**Steven Forth** is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

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How does one learn a new skill and get experience with its application?

Very few people are good at learning in isolation from others. They go into themselves, do their research, explore, test and reflect. I have great respect for these people. I am not one of them.

For me learning has a big social component. I learn by working with other people. Sometimes I am coaching them. I do this mostly by asking questions and recommending resources. Sometimes they are coaching me. The same person might coach me on some skills while I coach them on others. I find this mutual exchange works best for me. Collaborating on design, model building, proposals, even writing are an important part of how I learn.

Most people are familiar with the 70:20:10 dashboard. Seventy percent of learning happens while doing the work, twenty percent through social interactions and only 10% through formal training. Ibbaka’s skill management platform is mostly concerned with the 70% of learning that happens while working together and the 20% that is social learning. (You can learn more about the 70:20:10 model here.)

Take a few moments here to jot down some notes about how you learn together with other people. Some possibilities to consider are …

Do you learn by teaching other people?
Do you learn by collaborating with other people and working closely with them? How does that help you learn?
What kind of person makes the best coach for you?
What kind of person can you coach effectively?

A learning team is a way to combine learning through work with social learning.

Why have learning teams?

Good training programs often include breakout groups where people work together to solve problems. These breakout groups are an example of team learning. The individuals learn, and they learn how to work together to solve problems. Why take the time to do this?

People coach each other and the person doing the coaching and the person being coached both learn
People get to combine different skills and see how they can be applied together
Working together, without the constant presence of an instructor, helps people to internalize what is being learned and see how to apply it

A learning team is like one of these breakout groups, but it generally works over a longer period of time, weeks or months rather than minutes or hours, and applies the learning to real problems, not the cases developed for breakout groups.

What is a learning team?

A learning team is a team that includes formal learning goals. These could be individual learning goals or the team as a whole could have a learning goal based on building complementary skills and connecting skills.

Some definitions
Complementary skills are skills held by two or more different people that are used together to perform a task or achieve a goal. An example, many restaurants need a grill chef and a pastry chef to prepare a complete meal. In the software world, a UX (User Experience) designer and a front end engineer have complementary skills used to build web apps.
Connecting skills are shared skills or knowledge that help people to work together. For example, the skill ‘design thinking’ is an ideal connector because it is a methodology for uncovering solutions to big challenges that can be applied across disciplines.

Learning goals are generally defined in five ways.

Add new skills
Improve the level of expertise for current skills
Add evidence of expertise that increase confidence in the expertise assessment (SkillRank on the Ibbaka Platform
Connect skills and learn how to use them together
Learn how to work with a person who has complementary skills

Learning goals should be SMART goals, that is to say, they should be:

Specific (identify the skills and which of the five learning goals are relevant)

Measurable in terms of the level of expertise or the level of confidence or the connections

Achievable, a person who is a learner or even solid is not going to jump to become a guru.

Relevant (rather than Realistic which is similar to Achievable) to individual, team and organization goals

Time Bound, which in the case of team learning means achievable within the expected life of the team

Skills on a learning team

The skill distribution on a learning team will look quite different from one purely focussed on performance.

For a team focussed strictly on performance one is concerned with skill coverage as one designs the team. See this video for the Ibbaka approach to skill coverage.

On a learning team, there will be more people who are at the front end of the learning curve with the skills being acquired. This is perfectly fine. In fact it is the intent. Ideally though, there should be some people at the Expert or Guru level for the critical skills where learning is targeted.

Connecting skills (the shared skills and knowledge that we use to work with people who have different skill sets) are important on learning teams. There needs to be at least a few connecting skills in place when the team is formed, and as people learn together new connecting skills are forged. On some learning teams, the development of connecting skills is the primary learning goal.

How to build a learning team

Here are some simple steps to take when building a learning team.

Make sure the goals are clear
- Is the team primarily for learning or does it have other goals and deliverables (having goals and deliverables beyond the learning can make the learning more meaningful)
- Is the focus on learning new skills, increasing expertise on existing skills, building connections between skills, or building connections between people who need to apply skills together?
- How will the learning be measured? (On Ibbaka Talent one could look at new skills added, changes in SkillRank, changes in the confidence of SkillRank and new patterns of associated and complementary skills)
Select a small number of skills to focus on
- On most learning teams a large number of new skills will emerge, which is a good thing, but the focus should be on just a few key skills, in most cases it is best to start with 3-5 and to err on the side of having a smaller number of target skills
Make sure there are people with diverse skill levels
- For each of the target skills make sure you have some people who are Newbies or Learners and some people who are Experts or Gurus
- Teams often cohere when each person has some skill where they can coach the others, on a Design Thinking team, for example, one person may have great Active Listening skills while another may be an expert on Design Patterns; mutual coaching opportunities can be designed into leaning teams
Connecting skills make a big difference
- Growing connecting skills can be a goal for the team, but it is good to have a starting point, so check that there are at least some connecting skills
Make sure to provide resources to the team
- Learning is resource intensive, make sure a variety of different resources are available to support each of the target skills; include resources for different learning styles
Allow enough time for real learning to occur and be applied
- Learning that is being applied to real business problems seldom happens overnight, it requires sustained effort, practice and repetition

Build a team for capabilities that you want to encourage

There is another way to think about teams and learning. Communities of practice are well established in the knowledge management world. A community of practice exists to

Develop a shared view of a practice, the common methods used, the skills required, the value it provides
Advance the state of the art for the practice by introducing and testing new methods and applications
Educate new people entering the practice
Promote the practice to people who benefit from its adoption (who may not become practitioners themselves)
Provide opportunities for practitioners to find work, join projects and make a contribution

An example of a community of practice is Design Thinking. Design thinking is central to Ibbaka’s approach to competency model design and implementation, to value model and pricing model design and to customer value management. Ibbaka supports this community by managing the Design Thinking group on LinkedIn (which has more than 180,000 members and through the Open Competency Model for Design Thinking.

We have begun to build a team on Ibbaka Talent to further support the Design Thinking community. Please ping info@ibbaka.com if you would like to join this team.

Interested in leveraging the power of skills and competencies? Let's Talk.

Ibbaka posts on competency models and competency frameworks

Teams as a place to learn