“We value and respect personal development, creativity, and intellectual growth.” That’s one of our core values here at Behrman House.
Personal and professional development is not just encouraged here—it is required.
1. Each of the fifteen employees writes a personal development plan for the year and reviews and assesses it quarterly with the department head. (Years ago this replaced the annual review.)
2. Teams do plus/deltas after every meeting and event in order to improve for the next occasion.
3. Colleagues coach, mentor, and support one another with personal and private feedback and guidance.
4. Senior staff, or anyone willing to do so, gets 360 degree feedback (scary, because you don’t know what you’ll hear from your colleagues, but a real growth opportunity).
5. We have a formal system for sharing knowledge. For example, Creative Team members prepare and share in advance of the meetings interesting articles, blogs, and product ideas for group discussion.
6. Everyone posts cool new ideas on the internal Behrman House blog.
7. Staff members regularly take classes and courses, attend trade shows, and develop expertise by subscribing to journals, online newsletters, RSS feeds, and blogs.
I could go on. The key in receiving feedback is to be open to learning from anyone—including, perhaps especially, your colleagues. The key in giving feedback is to make it constructive and actionable—and deliver it with empathy—so that recipients are able to let their guard down and hear you.
As educators we can learn from our students too. In this blog, one educator describes how valuable it is when his students challenge and push him to be a better teacher and assess themselves so they become better learners. This kind of reflection helps everyone improve.
It’s the best example of cooperative learning.
