Practical Professional Learning in a Remote Work Environment
How did you get really great at what you do?
There are many paths to success, but they all have one thing in common.
Practice.
If you’re a Gen X or Elder Millennial nonprofit leader, chances are you started out sitting in a cube outside your boss's office:
answering phones and responding to mail, email, and fax (!) messages
setting up the room and taking notes in key meetings
getting your work sent back to you with a ton of tracked changes (and hopefully some helpful comments)
listening to, observing, and emulating the more senior people in your department
When everyone was in the office, it was easy for our supervisors - or the department leader - to:
pull us into impromptu team meetings to discuss a current project,
ask us to tag along for external meetings as a learning opportunity,
give a brief explanation about why they handled a situation a certain way, or simply
work the way they did, door open, out loud, and enable us to learn by observing.
All of this gave us regular opportunities to learn, practice, and grow.
Now that you’re a department head leading a remote team, how are you intentionally creating opportunities for your team to learn, practice, and grow?
You don't have the same environmental advantages your mentors did.
You can't rely on this kind of learning to happen organically.
As a department head, it's up to you to make it happen.
Here are 4 options to try this week:
Dedicate 15 minutes for a learning moment at your next team meeting. Walk through a specific situation and how you dealt with it. Encourage questions and answer them. Have others on the team share what's worked for them.
Schedule a debrief on a recent project or event. What went well? What didn't? What is still unclear? Discuss similarities and differences with other projects, and identify future areas for learning.
Provide clear, direct feedback on a work product. Send back the tracked changes (rather than just defaulting to re-writing it yourself) and give the team member up to 3 things to focus on improving next time.
Invite a team member to sit in on a meeting. It can be external or internal, but it should give them the opportunity to observe how you handle the situations that arise. Be sure to debrief afterward.
I'd love to hear - how else are you creating intentional learning opportunities for your team? Join the conversation over on LinkedIn.