CoachingOurselves emphasizes the aspect of learning in a team in order to strengthen the team throughout the rest of the workweek. The following from the paper titled -Experiential Learning in Teams - provides a nice quote to share with new groups emphasizing the importance of fostering a spirit of learning in your organization.
“Teamwork is prevalent in organizations, yet it has pitfalls such as social loafing, group think, over dependence on a dominant leader, over-commitment to goals, and diffusion of responsibility. Such negative factors can be overcome and team effectiveness improved when teams intentionally focus on learning.”*
I remember when we first started CoachingOurselves we used to joke that for one hour a week the team would focus on learning something together as opposed to the other 39 hours when our goal was to “do” things.
During our scheduled learning period we would inevitably come up with new ways to approach problems or ideas on how to better organize ourselves. But we would hold back from making lists of action items and remain focused on learning for the whole hour. The moment the learning hour was up people would rush to scribble down the action items that resulted from the sharing and discussion.
Ensuring that we remained focused on reflection and learning during the whole hour to the exclusion of all else proved very valuable. The moment one starts thinking through what they will do or how they will do it the learning momentum can be killed. What the sessions did for our teams was to bring this spirit of learning and critical reflection into the rest of our week making us more effective managers.
*As cited in David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1984
