Recently, I shared the 3 career principles that got me to Director on my guest post with
from High Growth Engineer. Check out the full post here!I got a few questions following that post on how to really find these growth opportunities. My answer - “immerse yourself in a learning environment”.
Today, let’s look at what teams make the best places for career growth. These are teams that offer a learning environment! Read on to find out the characteristics of a learning environment so you can identify one when you see it!
Characteristic 1: Mistakes are not career-limiting in learning environments
For most of us mistakes are awkward moments. We may feel a whole range of negative emotions when we fail. These could be embarrassment at having made a mistake, anxiety about being rebuked or fired from our job, concern about how our coworkers will view us after this, and so on!
In a learning environment, mistakes are not career-limiting. Instead, in a learning environment, you will find that people will quickly tell you when you make mistakes. Not unkindly or punitively but with a goal of helping you improve. If nobody tells you what you did wrong and how to get better, it is not a learning environment!
When I caused my first production outage at Google, I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide! Instead, I wrote a post-mortem that was available to any Googler (yes, all 100K of them!) to read. My tech lead helped me write about what happened, why and how it could be avoided. The exercise of writing the post-mortem let me detach from my shame. The feedback from my tech lead and peers helped me focus on the lessons to learn.
Google practices “blameless post-mortems”. This means that a post-mortem document doesn’t name any employee as the culprit or cause of an incident, removing the fear that writing a post-mortem will get you fired. This is an example of how to foster a learning environment.
Characteristic 2: Learning environments encourage experimentation
When tackling the monolith release problem on Google Compute Engine, we tried multiple hypotheses. Some worked, some didn’t. But had we not tried so many, we would have taken longer to reach our end goal or never reached there at all!
In learning environments, the appetite for tolerating failure and taking risks is already high. So experimentation is encouraged and it is understood that some things will work, some won’t. The goal is to fail fast through experiments so we can find out quickly and cheaply what doesn’t work.
There is also a constant desire to keep improving in learning environments. This fuels the need to keep trying out new things in a quest to get better.
Characteristic 3: Good conflict is welcome in learning environments
I remember a long discussion with a peer team-lead once about an upcoming feature launch. From my team’s perspective, there were many regressions and unfinished rough edges in the feature which would cause a poor customer experience. The other team had their long list of reasons as to why launching was critical.
This was a conflict.
Fortunately we were in a learning environment so we had mutual trust and respect. We could approach the conversation with the mindset that the other side was smart, had done their due diligence and probably had information we didn’t have which caused the opposing belief. We were able to talk through the issues and reach a mutual agreement. Nobody “won” that day and nobody was trying to “win” in this conversation. We were both trying to make the best decisions jointly for the product and the company!
Conflict can be a powerful catalyst towards progress when tackling ambiguous problems. In a learning environment, team members will feel like they can raise a conflict and work through it without feeling threatened or dismissed.
Beware of environments where there are no conflicts! It might seem like that’s a happy team that gets along superbly. But more likely it is a team where nobody feels comfortable challenging the status quo!
Here is a handy cheat-sheet to keep with you as you evaluate potential new teams!
Have you been in a learning environment? What characteristics did you observe?