#68: Why Being a Great Learner Is Key to Your Success

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Amy Hayes, Vice President of Global Learning and Development at Facebook. Amy has been a learning and development consultant and coach for over 20 years. And at Facebook, she and her team are responsible for helping people learn how to lead by building personalized learning programs and tools. She also works to ensure the company has the leadership capabilities needed today and in the future. Amy is passionate about being a resource for those who are truly making a difference in the world. So welcome to the show, Amy.

Thank you, Erika. Great to be here. So good to see you.

Yes, it's so good to see you. I'm so glad to have you here. And I feel like, you know, now more than ever in this kind of almost post-pandemic world, people are looking for their jobs to provide more than a paycheck, right? And one of the things they want is support to grow in ways that are meaningful to them, right? And I thought that your insights about that and about the role that learning can play in organizations would be really valuable for our listeners. So you ready? You ready to tell them, help them? I am.

Let's jump in. That's great.

So first thing I wanted to ask is, how can organizations better support their employees' learning and Why is that important? Why does that matter?

Yeah, I mean, such a great question, especially for a learning geek like me. I might, I might start with why does it matter first? Because I really see learning as a competitive advantage. And if you think about Meta, we're in a highly competitive field where innovation and speed are critical. And at the end of the day, what it comes down to is our ability to learn faster than our competitors and iterate faster than the industry, really. And I think that builds confidence, drives innovation. You gotta be able to fail fast to learn fast. And what's interesting about this is that the— this, you know, competitive advantage, if you will, goes in cycles. So if you and I were talking 6 months ago, we might have been talking about the Great Resignation, and we might have been talking about what's the competitive advantage of learning, and oh, it's there to attract and retain talent and all those things. Now, even 6 months later, we're talking about slowing economies, slowing growth in companies, and looking at what, you know, we're talking more about what are the skills that are critical for the company to be competitive, you know, how do we build the culture that will allow a company to learn fast and fail fast in this environment when you have less, you know, when resources are more scarce. So I find that interesting that it's a competitive advantage, but it, that morphs and that changes as the The conditions change.

Yeah, that's a great insight. A mentor of mine many years ago talked about certain skills are like Swiss Army knives. They're like core multi-use skills. And I really feel like that about learning. I mean, as you know, I wrote a whole book about learning. And I love what you said about you can— if, if one, if a person, if we can help people to be good learners, they can turn it in the direction it needs to turn. They can use it for whatever purpose is most appropriate at the moment. That's a, that's a great insight. Absolutely.

And the organization too. So that's at the individual level, but the organization can learn and learn fast as an organization or a team or whatever, a makeup of group of people. Then you have that agility and ability to adjust to whatever's coming at you, whether it be a pandemic or recession or something hopefully fun that will come next.

Not world-changing in a negative way. Well, so what, how, how can organizations be better support places for learning? How can organizations better support their employees' learning?

Yeah, I mean, I think you really have to, you have to legitimize it. You have to send the message that it's okay to learn. It's not something to do on the side, but it's a critical priority for folks. And to do that, you have to make sure learning is consistently acknowledged, that managers are encouraging people to learn and talking about it in their teams, that it's localized, and that people feel free to share what they're learning and feel free to share how they're failing or what mistakes they made.

Yes.

Move on.

Yeah, yeah. People talk a lot about the importance of risk-taking if you're trying to create an innovative, fast-changing organization. And you're talking about learning as risk-taking, right?

Yes, exactly.

I like that. Well, so then let's talk about the dark side. You know, what are the biggest impediments you see to real organizational learning?

Yeah, well, we've done a lot of— we've done some research on this at Meta. And what we hear time and time again through that research is that time prioritization, and discoverability are the biggest barriers to learning.

Time, prioritization, and discoverability. That's great. Okay. I'd love to hear more about all 3 of those.

Well, and it's interesting if you look deeper at it because you start to ask yourself, what makes something worth time? Yeah. You know, what makes something a priority? Is, you know, learning reinforced every day in that team or that organization? The other, the other cool thing that, or interesting finding that we found through this research was that people felt like Meta, the company, valued learning, but they didn't get that consistent experience from their manager. So even when you're getting it right at company level, like we have Mark Zuckerberg, our CEO, talking about what he's learning all the time, we have values related to this that we all, you know, signed up to and feel proud about. And yet, that experience with the manager, if it's not really being lived every day, if the manager is not reinforcing that or it's not reinforced in the team, you lose it. So it can't just be at the organizational level. It's got to get— That's great.

That's great. And I think we'll talk about that in a minute, kind of what more specifically what individual managers can do, what our listeners can do. But I love— I want to go back to— I love as you were talking about time and prioritization, and you may not agree with this, but I think you do. To me, and you started to say this about time, time and prioritization problems are really lack of value problems, right? 'Cause we prioritize and give time to the things that we value, right?

Yeah.

So if I understand you correctly, you're saying, and discoverability is a whole different thing, and I really get that, you know, it's like, sure, I'd love to learn about it. What do I, you know? But if people don't value it, then they're not going to do it, right?

Totally. Yeah.

So how do you do— what do you— what gets in the way of that? What gets in the way of people valuing learning in an organization, do you think?

Well, I think another big impediment is that people think about learning as training.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So if you start there, then you immediately— if that's your narrow view of learning, now, most of us know that there's a much broader view of learning that's helpful. The 70-10-20 model that we all know.

Yeah.

It's 70% through your, you know, of your learning in your life is going to happen through experiences, 20% through others, and 10% informal learning. So if you think about that, like, here we are defining the whole learning thing through that 10% and really losing the 90, the benefit of the 90%, or losing the chance to maximize what's going on in that 90%. So I think that narrow view doesn't help because it feels, first of all, like it takes— it's something extra you have to do. You have to go to a program, whatever it is, and that takes time. And you may or may not value that for a variety of reasons, like your manager doesn't think it's important. It's not in your performance.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and then so if you only think about it that way, that compounds this problem.

That is— that's so clearly stated. And if the organization— this sounds weird, but if the organization thinks about it that way, like if the organization proposes that this training thing that we're going to send you to, which is only actually 10%— is it? That's it. That's what learning is. The organization can reinforce that misunderstanding, right? Totally.

Absolutely. And you know who else can reinforce it? Learning professionals.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, we're guilty too because we get excited. I'm not saying there's not a time and a place for formal learning. There is, and it can be extremely powerful and useful, but that's not the whole story here. And if we as learning professionals continue to perpetuate the import, you know, and only talk about programs and consumption, only do create interventions related to that, then we're narrowing it Ourselves.

Oh, that's— I think that's exactly right. I'm thinking of all the people in my head that I know who either do or don't do that. And the ones, the learning professionals I know who really have a clear sense that this is a catalyst, this is to give you some foundational understanding or skills that you then— we're going to help you make sure that you actually sustain and use in your life and apply to your work. And that's very different than come to this day-long thing and learn, learn, you know.

Totally. And if you even think about, we've all, you know, the pandemic has been a shock to everyone, right? We've all, all our organizations, our lives, ourselves have gone through a lot. And I would argue, it's been the most incredible landscape for learning and the most incredible environment for learning because we've been tested because we've been challenged. And I can even think about the restaurants in my neighborhood. I live in San Francisco. And they, you know, early in the pandemic, like many other cities, they started building these outside seating areas.

Right.

For not only meals to be picked up, but cocktails to be picked up, which was super fantastic, which I hadn't seen before. And so if you think about that, they didn't go to a class in that moment and go, oh, I wonder what we should do. And, you know, oh, we're learning right now. No, they saw an opportunity to innovate, they jumped on it. And those that actually did that and learned quickly that that was a— that was the way to keep customers and sustain during the pandemic did, and those that didn't, yes, probably didn't fare as well. Yeah.

Wow. That's really true. I mean, I see that with, with us, with Proteus, you know, in the very beginning of the pandemic, when our business just kind of paralyzed because of all our clients were like, oh, we got together, Jeff, who you know really well, my partner Jeff and Laird and I got together and said, okay, how can we use this time? And we said, we have to learn how to do everything we do virtually. And, and now we have— we now we have that. Not only did it help us respond to the pandemic, but we've developed a whole new capacity, a whole new capability because we had to, you know. So I think I'm sure that's true for— I suspect that the businesses that have made it through the pandemic— this is kind of a gross generalization, but I think it's true— are the ones that learned best during the pandemic, right? Which is kind of what you're saying. Yeah, that's great. Well, so we— I always tell our listeners that we're going to get down to the to them and to the practical. So what are some practical steps that our listeners can take kind of right now to create a good or a better learning environment for their teams?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's really 3 big things. There's making learning a goal. So both in the big and small moments, be clear that learning is important. Put it in performance goals. Legitimize it. I think you can do that as a manager of a team, as a team member. You can start talking about that for yourself. You can start putting it in your goals.

Yes.

But I think really, really signal that. And then I think you got to make it easy. You got to make sure your team members know, to this discoverability point, you can't solve discoverability in one place. But you can certainly let your team members know what you think is important for people to either be learning about and how they can actually access that learning, whether through others, On the job or through formal learning. And, you know, I would say last, you know, really use the, use the real work, build rituals and practices in your team. It's all right there. I often say it doesn't take more time, it takes more thought.

Yes, yes.

To do these things like regularly debrief projects, whether they go good or bad, to normalize failures and mistakes, thoughtful failures and mistakes. And at Meta, we often talk about we don't want you to make the same mistake, but we want you to make a new Yeah, yeah. Well, let's make sure you learn from mine so you can go out and make a, make a new one. You know, regularly self-reflect. Everyone can do this right, right here, right now. You could do this. And we know from research that if you even self-reflect 15 minutes a day, you're 23% more productive. That's, that's a huge thing.

Wow.

So we've actually created journals for people at Meta to help them with that, but it doesn't have to be a fancy journal. My bonus daughter texts herself with her reflections.

She— yeah, yeah, yeah.

And video it. I don't know, think about it. It doesn't matter. But that, that practice of self-reflection is critically important and available to all of us for free.

I think I was just gonna say that I love that. I love all 3 of those. They're such great practical suggestions. And the 3rd one, especially because it's a combination of Practice what you preach. You as a manager have to model it. And then you have to, from your own understanding, your own modeling it, you have to create, as you say, cadences and habits for the team so that they can begin to do it just on a daily basis. Oh, that's great. I love that. Oh my gosh. Now I have 150 other questions I want to ask you, but this— I always promised this is going to be short and sweet. This is such good food for thought. And I think it'll get our listeners thinking about what else they could do. And listeners, to connect with Amy, you can find her on LinkedIn. It's very easy. Amy Hayes, LinkedIn. And if you'd like to find out how Proteus supports leaders to be learners, you're welcome to go to proteusleader.com, click on topics and choose Be Bad First. So thank you, Amy. I love that you were able to do this with me.

Oh, thank you so much. What a treat.

Yeah, really great. Yes, you too. So thank you for listening, everyone. And until next time, here's to creating the life You truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at ProteusLeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.