Team Building through Cohort Learning

Raoul Flaminzeanu at UXDX Community: Agile Design, Team Building & Metaphor-Driven UX. Video: https://youtu.be/5dhzs1kZhus

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What does top talent really mean

[00:00:00] Raoul: Hi everyone, my name is Raoul. My background is that of a UX designer, but about seven years ago I moved onto the manager track, and I'm a UX manager right now at AlayaCare. I worked at Shopify before as a UX manager, and I was director of design at Coio [?], and so on. I still remember the day when the chief digital officer at Intact welcomed me to her office and told me, "You're a manager now. Go and hire a team," an interdisciplinary team of 26 people. I was really excited. She also told me, "Raoul, go and hire only top talent." My first reaction was, "Yes ma'am, thank you so much for your trust. I'm only going to hire top talent."

[00:00:53] But as I left the meeting and started writing the CVs, I started wondering what the culture of the team I want to build is. I started wondering what top talent really means, especially for me. I realized that the definition I had was a bit limited. My definition was someone that is highly skilled, specialized, very efficient and very effective at what they do. But as I was thinking about the team culture, I also realized that is not enough to describe what top talent is for me.

[00:01:29] I also wanted people that can work with people. When you work on innovation, when you want to harvest a lot of ideas, when you want your solutions to be full of empathy and thinking of the user, you want people that can collaborate together, people that can have conflicts at work and still have a positive work relationship, who can live within the tension of the solutions and the problems. I also wanted people that were, yes, highly skilled, but humble, so they can mentor and coach. And I also wanted people that are self-motivated because they are passionate about what they do. Ultimately, I wanted people that can adapt really fast, because this is what we need in tech right now: to be able to adapt and learn very fast. So I augmented my definition of top talent.

[00:02:22] And then I started thinking, well, okay, now that I have this fancy definition, where do I find this top talent? Is there a factory of top talent hidden somewhere at Google or Facebook? Or maybe top talent, because it is very adaptable and can work with multiple stakeholders, is in a small agency somewhere. But as I started interviewing different people in different markets, from different large companies or agencies, I realized that top talent doesn't mean the same for everyone. Top talent, high performance, is a temporary perceived state through a company lens. Someone who is a really good designer at Shopify might actually not be seen as a good designer in the banking industry or the insurance industry. It really depends on the company.

[00:03:17] But from time to time I would interview one person and think, "Oh, they would be successful in almost any position I would hire them for," because they will be able to learn very fast, they will be able to adapt, they will be able to change the way they think and approach things depending on the mental models you find in different companies. So I started realizing that my calling as a manager, my mission as a manager, was to create environments where whoever I hire as top talent, I develop them further, so they will continue being top talent no matter what company they go to.

Why organizations make learning hard

[00:04:02] So I started thinking more and more: if I want to create that environment, what do I need to do? I need to create an environment where people can learn very easily, a learning organization. Now you're going to say, "Learning organization is not a new word, Raoul," and I agree. Peter Senge has talked since the 80s and 90s about how important it is to have a learning organization. You that are watching this talk might actually use your company time for learning, or you might get different benefits, like a budget for learning from your company, or you might even get your performance review connected to your learning goals. These are all benefits that companies provide.

[00:04:56] So think of your company and the benefits it provides you. I want to ask you a question: how would you rate your organization as a place of learning? Would you say it's a one, terrible, or a five, really great, the best, or anything in between? I'll give you a bit of time to vote. You can either type slido.com slash and then the number, or you can use the QR code on your phone if you don't want to switch browsers or tabs to vote.

[00:05:35] I've done this poll at different conferences, and I was really surprised to see that the average always ended up between three and four. I'm just going to wait a little bit more to see some other participants as they are joining in on Slido. That's great. I'm happy to see that the vast majority so far, and I only have three voters, said it's a five. Happy to hear that. I have a four, and I'm going to wait another 20 seconds. Oh, perfect, maybe my talk is not even needed; your organization is perfect. So far we have 4.28. I still want to give you a couple of insights to maybe even make it a six-star organization.

[00:06:34] I gave a lot of thought to what creates a learning environment, to the extent that I ended up doing a master's in organizational psychology and group dynamics. One thing is that an organization is a place of working; a university is a place of learning. For example, if you want to go to university, you pick something that you're interested in, for example marine biology, because you liked Ariel as a kid and you're really curious about life under the sea. You go to the university, and the first thing you actually receive is the learning plan. You receive all the reading materials, you receive your classes, your instructors, and you even have some students alongside you doing the plan at the same time.

[00:07:31] Once you're done with university, you have your diploma and you move into an organization. And let's say you even know what you want to learn next: nobody's there to actually give you a learning plan. So your entry point into a learning activity is much higher than it normally would be in a learning institution. That's the first thing that holds us back a little bit in organizations from starting to learn.

[00:07:56] The second is that there's always a conflict between teamwork and "me work." If you're in a university, a place of learning, ultimately you're there for yourself. You're there to learn something, to get that diploma, so you're really accountable for your learning experience. When you're in an organization, the thing that is most valued is actually teamwork. Everything you do is interdisciplinary; you work with other experts. We saw in the talk before me how a company is doing joint sprints between developers and designers, and so on. So in that moment where you want to take one hour of your Wednesday afternoon to invest in your learning goal, you might not do it, because it feels really selfish. So you might go back and do some project work. That's another thing that really holds us back: we don't really have permission in organizations to learn, to take that little bit of time for ourselves, because we feel we steal time from the team.

[00:09:00] And the last thing that really holds us back is putting performance reviews and learning together. Performance reviews are about how good you are at something, how stellar you are, what a top performer you are, how well you know how to do it. Learning is: you're not good at that yet; that's why you're learning. So they are two very different stances. Learning in itself is a bit of an anxious state, while performing has to be confident. Marrying them together just doesn't work well. It puts more pressure on learning, and then people, instead of focusing on learning, focus on proving to the manager that they learned something. So it creates a much more anxious space for learning, instead of keeping them separate.

ALTE: a learning team experience

[00:09:51] Giving a lot of thought to that, and going through my master's program, I started doing different exercises with my own design team. I experimented with my design team, which was around 15 people, for around a year and a half, when I started realizing that I was using the same rituals and the same templates. Slowly, slowly, and then suddenly, I realized I had a framework that I could repeat twice a year with my team. This is the framework I want to give to you, and it also includes templates, a facilitator script, and tips on how you can implement it with your team. I call this framework ALTE, a learning team experience.

[00:10:36] This framework has one facilitator, which can be the manager of a team. It could also be a guild leader, let's say a senior front-end developer that oversees all the distributed front-end engineers in other teams. It can be a learning consultant, or just someone very senior in the team that wants to facilitate this activity for the whole team. The cohort for learning should be anything between four and sixteen participants. If it is less than four, you cannot do study buddy pairs. If it is more than 16, you have to be a really skilled facilitator. Even at 16, which is the number I tried the most, it became a little bit heavy, because you needed to facilitate big groups. I think the sweet spot is anything between six and 12.

[00:11:32] To go through one cycle of this framework takes three to six months. I know, three to six months, oh my God, it's a really long time. But if we can do product roadmaps for two years, we can invest a little bit in making a roadmap for our own learning. So let me show you how it really looks on a timeframe. These are the four stages of the framework. In the first one, the facilitator helps each individual identify their learning goals. The second phase is a time-based event. This is where you call the team together, you bring all the participants into the room, and you create a team activity where everybody starts learning and shares what their learning goals are.

[00:12:28] The third stage is the learning period. This is what really takes the most time. This is where all the participants already have a learning plan, they are paired with their study buddies, and they are self-organizing on the learning plan. And the last phase is the graduation ceremony. This is also an event-based ritual, where you really want to provide closure to this learning and also help people reflect on their own learning patterns. Giving closure will prepare you for the next time you want to do this framework with your team.

Stage one: learning goals and a learning plan

[00:13:07] Now I'll go into each stage to give you more insights and the templates you can use for each stage of this framework. In the first stage, the facilitator coaches the participants to find their own learning goals and build a learning plan. This is a template I use for my design teams, but I have this template for developers, quality assurance specialists and product managers. You will see that I list around 12 skills that are pertinent for UX designers in this case, and then I ask the designers: what are three learning goals you want to focus on right now? Just giving this list of keywords helps people identify their learning goals.

[00:13:54] Once they select them, in the one-on-one that I have with them, I will ask, "Okay, what was your selection process that got you to these three learning goals for the next period?" And they will tell me, "Oh, I feel my skills are not good enough there," or "I actually want to move towards a management track, so I want to develop my communication more," or "I'm really struggling a little bit to facilitate my teams to align, so the decision making is not very good, so I want to invest in facilitation."

[00:14:24] While we are talking about this, I ask a really powerful question that, if you asked it in a performance review, for example, people would not answer. I ask them: how will these learning goals help you with what you struggle with right now? What I'm really asking is: what are you struggling with right now? And people will tell me what they struggle with. But because we are doing it in a positive space, a space of "all my struggles will lead to learning, to my own growth," people are very willing to actually talk about it. And that's how I find the intrinsic motivation, together with the participant, for their learning goal.

[00:15:08] After we do these templates, each participant should have three learning goals, and then I ask them as a follow-up item: "Okay, now that you have the learning goals, go and find all the things that will help you with your learning plan." So I ask the participants to actually build their own learning plan, and they will build it based on their preferences. Some might want to do Udemy classes, some might prefer to read, some might prefer to go to conferences or get a mentor, and so on. Once they find all the sources of knowledge, I actually sit down with them to make sure that we edit them down, so they don't go into the learning period overwhelmed.

[00:15:50] If someone comes back to me and says, "Well, I want to read six books in the next five months," I'll ask them, "Okay, you have five months. How many hours do you want to invest in your learning goal per week?" They say one hour. Then I will be like, "Well, then you have 20 hours. Can you read six books?" I'm doing this exercise because I really want them to be successful in their learning goals. At the end of phase one, each participant will have three learning goals and a learning plan. So this is perfect: the high entry point to this whole exercise doesn't exist anymore, because they built their own learning plan, and they are learning how to learn by themselves too.

Stage two: the team event and study buddies

[00:16:29] This is where I get all the participants in the room and do a team event with them. I host this team event, and in it I ask people to map their learning goals. This is an example that I use. This was online; the framework is great for online and distributed teams, by the way. This is an exercise we've done, and you can see the whole design team, where everybody put in their learning goals. It's also a beautiful mirror for the team, because like this they realize what everybody's learning goals are, and they might also see the different currents of where the team is at.

[00:17:13] For example, in this team everybody was really focused on their leadership skills, and less on their hard skills, or their expert skills. That's because this team already had a very high level of expert skills, but they really were not that good at communicating and being visible and facilitating. So you could see that reflected in the state of the team. When the team sees this mapping with everybody's photos, this is the moment where everybody gets permission to actually learn, because everybody realizes, "Oh, everybody will take one hour per week, two hours per week, to invest in their own learning goal." So this is where the "me work" of learning becomes the "we work" too.

[00:17:59] Another activity I do in this event is pair people together as study buddies. As a facilitator, I don't really want to hand-hold everybody through their learning goal. What I want is to create a positive relationship between two different people, so I pair them as study buddies. I might pair someone very senior with someone very junior who has the same learning goal; I would create a mentorship relationship there. Or I might pair two people that never really worked together or had a chance to work together, especially if they are in two different mandates or two different departments. This will break silos too; it's beautiful to see.

[00:18:37] Or sometimes I might pair people who I feel will not get along otherwise. Because I pair them in the positive context of a learning goal, I give them a better chance to actually create a positive relationship, an empathic relationship, to get to know each other, in case they would work together one day. And what I do here, and this gets to be a bit of an emotional moment, is ask each participant to sign each other's learning goals document, to really create an embodied pre-commitment to help one another.

Stage three: the learning period

[00:19:08] At the end of this event, the participants have five months, or three months, or whatever learning period you decided on with your team, to study by themselves. As a facilitator, you actually don't do much here besides observing. This is stage three, where the facilitator observes what different connections are happening in the team and how your team culture starts changing, because people are paired in positive relationships of learning.

[00:19:38] In an e-commerce company I was at some years ago, there were two very senior researchers who normally would not agree in a strategic meeting on what should be the main alignment. And in one meeting, suddenly they were agreeing from the get-go. I was really surprised. I was like, "Oh, what happened here? How come they see it with the same lens?" And then I realized, oh wait, they were actually paired as study buddies. That means they found ways to communicate and also align on some of the project work. These positive relationships really scale your team culture and create a positive one, one of support.

[00:20:24] Another thing I do in stage three: I look to see if there is a winter holiday or a summer holiday in the middle of your learning period. That means as people trickle back from holiday, they might lose some steam for their learning goals. So I do a midway energizer workshop. This is a simple one-hour workshop with a check-in and a checkout, and in the middle I just put the study buddies in the room and tell them, "Just revisit your learning goal. See how far you are, see what things you want to do, some of the things you want to share." So I basically just put them in the room and give them one hour to revisit their learning goals and invest a bit in the learning. That is enough to give them a bit more steam to continue towards learning goal completion.

Stage four: the graduation ceremony

[00:21:12] At the end of stage three, everybody will have gone as far as they could through their learning plan. This is where I do a closing. It's something I announce way in advance: I do a graduation ceremony. This is a great team activity, and I do a couple of exercises here. First, because I really care about people retaining all the knowledge they gained in these five months, I ask each participant to create a FigJam board or a Miro board with some of the insights from their learning. I ask them to go and revisit it; this repetition really helps their retention. I don't ask people to do presentations, because imagine you have a group of 12 people and you have to sit through 12 presentations of whatever everybody learned. It would be a mood killer.

[00:22:07] Instead, I ask them to do a Miro board or a FigJam board, and everybody will have a gallery, a little space for their learnings. This helps bring the knowledge back to the top of their mind, so they can apply it in their work. They might remember something they read in the first month that they didn't remember anymore, and just summarize it. That's one thing I do. The other one: I hold a bit of a retrospective, and I ask them: what boosted you in your learning, what held you back, and what would you do differently? This is a retrospective on learning about learning. This is where participants will start seeing their learning habits.

[00:22:48] Some people will tell me, "Oh, you know, I really wanted to commit to six books, and I really insisted on it, but ultimately that held me back. Next time I want to take on less for my learning goal. It's more important for me to finish a book than to really panic about six." Or some people really regret that they didn't prioritize their learning a bit more, as they see what their colleagues actually did in these five months. So this is really good, because it puts it back to the participants to reflect on their own learning habits.

[00:23:27] And for the last activity, I like to do something that is energizing and creates a beautiful memory. In this case, we were all a distributed team in the time of Covid. We never all met in person, but I wanted us to have a common memory together, and something that was actually part of our home. So I gave all the designers in the team a budget for flowers; that's something we would get at a graduation, flowers. And this is a photo of everybody showing the bouquet and the flowers they bought for this occasion. Looking at this photo still makes me emotional, seeing so many smiles and seeing this moment of connection around their learning goals, around their growth, and as a team. You can do other things. If you're live, you can ask people to fold paper hats and then throw the paper hats, or anything that is really fun, and then you take a photo.

Three takeaways

[00:24:22] So this was the last stage of ALTE. This is the whole framework, and you will find all the templates on Miro and in FigJam. I have scripts, articles, even a Udemy class on how to integrate it and how to really boost your team learning and really take advantage of all those company benefits, maximize them, because it will help to really create and expand your group of talent.

[00:24:50] If there are three things I would want you to take away from this meeting, besides the templates, and maybe it's too much of a commitment for you to go through a whole framework, remember just this. Make learning a team activity, because this will allow everyone in the team to actually invest in their learning goal. Second, use learning to create positive relationships. Pairing people in mentorship and coaching on common learning goals will create those positive relationships and will not allow much space for toxic or negative relationships. And ultimately, try to find a framework that is easy to implement, scaffolding around your team learning, if you see that your team is not used to doing a learning plan, to maximize your learning benefits and to really create an environment where you can welcome top talent and create top talent.

Q&A

[00:25:56] Thank you so much for coming. You will find all the materials on my website. And Rory, if you have any questions, or if there are any questions from the public, I will be happy to answer them.

[00:26:08] Rory: Excellent, thank you very much, Raoul. I have been checking out your site; it's a lovely layout of all the materials as well. So if anybody is interested, please do check that out, because it's a free and valuable resource. Thank you, Raoul, for sharing that. If anybody has any questions out there, please do write them in on whichever platform you're watching on, and I'll post those questions through to Raoul. But the question I thought of as I was watching that was: I thought there would be a bit more guidance in the training plan, but from what I understood from you, it's a lot more that you're expecting the person to come up with their own plan rather than being guided by you. How do you overcome the challenge that people don't know what they don't know? If you're trying to learn something new and you don't really know how to learn it, how do you help people through that phase?

[00:27:08] Raoul: Rory, if you identify a learning goal, what's the first thing you do if you want to learn something about that particular subject?

[00:27:15] Rory: I'd Google it.

[00:27:19] Raoul: That's what everybody does. They Google it, or they ask other people. So what I'm asking them is just to come with material. Do a Google search. You want to learn about service design and you don't know what it is? Do a Google search. What are some of the books? You know a service designer? Ask them. It's more important for me to create that scaffolding where they start having that instinct of finding their resources than me going and searching for the resources for them, which actually might not be the right format for them. Maybe they realize, just because they asked a service designer, that for them learning is actually through mentoring, and then they already have a service designer that can mentor them.

[00:28:01] Or maybe I would propose a Udemy class for them, and they say, "Oh my God, I cannot watch videos. I'm on Zoom the whole day, I would hate it. I would prefer a book." That's why I ask them, after the learning goal session, which is a one-on-one meeting, to come back next week with all the sources they find, and it's interesting for them to invest in that learning goal. And then I might guide them a little bit. I might also look at the material and be like, "Well, I know this book; this book might not help you with your learning goal," or something like this. But the most important thing for me is to teach them how to fish, basically.

[00:28:32] Rory: Excellent, now it makes sense, because otherwise people won't take as much ownership over it if they haven't put in the work.

[00:28:41] Raoul: Exactly, yeah. And this is a low-level effort, because in 10 or 15 minutes of Googling you will find a lot of service design videos, books, Udemies and so on. And if you just put them in a document, you already have a learning plan, to be honest.

[00:28:59] Rory: Excellent. The other thing I thought of as I was going through it: during the learning period, you said maybe you jump in and do a revitalizing thing. But have there ever been any instances where you've buddied people up and then one of the buddies just drops out? What happens to the other person? Because maybe the other person is motivated, but they don't have that buddy keeping them in check.

[00:29:28] Raoul: I did. It happens, probably 10% or 20%. You will see people very differently engaged with this. You will see people that are super engaged, and you will see people with lower engagement. Priorities also happen. I once had a junior and a senior that were paired, and the senior was just too busy to learn, but the senior still kept the half an hour with the junior every two weeks, because it was kind of a shame to cancel them. And even if the senior didn't actually invest a lot in their learning goals, the junior benefited a lot from that half an hour, and the junior did their reading of the book by themselves anyhow. That's why I build those study buddies, because it does form a little bit of accountability.

[00:30:16] And ultimately I do have to say, even as a manager: it is your responsibility, your growth. I can only build so much scaffolding. This is not project work; I don't want to impose anything on you. And ultimately I do ask participants if they want to enroll in this framework, and of course the participants want to, because they want to be part of a team and so on. But yes, you might have people that are disengaged for different reasons, and you as a manager might guide them, or you might ask them what doesn't work for them and what works, but ultimately you cannot force it. I do expect, especially in a cohort of 12 people, that there might be one person who is not as engaged, and that is okay too. Maybe they have a young kid at home. That is okay too.

[00:31:05] Rory: Yeah, no, it's a great strategy, though, of trying to build that mutual accountability, so hopefully it forces people. But that brings us to time, Raoul. I just want to thank you very much for sharing your framework. I hope everybody out there enjoyed it as much as I did, and please do take advantage of those resources that Raoul has shared.

[00:31:29] Raoul: Thank you so much, everyone.