Your legal organization is a garden. When given the right tools and nutrients, it thrives on a culture of learning and growth. When left to its own devices, it will wither and stagnate. Just as gardens continually evolve with the seasons and as new growing methods are developed, your organization must adapt to changing circumstances and evolve to meet the demands of today’s clients.
The ideal garden includes a variety of plants, and your legal organization includes a variety of people with different personalities and learning styles, filling a variety of roles. As the gardener for your organization, you must supply the right tools and nutrients for people of all types to thrive. It is the gardener’s role to not only provide these but also to cultivate a culture of learning and growth where people seek innovation and continually improve.
- To cultivate a culture of learning and growth, you must:
- Plant in fertile soil,
- Provide water and sunlight,
- Nourish with fertilizer,
- Uncover the right tools,
- Prune old standards,
- Banish aphids and pluck weeds, and
- Plan for the coming seasons.
Plant in Fertile Soil
New hires are the seeds of your garden, ready to grow and learn. The training you provide them lays the roots for how they will approach learning and growth during their tenure with your organization.
Plant them in fertile soil with the right balance of nutrients to see them flourish. Seeds fail to thrive if inundated with the wrong nutrients or missing essential nutrients. Likewise, providing new hires with too much information too fast or not enough information upfront creates a culture of frustration and causes their appetite for learning to begin to wither.
Think of new hire onboarding not as an event but as a period of rapid growth with continual training. As new hires grasp their role and responsibilities, provide more advanced training, allowing new hires to flourish. Encourage people to ask for more training and to be hungry to learn something new.
Provide Water and Sunlight
All plants, whether they are young seedlings or mature trees, need water and sunlight to grow and develop. Without either, they quickly stop growing and drop their leaves. Everyone in your organization, regardless of experience level, needs the training to grow and prosper.
Training resources that are always available for reference are sunlight to your people. They are always present and available for the taking. Reward people for taking advantage of these resources with gamification. Gamification creates an incentive to get people in the habit of continually learning and provides goals to work towards. Something as simple as badges added to an intranet profile can motivate people to learn more.
Provide easy-to-access sunlight in the form of:
- On-demand videos focused on specific tasks
- Digital courses that allow people to move through the material at their own pace
- Written step-by-step instructions filled with screenshots
- Manuals and handbooks that include everything from the high-level overview to the minute details
Training classes are the water for your garden. Just as plants require regular watering, people need frequent, regular training to sharpen their skills and thrive. Whenever possible, make training classes hands-on to improve retention and deepen understanding.
Provide water in the form of:
- Live training in your conference room
- Webinar-based training
- Conferences that focus on skills your people need and allow people to learn from other attendees
- Lunch and learns where someone in your organization presents on their area of expertise
Making time for training is a crucial component of cultivating a culture of learning and growth. Avoid interrupting those attending training whenever possible, allowing them to focus on honing their skills.
Nourish with Fertilizer
Transplanted plants need a fresh round of fertilizer to thrive in their new environment. Like a transplanted plant, your people need nourishing with training whenever implementing change. Whether it is the introduction of new software, a software upgrade, or a change to existing processes, training is the key to adoption.
Organizations that have successfully cultivated a culture of learning and growth don’t just provide training at the time of the change. They provide regular follow-up training to ensure that everyone fully understands the new software or method and helps employees buy into the change.
Uncover the Right Tools
As gardens grow and change, forgotten tools get hidden under fresh mulch and behind new growth. As people become overwhelmed with more work and learn new tasks, it is easy for them to forget about less often used tools. The less the tools get used, the further they fall from people’s minds.
Working harder has become the norm in most organizations. When people take pride in working harder rather than uncovering the right tools to work more efficiently, innovation and efficiency decay. Uncovering and rediscovering these tools is the key to working smarter, not harder.
Regular training on a variety of topics reintroduces people to forgotten tools. Once you remind them that the tools exist, retrain people on how to use these tools efficiently. From creating automatically updating tables of contents to redacting sensitive information from a PDF, forgotten tools are scattered all around your garden, waiting to be uncovered.
Prune Old Standards
Prune phrases like “that’s the way we’ve always done it” from your organization’s vocabulary. Whenever you hear this phrase, stop and encourage those around you to challenge the status quo and come up with a better way. All people, regardless of their experience or role, have valuable input when it comes to innovation.
Anonymous suggestion boxes allow even the timidest people to challenge the norm and suggest improvements. Whether it’s a physical box in your office or an electronic suggestion box, letting people speak up, anonymously gives everyone the chance to speak their mind without fear of repercussions.
Hold regular meetings to tackle the thorniest issues. Invite people to brainstorm new ways of doing things and rethink processes. As improvements and innovation become the norm, people develop an innovation mindset and start seeing ways to make improvements in every aspect of their job, allowing for exponential growth and potential.
Banish Aphids and Pluck Weeds
Aphids, the bane of many gardeners, suck the sap from plants. They rapidly reproduce and thrive in unattended gardens. Negativity is the aphid of legal organizations – sucking the positivity out of your culture and spreading like wildfire. We hear it all too often: “I don’t have time for training.” “We can’t change that; we’ve always done it this way.” “Only new people need training.”
You must nip this negativity in the bud before it has a chance to spread. It all starts at the top and works its way down. Your leaders must first embrace training and change before you can expect those in the trenches to adjust their attitudes. When leaders eagerly attend training and stay engaged, it sets the example for others to follow. When leaders ask for feedback on processes and show excitement about possible improvements, it encourages others to speak their minds.
Bad habits spring up like weeds in a garden. The sooner you pluck them, the fewer you’ll see, but the gardener’s job is never done. Regular training reinforces good habits and helps people develop the right ones. Whenever you see bad habits forming, put together a training plan that focuses on the right habit. Encourage those with bad habits to attend, and they’ll soon be back on track.
Plan for the Coming Seasons
Gardeners must continuously plan for the coming seasons. There is always something to be done to prepare for the changes ahead. Planning for future growth and development in your garden requires mapping out and improving processes constantly.
There are a plethora of process mapping tools to pick from. Find one you like and start mapping. Answer these questions:
- Where does the process start?
- Who does what along each step of the way?
- Where are there bottlenecks?
- What steps take the longest?
Use this information to start brainstorming ways to improve. Start with the bottlenecks and work your way out from there. Encourage people to think outside of the box – some of the craziest ideas result in the best innovations.
