Engaging Your Inner Chief Curiosity Officer Leads to An Engrained Learning Culture
“Business leaders often ask me how they can create a “learning culture”. My answer is always the same. Start with your own curiosity.”
This past week I attended a fireside chat hosted by The People People Group - aka TPPG - (I’ll be writing about the importance of a professional community in a future post). The topic of this chat was “Leadership as a Learning Act: Why Every Manager Must Become a Chief Curiosity Officer”. The conversation, which was between Mentimeter’s Maggie Bryce and FIS’s Shawna Stewart, got me thinking about the importance of being curious in business.
When I started my career working PR for musicians, there was very much a pattern in the way we did things. We were briefed by the artist on their story and their project (be it an album release, a live show or tour or award they won). We would then draft a media release, send it out to the media (by fax in those days, if you can imagine). Then it was follow up calls to all the folks we thought would be most interested in sharing that artist’s story. Rinse and repeat. As much as I loved that work (and that the process we followed worked), it certainly didn’t do much to build my curiosity muscle.
Luckily for me, another part of that job was to help my employer run her small business. Since this was my first “career” job, that was a new world to me. I asked every question. Why did we work with the clients we did (and why did we pass over some work)? Why was our team the size it was at any given time (as a small business, that team size really changed depending on our client load)? I learned about how precarious the finances of a small business can be, particularly when working with cash-strapped musicians. It was all fascinating stuff.
When I moved on from my music/PR career into a focused People Operations role in the technology space, I was lucky to join a company with leaders that appreciated the need for curiosity as much I did. They were open to being asked hard questions and committed themselves to providing honest answers as quickly as possible. They wanted to give their team the autonomy to think for themselves and not limit them to specific solutions for our clients. It fostered a real sense of constant discovery, which we really nurtured into a true learning culture. The team was learning. Always. And it was contagious. When everyone around you is learning, you can’t help but want to learn more yourself. I felt this impact as an employee as much as an HR Leader.
Business leaders often ask me how they can create a “learning culture”. My answer is always the same. Start with your own curiosity. If a leader starts asking questions, telling their team they just want to understand their processes, learn about their work and get to know them better, the team will eventually, and naturally, follow suit. When your team starts asking questions, they are opening themselves up to learning something new.
It doesn’t hurt to reinforce the concept of learning either. When I was I TWG, we would end our weeks with “Demos.” It was an engrained part of our culture (one that I wish I could take credit for, but was a practice that predated my start with them) that at 4 pm on a Friday afternoon, one of our leaders would round the desks with a little cart of beer to encourage folks to wrap up their week and head to our event space.
There, we would hold 5-minute presentations where anyone from the team would go and present something on any topic. 90% of the time it involved something they were learning (or teaching others) about, either a personal project or something they had learned through the course of their client work. It gave us a forum to not only celebrate discoveries in everyday work, but to also subtly teach the team that their learning was important, but also that sharing their learnings with others was important too.
Leaders can take that idea further. One thing I always advocated for at TWG (although never formally found an application for) was adding learning to performance reviews. If you give hard value to learning that applies to how an employee’s performance is measured at the end of the year, you make it crystal clear that your company values the time they spend learning. If you add that to the equation of what determines compensation increases, you are communicating loud and clear that learning is one of your priorities.
Another element of curiosity that most don’t connect is the feedback loop. One of the subjects that came up in the questions at the TPPG event this week was the value of anonymous feedback. Some love it, but most hate the idea whenever I broach it. The truth is the anonymous feedback is how leaders learn the most from their team. That is where they will be the most honest. Shawna Stewart said it best. “They either share it with you anonymously, or they start a WhatsApp group about you.” So true.
That happened at one of the companies I worked at. We had a small contingent of employees start a not-so-nice Slack group to complain about the company and its leaders. Sure, griping is human nature and you have to expect some of it to happen through the ups and downs of your business. But it can go from harmless to toxic… so quickly. It can be a signal that you don’t have enough avenues for anonymous feedback and/or you aren’t reacting to that feedback quickly enough. At the time, we assumed it was both and found ways to channel those complaints into space where we could hear the feedback and improve. It made us a better team. So love it or hate, be open to receiving anonymous feedback. There is no purer form of learning about ways to better your business.
That seed of curiosity has continued throughout my career and is now at the core of what I’m doing as I consult with businesses. Without it, how would I dig into how a business runs, what a company needs as far as staffing and what it can do to be more efficient. The employees of the companies I work with are great sources for this information, just as much as the business leaders are.
The challenge in creating a “learning culture” is so often not about businesses not knowing what to do. It is about leaders that aren’t willing to challenge their own thinking. When you are set in your ways, it sends a message to your employee that it is almost better not to question how things get done. Your employees with a natural drive for personal growth will leave (and those are often your most valued employees). Those that don’t leave get complacent. They just rinse and repeat, like I did early in my career. And unlike me, they may not have the other avenue in their day-to-day work to stretch and work that curiosity muscle. That muscle will atrophy, which will make it harder to introduce a curiosity mindset and build a learning culture.
It was nice to hear some things I’ve thought about for a long time confirmed by the speakers and attendees at this past week’s Fireside Chat.
If you are working in the People and Culture space and want to join a helpful community, I can’t recommend TPPG enough. It is a great community filled with great people that help each other learn every day. Check them out.