Previously, we showed how to use the impostor syndrome as a guide for creating capacity and scaling capability. In that post we highlighted the importance of growth and development, but we skipped over how to get them to occur. More recently, we introduced the Double-Blind Socratic method as a means of growing and developing someone who knows more than you. The next natural step is to combine your new capacity creation and individual development abilities to generate growth. The most powerful way to do this at scale is by creating an Industrial Internet of People.

By employing the Double-Blind Socratic Method in one-on-one engagements, you can get the members of your team accustomed to teaching you. As a quick refresher, the Double-Blind Socratic method is a five-step process for developing people in areas where their ability already exceeds your own. The first step is to have them teach you while you identify and probe gaps in their teaching. The second is to define the “building blocks” of the discipline or area in question. Third is to then propose new arrangements of those building blocks. Fourth is to ask follow-up questions that help them gain clarity over their own thoughts. Lastly, shift the conversation up and down in levels of abstraction so they gain new perspectives. To get learning at scale, we now need to get the members of your team to teach each other.

Set a Good Example

As with many areas of leadership, the first step is to set a good example. If you’re using the Double-Blind Socratic method, you’re already setting a good example as a student. With that foundation in place, next deliberately set a good example as a teacher.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.

Albert Einstein

Show your team how to teach to groups by teaching them as a group. Create training courses on topics you know well. The topic could be a tool, a process, an insight, anything relevant to your team’s performance. When starting, it matters less what you teach than that you do teach. You’ll need to create material to support what you’re teaching. This could be in the form of written SOPs, slide decks, training videos, or anything else that works for the topic. Teach the team in group sessions and give them the material for further self-study.

One on one coaching and training is still going to be one of the most important talent development tools in your pocket. The Double-Blind Socratic method reviewed earlier is specific to times when you’re teaching someone who knows more than you. As the team’s leader, you have tremendous knowledge in areas where you are an expert. Take advantage of opportunities to teach on these areas in one on one settings. Do this for people at all levels of your team, not just your direct reports. You can also use these individual training and coaching sessions to reinforce anything you taught in group sessions.

Of course, there will be material you’ll want your team to learn that you don’t know well enough to teach yourself. At times, there will be no one on the team who possesses the knowledge required to teach what the team needs to learn. When that situation arises, you need to find external sources of material or teaching capacity. At a previous organization, several members of my team decided to augment their finance skills with analytics by taking a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) in R. There are numerous platforms for online courses, including edX and Coursera. There’s also the option of turning to a consultant who specializes in the area you need to build up. Whichever path you choose, find a resource you like and encourage the team to learn together.

Set the Most Important Example

With a plan and some effort you can set examples for how to teach in group settings, how to teach in one on one settings, and how to go acquire external knowledge and spread it to the group. That’s a great start, and there’s one more example to set. The most important example you can set is to share your own lessons and learning path. Share your failures and rebounds. Set the standard for admitting when you’re wrong and becoming right. You want the members of your team to learn from their mistakes. So, set an example by showing that you learn from yours.

This will dispel the myth that you’re an infallible leader. Hopefully that’s not a myth you’ve been cultivating. None of us are infallible. No one on your team is infallible. Good leadership requires vulnerability, and a high-performing team requires trust. Do you want to build trust with and among your team? Be vulnerable with them. Admit to not being infallible, and show them how you cope with that. In response, your team will try to chase excellence the same way you do. By being vulnerable with them, you’ll show that the path forward is not through perfection, but through resiliency. It’s a powerful shift in mindset that will move your team from thinking they don’t have what you have to thinking they don’t have what you have yet.

I never lose. I win or I learn.

Nelson Mandela

When your team operates with vulnerability in this way, they will be so resilient that they will not feel the need to chase invulnerability via infallibility. When the only options are to win or to learn, and learning is encouraged, your team will have the psychological safety necessary for growth.

Get Emulation at Scale

Now you need to get your team to emulate your examples at scale. Make it easy for your team to emulate your proclivity for learning and teaching.

Create formal platforms for informal learning.

Doug Bennett

One example of how we did this in my last team was with “Advanced Analytics” training sessions. The same concept can easily be generalized to sales training, process improvement, or any other topic. Set a formal schedule with a dedicated time slot, e.g. one hour every other week. In advance of each session, have the leaders in your team select who will lead it. This should be done based on recent work and lessons learned by the members of the team. Once selected, that team member then prepares training material and teaches the rest of the team what they learned from their recent experience. This accelerates team learning, instills learning and teaching in the team dynamic, and gives team members great opportunity for public speaking and storytelling practice. Assign a leader on the team to help each team member with their presentation to make sure they’re effective.

With a solid platform for internal knowledge sharing, next set your team up to teach other departments or business areas. Almost any department or business unit has valuable things to teach to other areas. At the very least, you have things that it would be helpful for other areas to know and understand. Establish cross-functional “train-the-trainer” engagements for your team members to share knowledge with other teams in such a way that the knowledge will then spread through those teams. This is especially helpful for shared services teams, as they always can benefit from other areas learning more about their domain.

Of course, you can also go all the way outside your organization to the rest of the industry. Attend industry events, take good notes, and share your discoveries and insights with your team. Encourage your team members to do the same. Also encourage them to present at these events if they have the opportunity. This is one of the easiest ways to maintain a team’s ability to stay at the forefront of knowledge in its area.

Don’t limit these approaches to just technical material. One of the most valued learning platforms we had at a previous organization was what we called “Brown Bag Lunches.” For these, a senior or executive leader from another department would be invited to present on their career path, mistakes, and lessons learned. They’d also present on their department’s current challenges and recent wins. Team members could ask questions and receive specific advice. These simple events give dual benefits. First, your team gets career advice from someone other than just you. Second, barriers between teams start to erode.

Executive Leadership and the Industrial Internet of People

In one of our first posts, we defined executive leadership at a high-level as consisting of:

1. Setting the strategy and vision
2. Identifying and developing talent
3. Establishing a pattern of accountability

Creating an Industrial Internet of People is about creating a pattern of accountability that continually fosters talent development. Thus, it entails joining two of the elements of executive leadership to reinforce each other. The goal is to get your team to a point where this happens even in your absence, which is how you get scaled learning.

There are multiple stages of scaled learning:

1. Learning from your own mistakes (which requires admitting when you’re wrong)
2. Learning from others’ mistakes
3. Learning from others’ mistakes and successes

It’s important to learn from your mistakes, but it is BETTER to learn from other people’s mistakes, and it is BEST to learn from other people’s successes. It accelerates your own success.

Jim Rohn

This is a profound insight that gets to how some people are able to learn so much so quickly. It’s not necessarily because they’re brighter than everyone else or that they find the best teachers. It’s that they’re resourceful in identifying and taking advantage of learning opportunities.

However, as an executive, to truly build a high-performing team than can continually drive to new heights, the three stages of scaled learning above are still not enough. There are two more stages you have to master:

1. Learning from your own mistakes
2. Learning from others’ mistakes
3. Learning from others’ mistakes and successes
4. Getting others to learn from each other’s mistakes and successes
5. Creating an environment in which #4 happens by default

The fifth stage of scaled learning is the pinnacle of creating self-growing capacity. It is also what I am referring to by the Industrial Internet of People.

Why call this the Industrial Internet of People?

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) is the heart of the fourth industrial revolution:

The first industrial revolution came from access to new energy sources that enabled more efficient production of individual parts. The second then scaled that to many units at once, via assembly lines. The third revolution was robotics, which enabled faster, more efficient, and more consistent production of individual units. The fourth industrial revolution is the Industrial Internet of Things, which takes the third revolution and scales it through instant communication and coordination between devices. I always arrange the 4 stages as a box of 4 squares because of this pattern.

In a connected network of robots, when one learns a new task, they all learn that new task. The ability to rapidly scale learning across connected machines is such an important innovation that it’s credited with its own industrial revolution. There is tremendous power in generating that same ability for your team by creating an environment in which you continually get other people to learn from each other’s wins and failures. The result is what I call the Industrial Internet of People, as it gives to humans the most remarkable advantage mankind has ever devised for machines.

For the widest-scaling and most sustainable capacity creation, remember to follow the steps laid out in the previous posts as well. That way you can combine them sequentially to:

1. Identify people able and eager to learn through Dunning-Kruger interviewing
2. Hire people you want to learn from through the impostor syndrome talent tapestry
3. Teach the people you hire to fully unlock their own knowledge with the Double-Blind Socratic method
4. Get them to teach and learn from each other by creating an Industrial Internet of People

You can model your intellectual capital revolution after the 4 industrial revolutions, culminating in an Industrial Internet of People. By following this approach, you will create a team that is both consciously aware of its combined knowledge and in a constant state of intellectual capital growth. For a team that learns at scale, being unable to do any specific thing is always just a temporary state. A team like that can do anything.