In this discussion, the speakers share practical steps for B2B technology firms to begin building a sustainable culture of learning. They stress that senior leadership must financially back people development, arguing that top‑down commitment is essential for any grassroots effort to succeed. Next, they advise companies to meet employees where they are, avoiding arbitrary performance bars and instead assessing individual readiness to tailor support, which builds trust and demonstrates genuine investment in staff. They then recommend instituting a regular, dedicated learning slot—such as a 30‑minute Friday session—where teams can share problems, run workshops, or receive cross‑functional knowledge transfers, turning learning into a habitual practice. Finally, they highlight the need to measure learning outcomes, linking skill development to business metrics so the impact can be demonstrated to executives. The overall message is a concise, actionable roadmap: secure executive sponsorship, personalize development, embed consistent learning time, and track results.
Chapters
A big part of what we do is working with a couple hundred B2B tech companies that are trying to build and foster and maintain this culture of learning. So from your perspective, working with as many companies as you do day in and day out, if a company is trying to figure out just how to get started, walking away like, hey, here's one or two things that I need to start doing right away to start fostering this culture of learning versus culture of coaching. How can they get started?
That's great. You know, I think one of the biggest pieces is no matter where you plant the seeds and where the effort comes from, from like a grassroots perspective, I think there's always going to be a limitation if it doesn't come from the top down. So there has to be an investment from the overall revenue organization that they care about the development of their people. So I think that that's like first and foremost. And if you're struggling to be able to like make this argument, some of the data we've shared today, but there's tons of data out there about how having a culture of learning actually leads to overall business success. Right. So lots to dig in there. If you're trying to make a case from a data perspective to an executive team or whoever it might be to say, like, hey, we really need to be more focused on this, but just making sure that you're meeting people where they're at, not holding arbitrary bars, kind of assessing your team, seeing where is everybody to be able to come in where there's an opportunity for. For it to feel like they get me, they see me and they're trying to help me get to the next place, not just for outcomes of the business, but because they're invested in me as an employee. And I think you'll really see that in a lot of places. With the culture of learning, one of the things to do that can be a real easy hack for this is just creating a consistent, dedicated time for learning. So I've seen this with a lot of orgs I've worked with in the past where it's like, hey, every Friday we have 30 minutes and it's booked. And sometimes we have it and sometimes we don't. Sometimes it's like an IC brings a problem and we all talk about it together and we work through it and it's like workshop style. Other times it may be somebody from this other business unit, like maybe somebody from implementation comes over and walks us through detailed how they go through that thing. And now I'm more aware to be able to take that information into a pre sale conversation. Right. So just having that dedicated time for learning can be a really easy way to start building this into the muscle that your company flexes. And then the last piece I would say is you have to measure it just like anything else in a business. Measuring progress with learning is going to make it something that you keep top of mind, something that you can then correlate or look at causation from a data perspective to see, like, hey, we didn't arbitrarily just have 3% increase in revenue. Like, look at all this stuff that we did that kind of led into that. So I think it's really important to be measuring what you're doing to make sure that you can back up why that culture of learning is so important.
