Learning Together as a Team
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"Creating a culture of continuous learning and growth ensures that your team can thrive in a rapidly changing business environment."
— Mike Goldman
Performance & Learning Together:
- Leadership team growth enhances performance and productivity.
- Knowledge development and talent growth benefit the entire organization.
- High-performing leaders are crucial for success.
Leadership Team Development:
- Focus on teamwork, trust, and decision-making.
- Goal: Become a more effective leadership unit.
Professional Self Development:
- Enhance individual skills like strategic thinking and communication.
- Encourage leaders to invest in their own growth.
Personal Self Development:
- Focus on non-professional aspects like wellness and meditation.
- Elevates leadership capabilities and overall performance.
Direct Reports Development:
- Foster growth and learning among team members.
- Enhance team cohesion and effectiveness.
Reading Together As A Team:
- Cost-effective learning through team reading.
- Identify actionable ideas and assign accountability.
Strengths Coaching:
- Identify and leverage individual strengths.
- Enhance collaboration and personal development.
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I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
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What are you doing to make sure your direct reports are learning and growing and again, learning and growing and at similar levels, you know, is there, are you developing your team to become a better team? Are you encouraging your direct reports to develop professionally as individuals? Are you encouraging them on their personal self development? Are you willing to make an investment on their personal self development? There are four different types or levels to think about. Leadership team development, professional self development, personal self development, and direct reports development.
you made it to the Better Leadership Team. Show the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things so you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach Mike Goldman. I'm gonna show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. Alright, let's go.
When's the last time you got together with your team just to learn? Not to deal with some big issue or plan for the future or create a new vision or figuring out how you're going after some opportunity of course, all that stuff's important, but when's the last time you got together just to discuss a great book or just maybe to coach each other on how you could better leverage individual strengths. When's the last time you did that? I would argue that most leadership teams don't take enough time simply to learn together as a leadership team. Your profit growth is going to follow your talent growth. What are you doing to grow that on your team? Now, why do I believe learning together is so important? Well, some of it's obvious, but maybe some of it's not so obvious. If you are learning and growing together as a team, your performance is going to increase as a team that shouldn't shock anyone. But if you're on a leadership team or you are the leader, as your knowledge increases, as you are developing your own talent. Think about the impact of how that cascades down the organization. I often quote Kip Tyndall, the founder of the container store. He said one equals three. One superstar equals the productivity of three mediocre performers. Let me say that one more time. One superstar. Equals the productivity of three mediocre performers. Now I believe that, and when I talk to leaders, they believe that. But I also believe that if you are on the leadership team, if you're anyone that leads other people, especially if you lead other leaders, I don't think it's one equals three. I think it's one equals five, one equals ten, one equals twenty. As the leaders learning increases as they're growing, as you're learning and growing, your performance is going to increase as will everyone else in your organization as it cascades down. So that's number one performance is going to increase. Now, why else? Let's go through a few other reasons why it's important to learn together. Learning together gives peers a better ability to help their peers. So the more you learn together, the more you could help each other. Next is as you learn together, as each of you develops, there's going to be more fresh ideas injected into the team. When you're talking about issues, when you're talking about opportunities, when you're talking about strategies, the more you are learning together and learning separately as a team. The more fresh ideas you're going to have injected into that team, the more books you're reading, the more conferences you're going to fresh ideas injected into the team. So, so far we've talked about number one. Performance increases. Number two, the ability for peers to help other peers increases. Number three, more fresh ideas are injected into the team. And number four, and obviously all these start blending together, but you stay ahead of your competition. We need to assume your competition is not staying still. We need to assume your competition is learning. We need to focus on how you could learn faster. How you could learn more than them. As one more way to stay in front of the competition. Fifth is... higher performers, stay longer because giving them opportunities to grow, giving them opportunities to learn, develop shows that you care. And lastly, high performers are going to stay longer because staying longer with you is helping to drive their career growth. I could remember way back. Working for someone in my only job kind of in industry and I wasn't learning anything new. And the feedback I got was keep up the good work. Soon as I got that feedback, keep up the good work. I knew my days were numbered there because I just wanted to learn and grow and keep up the good work meant I wasn't going to do much learning and growing there. So if you want high performers to know you care, if you want high performers to stay longer because they're growing while they're within your company, then you need to figure out how you continue learning as a company and learning as a team. So let's talk about some, the different types of learning and then more specifically, some ideas for how you might learn as a team, some things you can do as soon as you shut this podcast off, I want to give you some ideas to move forward on. But first, let's talk about as a leader, four different types of four different levels of development that you should be thinking about. Number one is leadership team development. If you are the leader of a leadership team or you're on a leadership team, leadership team development means what are we doing as a leadership team to become a better leadership team? What are we learning? You know, are we reading the five dysfunctions of a team together or my book Breakthrough Leadership Team, you're reading a book together as a team, what are you doing to become a better leadership team together? To learn how to trust each other more to learn how to make better, faster decisions. So that's kind of the first level is leadership team development level. The second level is professional self development. So similar, but it's individuals on the leadership team being challenged to learn. How can I get better at strategic thinking? How can I get better at written communication? How can I get better at coaching other people? How can I get better at public speaking? What are you doing for your own professional self development? So first level is leadership team development. Second is professional self development. The third level is personal self development. Personal and professional bleed over. Personal self development is super, super important for being a better leader of others, to being a better part of a leadership team. Maybe it's meditation or yoga or you know, maybe it's better exercise, you know, losing weight, whatever it is, what are you doing for personal self development? You know, I promise you, you're not getting home at night, you know, yelling at the kids, kicking the dog, drinking yourself to sleep, and now you're going to be a great leader the next day. It doesn't work that way. The more you could work on your own personal self development, the more you're going to be better at work. So that's the third level. And the last level is what I would call direct reports development. What are you doing to make sure your direct reports are learning and growing and again, learning and growing and at similar levels, you know, is there, are you developing your team to become a better team? Are you encouraging your direct reports to develop professionally as individuals? Are you encouraging them on their personal self development? Are you willing to make an investment on their personal self development? I can remember about five years ago going into one of my clients and I was doing a half day session with their extended leadership team and before I got in there, they did a couple of hours on yoga and meditation. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with personal self development for your direct reports. So those are four different types or levels to think about. Leadership team development, professional self development, personal self development, and direct reports development. Now, let's just talk about a few examples of some simple ways that you can leverage learning as a team and one way and the simplest way I think and certainly not one that costs a lot of money is reading a book together. When's the last time you read a book together as a team? And if it's recent, that's great. You know, what's the next book you're reading? Reading a book together as a team, I think it's something that ought to happen at least once a quarter. I remember working with a leadership team a number of years ago, and man, from one leader in particular, there was real pushback when we talked about reading a book together. And the pushback was, I don't have time to read a book. You know, I'm working my butt off and when I get home, I want to be with my family. I want to be with my kids. I want to sit back and relax. I don't have time to read. And I got to tell you, I could be sympathetic, but I'm not. If you're taking the responsibility to lead a team or lead an organization, you need to have the responsibility of learning and growing. And if you can't read a book in a quarter, then I'm sorry, you don't belong as a leader. If you're not willing to make that kind of investment. I get it. Well, I really don't get it, but if you're not willing to make that kind of investment, then you know what, then you don't belong in a leadership position in your organization. Now, it's not enough to say, read a book together. How do you do that? I've seen too many organizations that do that, they just do it the wrong way. They read a book together, and then the CEO feels like they've got to come in with a book report on the book, and they create a PowerPoint with all the key learnings, and they go through everything they've learned from the book, and they have some interesting discussions, and then they move on. And frankly, if you look back six, nine, twelve months later, they could say they read a book together, but they didn't leverage it. To do anything and I'm a victim to that. I read so many books, but there's more books than I'm willing to admit that I've read I thought were great and then I move on to the next book without really taking the time to say how am I actually gonna execute on what I've learned. So one of the things I found which is it just a real simple powerful way to read a book together as a team is, you know, give yourself a date when you're going to finish reading that book. I like to incorporate the learnings from books into the quarterly planning and education session, but whenever you do it, don't get together and do a book report, get together and very simply ask your team who has just read this book to put on three to five different post it notes. What are three to five things that they learned in the book? That they read about, that they believe those things are important to inject into the DNA of your company or of your team. Not just, here's an interesting idea. And then when you talk about it and say, well, what do you think we can do about it? I don't think we could use it, but it was a great idea. Those are a waste of time to talk about, but what are three to five ideas that you wanna inject into the DNA of our company, of our team? And if you've got a leadership team of 4, 5, 6 people, and they're each coming up with 3, 4, 5 different ideas and putting them up on a flip chart, you know you're gonna wind up having 10 or 15 unique ideas up there that you can talk through. And if those ideas are interesting, interesting enough and important enough that you get excited about it, then very simply ask the team who wants to own, who wants to be accountable for implementing this in our company, in our team. And by the way, if no one's excited enough to be accountable. It's probably not that important an idea. What do you want to inject into the DNA of the company? And then most importantly, who's the one person accountable for each of those ideas. It's going to take that idea and actually do, you know, drive ownership of executing it. And that's a really powerful, simple way to read a book together. Second thing is something that when I owned a staffing firm a number of years ago and couldn't afford to bring anyone in for training, I came up with this idea and I called it rotational training. And I've had a number of clients do it up until now. Rotational training very simply is saying It doesn't have to be any book or we don't even have to go to a conference or hire anyone to come in and do training. If you've got a team of five or six people, four or five, six people. However many you've got, rotational training says each month you can do it monthly. You can do it quarterly, but let's say it's monthly each month. It's someone else's turn on the team to train the team in something they think would be useful for the team. And I've had people read a great book and then come on in and teach the team what they've learned from that book and have a discussion about what they could implement. I've had people find a really powerful Ted talk and come in and just show the team that Ted talk. I've had someone on the team who happens to be really, really good at something. Someone who is just really good at getting up there and speaking publicly, come in and teach what they know to the rest of the team. Or maybe they become really good at coaching their employees. And again, they're going to come in and teach the rest of the team what they know. So what it does is it gives every month, someone on the team accountability for learning or knowing something well enough that they can teach it to everybody else. And by the way, the best way of learning is to prepare to teach other people and then teach other people. And if you do that, it's just a really simple, really inexpensive way of getting some great training each and every month. So we've talked about reading a book together. We talked about rotational training. A third one which is really, really simple is what I call strengths coaching on your team. There is, you know, there's the book Strength Finder 2. 0 where you could buy that book and it comes with an assessment of you know, what your top five strengths are. There is something that's free. You don't need a book to buy, but there is a guy named Martin Seligman, who is the father of strengths based leadership. And he's got a website called authentichappiness.org. And on there, there's something called the VIA strengths survey. Again, it's a way to take a simple assessment and it comes up with your top five strengths. Now, why is it important to come up with your top five strengths? Well, in this strengths coaching exercise, which again, you could do with your team is what I found is it could be really powerful to share those talents, share those strengths with the rest of your team. That in and of itself is really important. Your team may already feel like they know what your strengths are, but maybe they don't, maybe you don't know what your strengths are. Very often our talents, our strengths are things that come easy to us. So we may not even look at them as strengths. Until someone holds up the mirror to us and says, no, that's not easy for the rest of us. It's just easy for you. So number one, we identify our own strengths. We share those strengths, but the power of the exercise is now what each person on the leadership team gets to do is talk about what they believe they can do to better leverage their strengths. Maybe right now they're only spending 20 percent of their time on their key strengths and they want to talk about how they could up that to maybe spend 40,50,60,70 percent of their time leveraging their strengths. And when you do that, get coaching from the rest of the team. The rest of your team may see clearer than you do how you could best leverage those strengths. And imagine getting that strengths coaching around the table where everyone on the team is sharing their strengths and getting coaching on those strengths. So we talked about reading a book together, rotational training, strengths coaching, going to a conference together. Very often when people go to a conference, they just go. And they say, well, what sessions are you going to? I'm going to these, what are you going to? How about planning before? And say, hey, there are five different streams. Three of us are going to the conference. Let's plan before what streams we're going to focus on. Who's going to go to what session? Let's not all go to the same session and learn the same thing. Let's make sure we're in different sessions and then coming back and bringing those learnings back together. How are we going to bring them back to each other? How are we going to bring them back to the organization? So those are a few ideas. Last thing I'll say is you should have learning plans for yourself and learning plans for the organization. Month by month, what's your plan to make sure you're at those different levels? What's your plan to make sure you're doing leadership team development? What kind of development are you doing? What plans does everybody have to do their own professional self development? And that should start with you as the leader. What kind of personal self development are you doing month in and month out? And is the rest of that leadership team committing to do, and then everybody on the leadership team should have a plan for their direct reports development. So with that being said, what do you need to do next to creating a learning plan for yourself? What do you need to do next to creating a learning plan for your team? And what's your next leadership team learning? Are you reading a book together? If so, what's the book? Do you want to start a rotational training program? Maybe it's about strengths coaching, or maybe you got some conference coming up. What are you doing next to learn better as a team? You learn better as a team. You're going to build a better team. And again, if you want, I always say this at the end of the episodes. If you want a great company, you need to build a great leadership team. Learning as a team is going to help you get there. Thanks. Go to it.