You know that change is constant, but are you truly preparing your team to thrive in it? One important piece of building a culture of change agents is adopting, promoting, and supporting a learning mindset. This is more than offering occasional training. It’s about helping your people go deep, broad, and far, in their learning and development.
Do you have a learning mindset in your team?
Most leaders say, “Yes, of course!”
They say:
We’re open to change.
We understand we can’t stay still.
We encourage everybody to adapt to change,
We’re always open to new ideas from our team.
Great! That’s the right mindset. But how are you putting that into practice?
A key part of building a future-ready culture is nurturing a learning mindset. We need to be constantly learning, relearning, and even unlearning things that used to be true but aren’t true anymore.
Whenever I talk to leaders about building a culture of change agents, this is an important feature. Sadly, it’s often forgotten.
I spoke about this last week in Brisbane at a large conference of schools teaching VET (vocational and educational training): many of the essential skills we will need in the future.
Two weeks before that, I spoke to employees of a large company that was running their annual “Careers Week”, helping employees map out their career plan and use the company’s resources to roll out that plan.
And in a few weeks from now, I’m speaking at the Australian Human Resource Institute (AHRI) conference, discussing the future of work and leading through change and disruption for HR professionals and other leaders.
All of this is about change, and a key part of that is having a learning mindset – for you as a leader and for your organisation to actively and proactively help people learn.
Offer three kinds of learning.
Broadly, think about learning at three levels: deep, wide, and far:
- Deep learning is understanding more about your area of expertise – staying up to date with ongoing professional development.
- Then go wide, developing broad skills we all need that are not tied to a particular role, job, or area of expertise. This includes innovation, problem solving, digital literacy, AI literacy, emotional intelligence, resilience, well-being, and critical thinking. These wide, transferable, skills apply in any role and job, and will be vital as jobs change in the future.
- Finally, develop skills that help people look far. These are the skills of a futurist: anticipating what’s coming in the future, dealing with uncertainty and amiguity, and understanding the impact of current and future trends.
As a leader, provide opportunities for your team members to develop in all three areas. And don’t forget your own learning, too!
That might sound like a lot of time-consuming and expensive work, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The traditional training course still has value, of course, but you also have many other options now for learning and development. In fact, there are many ways to incorporate learning in on-the-job activities.
For some examples, download my worksheet with a list of these activities, and choose which might be suitable for yourself and your team.
