Today, your business needs to be able to adapt and change quickly.
Which means you need people in your business that can adapt and change quickly.
In fact, your people’s ability to adapt and change quickly could be your biggest competitive advantage.
So, you might want to put acquiring new knowledge on everyone’s daily to-do list.
Yes, daily.
Because that’s the rate of change nowadays.
And because you want to make learning a habit.
And learner led.
Which probably doesn’t mean forcing yet another yawn inducing training session on people.
Instead of making everyone a student, maybe you should look at making everyone a teacher.
Engage with your employees regularly to explain how and why the business needs to adapt and change.
(Research suggests they’ll like that.)
And then asking them individually what knowledge gaps need to be filled.
(Research suggests they’ll like that too.)
Then make acquiring that knowledge a project to be completed by a specific date …
When they will come back and teach what they have learned to everyone else.
‘Preparing to teach’ has been shown to be a very effective way to acquire knowledge and learn.
Teaching your peers and fielding their ensuing questions gives you feedback on how much of the knowledge gap you have actually closed.
Plus: the act of teaching will help your people self-develop in many other ways too.
So, if you want to make your people part of your competitive advantage and creating a learning organization makes sense to you, then making it learner led might be the best way to do it because as Charlie Munger says …
“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
