Can you tell me what American Express, Apple, Google, and Spotify have in common?  They are all leaders in their industry and all promote a learning culture. Research by Edward Hess at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business wrote “companies that learn fastest and adapt well to changing environments perform best of over time.” These organization create a learning culture from top to bottom. Below are three strategies to help implement a learning culture in your IT department.

Failure is an Option

Creating a learning culture starts with failure. We all fail more than we succeed but it is what we learn from it that helps us grow. Success is measured by how quickly we can turn failure into success. Communicate with your team that this is a fail friendly environment. Preach that failure is not fatal, but a great learning tool. Encourage team members to strive for failure.  Push them to make mistakes faster than anyone else. The faster we fail, the faster we can learn.

I know I sound like an inspirational poster. But the opposite is a dire scene. If you punish failure, fear starts to creep into team members. Fear eliminates innovation. Developers don’t try new and creative ideas in fear of getting punished. Fear puts a cloud over development teams. It makes it hard to go to work and stay motivated. This can be seen from the outside making it hard to attract and keep talented employees.

Hack Time

When developers have no fear of failure then creativity begins to fly. To promote this creativity, we suggest providing developers with the freedom of hack time. Hack time is giving developers the space and time to create whatever they desire. It could be a new feature for a project your team is working on or an idea you got from talking with a co-worker. No strings, nobody over their shoulder telling you not to do it. This helps to generate ideas, spark inspiration and just have a little fun. You can find the best balance for your organization but we recommend at least 10% of their work week.

Hack time allows developers to break away from a project and clear their mind. Overexerting oneself can lead to burn out and lower productivity.  Give developers time to work on a project that inspires them and you will see that energy carry over to their current assignment. The ideas and creations from this time might not always be useful but we are bound to hit gold eventually. More often than not the learning experience gained from each attempt is more valuable than the products created.

Self-Steering Squad

A new trend in the development world is self-steering autonomous squads. Small companies will have one or two while large companies may have ten to twenty. These squads consist of team members throughout the development process including architects, programmers, testers, analyst, security, and any other needs. Each squad is assigned a portion of the product/application to create and update. They are allowed to select their own development process and manage their own releases. All team members are on the same playing field and encourage open communication.

Self-steering squads give each team member a sense of ownership and empowerment. We all work harder and better when we have something at stake. Team members are involved in all processes from budget allocation, planning, backlog priority and customer engagement. This opens the opportunity for cross training and to learn new skills you couldn’t learn if you were working with a room full of developers. This improves team work and communication skills. Each squad needs to work together to be successful. But the biggest skill gained is learning how everything is interconnected and how it all comes together. They essentially learn how to run a department or business.

The goal of life is to learn and grow. We seek this in our personal life as well as our professional life. We want to work at a place that inspires and challenges us. We don’t desire to be stagnate. We want to be innovators and creators but most of all we want to learn.  If your work culture is not built around learning, I urge you to do some additional research and find ways to implement these strategies in your department.