5 Practices to Build a Learning Culture in the Workplace

Most organizations don't have a learning culture.

Allow me to explain.

A workplace's culture is a collection of shared values and beliefs that play out in daily interactions. It's shaped from the top down and from the bottom up, meaning that everyone can impact a company's culture.

For a workplace to have a learning culture, personal development needs to be part of the shared values and beliefs that guide how people work. A learning culture in the workplace embeds development into everything from daily work to organizational operations.

Why most workplaces don't have a learning culture

Building a learning culture is hard. You can't just add words like "growth" or "continuous learning" to your company values and call it a day, nor can you hand it off to be the sole responsibility of a learning and development team.

It begins with cultivating a working environment where people can admit they don't know something or that they made a mistake or took a risk and failed. Where employees can stop "hiding" themselves, as Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey put it, and instead realize their true potential.

In their 2016 book, An Everyone Culture, Kegan and Lahey describe how most people are doing a second job at work that no one is paying them for: managing other people's impressions of them. We're all guilty of this, and it's one of the reasons behind the ubiquity of impostor syndrome.

Now imagine you were free from that second job, working somewhere that has "created a safe enough and demanding enough culture that everyone comes out of hiding" (p. 3). This is what Kegan and Lahey call a Deliberately Developmental Organization (DDO).

Even a decade later, these DDOs appear to be rare, but it doesn't have to be this way.

How to build a learning culture

To build a learning culture, you need to develop a core set of practices or behaviors across the organization, so they eventually become commonplace. Here are five I recommend.

1. Leaders go first.

A learning culture begins with leadership.

Kegan and Lahey's research stems from the idea that organizations do best when they're built around everyone's growth, and that includes leadership. We've all worked at organizations where leadership is rarely challenged. What they say, goes. That limits the growth of an organization, as well as the leaders.  

So leaders need to go first by:

• Acknowledging when they make a mistake, and sharing what they learned
• Encouraging others to weigh in before sharing their own opinion
• Modeling desired behavior by explaining how they're investing in their own development 

2. Managers coach.

Managers build a learning culture through regular coaching.

Coaching is often a de facto responsibility for managers. It's something they're expected to do, often without any training (let alone alignment around what good coaching looks like). Yet, when managers coach their direct reports, performance can improve.

Managers need to build a coaching practice by:

• Setting clear expectations with their direct reports about the goals and how to be accountable for them
• Asking to understand (being genuinely curious about what their direct reports are saying)
• Responding without judgment, and when appropriate giving constructive feedback

3. Teams review the process.

Teams build a learning culture by reviewing how they got their results.

Teams often celebrate when they achieve a result, but they don't always focus on what got them that result. While sure, there may be "post-mortems" (a term that could certainly use a rebrand) to investigate when something goes wrong, there's not equal energy spent on investigating why something went right. That matters because a good result can come unexpectedly from a bad decision, and we're prone to judging decisions by how they turn out. For instance, we often rate the same decision as "better" when the outcome was favorable.

Teams should review the process beyond the outcomes:

• Separating outcomes from decisions; asking why things went right as well as why they went wrong
• Holding a short debrief after each project or milestone
• Sharing what they learned with other teams
  

4. Everyone gives feedback.

Everyone contributes to a learning culture by giving and asking for feedback.

For learning to happen, you need timely feedback about your performance so that you can adjust or continue accordingly. Meaning, good feedback needs context to be impactful: what happened and why it mattered.

Everyone can make feedback a habit by:

• Asking for feedback in real time (e.g., after a presentation or a meeting, Slack a colleague or ask them in person, "What's one thing I could have done better?")
• Proactively sharing feedback with colleagues, including managers and leaders, when appropriate
• Recognizing colleagues who regularly give feedback to encourage the behavior

5. L&D enables the organization.

L&D provides the foundations of a learning culture. 

I've spoken with leaders who think because they invest in L&D, or have someone "doing L&D," that they have a learning culture. (And no, this isn't limited to L&D. It can include Sales/Revenue Enablement, Customer Support, or any team that offers training to employees.) For L&D to be truly effective at their job, they need everyone's buy-in to their work. That it matters, beyond compliance or other checkboxes.

For L&D, that means enabling the organization by:

• Training leaders to go first, managers to coach, and employees to ask for and give feedback, so they can build this culture; that includes everything from feedback frameworks to deep dives on psychological safety
• Embedding learning in the flow of work and providing just-in-time training to support these practices
• Evaluating the impact of training, and using that process feedback to improve your strategy and roadmap

How AI is changing learning cultures 

AI is transforming how we learn, and consequently, how an organization shapes a culture of learning.

In the epilogue to An Everyone Culture, Kegan and Lahey write, "the doing dimension of work has undergone a fundamental reorganization [due to new technologies]." I'd wager that if asked today, they'd say that AI has only amplified that reorganization.

L&D practitioners are grappling with how AI is transforming their work, as are managers who are being asked to develop new skills as they juggle, on average, more direct reports than ever. We need to account for these changes when designing learning cultures.

That includes more transparency around how people are using AI, whether that's to polish a performance review or conduct a post-mortem, and understanding how they're learning with it, formally or informally.

For instance, I've seen employees practicing how to give feedback by doing so with the AI, whether using the thumbs-up button, edits, or constructive corrections. In some cases that feedback, or the company's own data, is how the AI learns, which means someone has to own what it learns from and how its output gets reviewed.

A healthy learning culture is transparent about AI's role in the organization and across every practice I've shared above.