovered that the experienced team members were more successful than the new team members, and they were also willing to teach the new team members - who were willing to learn from them. This was an important discovery.

And again, there was no space in our organization’s process to facilitate this learning – not yet.

So, I put a brief summary together of my findings, created an outline for a proposed solution, and knocked on my senior manager’s door. His door was always open for us.

After he listened to me enthusiastically sharing my excitement and out-of-the-box solution with him, he warmly looked into my eyes and asked “So, I want to know, do you really believe your idea will succeed? And are you willing to lead it and succeed with it?” “Yes, and yes!” I responded, without really realizing I had just signed up for my first leadership learning opportunity.

Many years later, I continue to hear that space still exists today within my old organization. That space where experienced and new, student and master, curious and knowledgeable come together to learn how to behave, how to communicate, how to show up, how to prepare, how to respond, how to be confident, how to trust themselves, and how to listen and be listened to, and how to solve process obstacles together.

The value of these amazing spaces was that the culture and its attributes literally became alive and were welcomed by everyone in the space. It wasn’t the elephant in the room that everyone wanted to dismiss and ignore. We accepted and invited culture into our work lives.

“Culture is the tacit social order of an organization: It shapes attitudes and behaviors in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group.”

[The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-leaders-guide-to-corporate-culture )]

My old organization still encourages and shapes their behaviors and their norms by having spaces where the team members see and experience these behaviors for themselves.

"We have a learning culture here" wasn’t just written on big posters there, it was expected to be stepped into as a physical space, felt on our skins, and shared with others on the team.

While reading The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture, the four generally accepted attributes of a culture identified by the authors really resonated with me and made me pause for a minute.

Shared: “… It resides in shared behaviors, values, and assumptions and is most commonly experienced through the norms and expectations of a group—that is, the unwritten rules.”

Pervasive: “… It is manifest in collective behaviors, physical environments, group rituals, visible symbols, stories, and legends. Other aspects of culture are unseen, such as mindsets, motivations, unspoken assumptions…”

Enduring: “…It develops through critical events in the collective life and learning of a group…”

Implicit: “An important and often overlooked aspect of culture is that despite its subliminal nature, people are effectively hardwired to recognize and respond to it instinctively… the ability to sense and respond to culture is universal…”

In my curiosity to understand more, I looked up the meaning of instinctively and then it clicked for me.

Instinctively - Definition: in a way that is not thought about, planned, or developed by training.

Learning is important within an organization, no doubt. Yet, learning what the difference is between training spaces and learning spaces, and a third space – sharing spaces – is vital to the future of an organization.

As I read the conclusion of the article, I was left pondering about how many readers (and leaders) missed what the article suggested to do first, and what I realized I had actually done instinctively at Boeing.

“It is possible - in fact, vital—to improve organizational performance through culture change… First leaders must become aware of the culture that operates in their organization.” 

Become aware of something - Definition: knowing that something exists or having knowledge or experience of a particular thing. If you are conscious of something, you are aware of it, especially because you have noticed or realized it yourself.

What I discovered was that a leader’s first and biggest challenge was not to define which culture they wanted to choose for their teams, nor was to design massive change processes. 

A leader’s first and biggest challenge is to become aware of what already exists within the organization by noticing and realizing it for themselves.

My leader was willing to listen and hear my observations. He instinctively created a space for me to get curious and discover what was happening at a deeper level.

Without us even realizing, his open door was an invitation to enter a space where we could share everything we have learned – about the business and about ourselves as part of our professional and personal development.

Together we grew the business. Together we grew into our best versions of ourselves.