How Pollinate can help you cultivate rich learning soil in your organization.
At 26 years old, I had a critical inflection point in my life and career. I was being offered a huge promotion, and I called my uncle for advice. My uncle was one of the most successful people I knew – he’d been the head of an investment bank, a founding board member of one of the fastest growing tech companies in Canada and a trustee for a head of state. I was expecting him to convince me to go get an MBA at Wharton – also an option on the table – and not to take the diversion of this promotion. I was astonished at his advice:
“Take the job tomorrow! Ask for 2 mentors – that will be worth a dozen MBA’s. The most meaningful things you will learn in life and your career you will learn in the fire of doing if you have the right mentors around you to help you learn fast enough – and the ride is a lot more fun”
Twenty years later, I am struck by 2 profound truths. First, how demonstrably true the principle of “get mentorship” has been in my life and the life of virtually every successful person I have encountered. Second, how underutilized this truth is in most organizations’ in their people strategies.
Here are 5 reasons why Boards and C-Suites need to pay more attention to collaborative learning and mentorship as a critical lever of success in their organizations:
- Collaborative learning (mentoring, coaching & intentional peer learning) will largely determine how successful all of your other performance initiatives will be. 100 years of social science (behavioural economics, industrial psychology etc.) have all validated Bandura’s Social Learning Theory: individuals learn and change behaviours, attitudes and emotional reactions through interactions with others.
- Wisdom and good judgement will remain the best source of competitive advantage. The only proven way to scale these competencies is through mentoring and mature group learning. We all know smart, well trained people who show terrible judgement; I am yet to meet anyone who values the input of ongoing mentoring in their life who falls victim to repeated poor judgement.
- Connected employees who frequently have socially supportive on-the-job encounters have lower anxiety and better mental health outcomes. This means greater emotional resilience and lower levels of burnout. Building a culture where constructive conversations that help people learn and move forward is the norm is one of the most impactful things you can do for non-clinical anxiety and mental health issues.
- Trust, open communication, and greater feeling of belonging amongst team members creates a sought after environment. The performance, innovation and reduced turnover that comes in that environment make it appealing. A culture that prioritizes mentoring & collaborative learning in all forms (ERG’s, Cross-functional teams, task forces) retains the good people that foster this type of environment.
- Organizations with deep mentoring and collaborative cultures are more agile, resilient and adaptive. The next 10 years will be the most disrupted in all of human history. Generally humans are terrible at predicting how things will change but we can bet for certain that change will happen and companies that can’t adapt are unlikely to succeed. Deepening purposeful collaborative learning and mentoring is probably the single best investment you can make in making your organization anti-fragile.
So why isn’t mentoring and collaborative learning a more predictable solution to these problems in most organizations?
In my experience, it is the belief by senior leaders that people should self-organize for this kind of benefit; they often say “I did”. This paradigm has a highly predictable result, only 10% of people will. The reality is that if the majority of people in an organization could have self-organized collaborative forms of learning, they would have done so already. In our increasingly complex work settings, the vast majority of people don’t find this easy – unless they join a culture where it is well established as a norm.
This will likely only get worse. My 20 years working with young leaders and all of the current research shows that the generations entering the workforce will be less skilled at finding and cultivating these relationships for many reasons without the support of their organization through active endorsement, technology that effectively facilitates connection and the culture that comes from this being visibly modelled and supported from the top. Most Millennials and Gen Z have had much more structured programming for all their development and are accustomed to tech enabled solutions to enable human connection – just look at the explosion in every form of relationship app.
In my opinion this opportunity is one of the most overlooked by organizations today. The amount of time, money and energy the average organization spends on disparate programs without this foundation is like trying to run a farm without any soil cultivation. You can have a lot of seemingly intelligent activities but at harvest season you will likely find yourself asking why very little is growing.
Chris Evans is CRO of Pollinate Networks. Chris has over 20 years of executive experience and enterprise consulting in a broad range of contexts including learning and development as well as business and corporate development.
Interested in learning how Pollinate can help you cultivate rich learning soil in your organization? Please reach out chris.evans@pollinate.net.
