Destined to learn things the hard way

The longer I am in business and working with many different companies, the more I am convinced that most of us are destined to learn things the hard way – from our own mistakes and those of others.

Text books are full of the wisdom and knowledge of those who have learned the hard way, but it seems that despite all our studies those lessons aren’t fully taken on board. It is one thing to say how something works in principle, but it is much harder to apply that to your day to day working life.

Likewise, by instituting best practice systems and processes you are assuming that all the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is in the system. However, if your people don’t understand this, then their motivation becomes gaming the system to get the outcomes they see as best, rather than using the system to achieve the best outcomes for the company.

Have a look around and you too will recognise learning by doing is one of the fundamental paths to becoming good at what you do. That’s all good and well I can hear you say, but how can we take this approach and put it into practice.

The fundamental step is to recognise that when we start our careers we see parts of the job, but not the whole, and we definitely don’t understand how it all comes together. I know one international construction firm that explicitly recognises this.

This firm puts its new staff in at the deep end. They use these new staff to provide all the disciplines required for a job, but they put them on a small job worth a few million dollars as opposed to the hundreds of millions to billions for a major role. By being given responsibility, accountability and support/mentoring these junior staff rapidly learn how to, and how not to do things. They mature faster and understand how everything fits together faster.

By giving such trust to your people you are also encouraging them to be high performers. You also have the added benefit of creating a team who can progress together through the organisation.

The key lesson from this is that to help your people develop mastery of their profession provide a safe way for them to learn – a sandpit to play in if you like.

This lesson is lost when there is a lot of work on. This is particularly evident in Australia right now where a variant of learning by doing is in place – survival of the fittest.

Given the large amount of resource industry projects happening in Australia at the moment and the shortage in skilled and professional workers, there is a tendency to grab anyone who looks competent and throw them straight in the deep end by putting them in charge of a job. All too often these well-meaning people are performing to the best of their ability, but they have limited skills in management, budgeting, project controls, legals, commercials and all the other skills they need. Such skillsets are acquired through learning and practice and are often far outside the experiences of most people. Universities are manifestly failing to produce graduates with such skillsets.

In such situations you get bad commercial outcomes, poor project delivery, cost and time blowouts, and a failure to recognise your own commercial rights and claim them. The human capital damage is pretty high too. I have seen good people have breakdowns at being given responsibility. The higher the budget they are responsible for, the worse their anxiety and performance becomes. Even worse, those who tend to fearlessly thrive in such an environment are sociopathic by inclination which may not work out well for your company as such characters tend to ruthlessly overwork their own team and destroy relations with contractors and the client.

Survival of the fittest can work to a degree, but it ignores the fact that if you train people up over time, then you can have a lot more competent people available in the workforce than if you just throw people into major jobs in a situation that is beyond their capability.

If you really can’t afford to take the time to train your own people up, then I recommend that if you have critical role then hire for people who have a proven record in that area. Enthusiasm, qualifications and a can do attitude are manifestly inadequate.

Further steps would also include the following.

Mini-startups - Be brave, consider setting up a mini-startup in your company. Give the vision, budget and resources to a group to try something new, or to deliver a project. They will learn more from that process than all the procedure manuals in the world.

Strong leadership is vital - Make sure your team pulls together instead of going off in their own directions. High performing teams tend to be full of strong minded individuals. You need strong leadership in place to keep them going in the same direction and keep them from taking an axe to each other.

Provide optimism and hope - There is not a project or product development in the world that doesn’t hit rough patches. You may know from experience that you can get through it, however, less experienced staff may look at the amount of work to be done before a deadline and simply give up, or go off on a tangent. Destructive mentalities and gossip can start. Even worse, the blame game can commence. You should provide that overarching calming effect rather than engaging in a “Lord of the Flies” type experiment.

Vocational training is important - University education is good, however, vocational training is every bit as important. Competencies in job roles, software usage or other areas important for productivity and job mastery need to be learned through vocational training. Universities don’t teach this stuff, and you shouldn’t rely on people teaching themselves these skills.  As part of your training and development plan I would highly recommend the inclusion of vocational training providers.

Recognising that our working lives involve constantly acquiring new skills in order to be productive and implementing training and initiatives to allow learning by doing is an important first step for your company’s growth.