Making room to learn

In 2021 I was the lead coach, with a team of six coaches, for the infrastructure organization of a large financial services company: about 1,800 people providing shared services to the rest of the business. Its leaders worried that the group had become too tenured and too slow to keep up with the market, with as many as seven layers of management between a developer and the C-suite.

1. the puzzleunder 20% using paid licenses
2. listeningwhat gets in the way
3. exec backlogblockers the CIO owns
4. room to learnlearning time built in
5. resultsatisfaction up 15%+

The puzzle

The company had bought enterprise licenses for Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning, yet fewer than 20% of people were using them. The first instinct was to treat that as an adoption problem: how do we justify the licenses and get more people to log in?

We came to see that as putting the cart before the horse. The organization was full of self-motivated people, and the real question was what kept them from learning.

Listening first

My coaches and I created safe spaces for people to talk about how they wanted to grow and what stood in the way. The answers were practical: no time, competing priorities, and shift work that left support staff with no room in the day at all. We helped people write their own plans for learning days, and we brought every blocker we heard to the CIO, where it went onto the executive team’s backlog for leaders to resolve.

Shift work is a good example. Support staff couldn’t step away from their shifts to learn, so the leaders explored options with them and ended up building learning hours and slack into the shift schedules themselves. We also encouraged people to learn each other’s jobs, which gave them new paths to grow and gave the organization more resilience.

All of this happened alongside a larger change, as the organization moved from individual contributors working alone to squads working in Scrum and Kanban.

What happened

Once learning had room to happen, participation grew through both organic and structured opportunities. Job satisfaction, measured as an NPS, rose by at least 15%. Engineering practices and code quality improved, release frequency went up, and leaders could see the difference in the organization’s results.

What I took from it

When people aren’t using something you’ve paid for, the tool is rarely the problem. Ask what’s in the way, and give the answers to the leaders who can remove them. Motivated people will take it from there.