Hi, I'm Kevin Eikenberry, and I'm here
to help you reach your potential as a leader and a human being.
Welcome to Remarkable TV and the Remarkable Leadership podcast.
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In today's episode, we're talking about learning
specifically social and peer learning.
Are you ready?
Let's get started.
One of the things that differentiates us as humans from the other life forms on
the planet is our ability to learn, to learn deeply, to learn broadly.
And so many of us think of learning
as being sort of related to school or perhaps to reading.
So we we love learning into reading in school.
And, and the research also says that lots of people don't
do a lot of reading after school, and many of us didn't love school.
That's not what we're talking about today.
Today we're talking about social and peer learning.
So let's say a little bit more about both of those things.
First of all, social learning is a theory that was formulated
by a guy named Albert Bandura.
And what I'm about to do is to summarize it in about two sentences,
which is far different than the fool theory.
But basically what Bender says that in the right circumstance says we can
learn a lot simply by observing others and of course practicing it in more.
But fundamentally, the big idea here is learning by observation.
And so examples of that would include things like
learning from others in a meeting, like I'm watching
other people how they interact and meeting, and I replicate that.
I learn from my observation how to carry yourself in any kind of situation,
or perhaps how to do any kind of task when you can watch someone else
and then do it based or learn from what you saw someone else do.
Okay.
Now, peer learning is OBS is learning from observation.
But I'm going to take this
from the perspective of the workplace just a little bit more and include things
like I can learn from my peer in an on the job training situation.
I can learn from my peer in a peer
coaching situation just from conversations, etc..
Right.
So the big idea that I want to talk about today is whether we're talking
about social learning or peer learning that we be intentional in doing it
because it's a powerful way for us to learn.
But if we just let it happen because it happened, well, that's cool.
If we could be intentional about it and we can really amp up our ability
to learn, to learn more, to learn faster, to learn at deeper levels, etc., etc.
It's a way for us to get better.
Differentiate ourselves in the workplace, reach our goals, and 100 other things.
So I want to talk about this intentionality in two ways,
both organizationally and personally, some very specific things
that you can do to be more intentional in your social and peer learning.
First of all, organizationally, well, we can make sure that we incorporate
into training things like chances for people to interact.
We think about that in training, like having a breakout
group of people having the chance to work through something
and talk through something that's the chance for peer learning.
It's extremely powerful, but organizationally,
we can go beyond a training event and add things to the training event,
like the chance to have a learning partner or peer learning.
We do that lots in the training that we design
with clients or lots of other ways to give people the chance to interact
in a networking situation both both in person or online.
All of those sorts of things creating intentional modes
and methods for people to learn beyond the training.
And then the last thing I would say organizationally is that we can simply
make it an expectation that we expect you to be learning from your peers.
We're creating opportunities for you to learn from your peers at work
and and get rid of the idea that training equals learning at work.
Right?
That it's not just that we're not just that alone.
And what about personally, like, how can we use peer
learning as an individual?
Forget the organizational piece, but just for you as an individual, for me
as an individual, the first thing we can do is be more observant.
Just pay closer attention once we realize or remember
that there is learning opportunities all around us,
we can take advantage of them by simply paying attention
to how people do things and say,
Hey, I either want to do it like that or I want to avoid that.
Secondly is to just be more intentional.
Say, I'm going to do this, I'm going to take opportunities to learn.
Maybe it's in a time when I'm in a meeting and I don't know what my role is or I'm
a little bit disengaged or I'm starting to be bored to say,
Listen, where, where can I learn from
someone in this moment?
And lastly, to seek out people to learn from.
Maybe there's someone on your team
that you don't know well, but you know, they have a skill set you don't have.
Maybe most people would think about this as a mentoring situation.
I'm going to seek out
a mentor to help me learn something, which is a fabulous strategy,
but we don't always equate that with the word peer.
So we can think about finding mentors, finding people who know stuff.
That may just be our peer.
They don't have to have a lot more experience or a lot more age or
any of the things that we might otherwise associate with being having a mentor
so we can be more observant, we can be more intentional.
We can certainly reach out to people that we would love to learn from.
Okay, so what we talked about today, we said learning is way more than school,
that we can learn so much from others around us, whether we call
that social learning or peer learning, you already know it,
but now you have some strategies that you can use to be more intentional
in doing that more effectively, more often.
Let me close with today's tweet.
Learning from others is one of the best ways to learn.
Are you maximizing your learning from peers and those around you?
Well, you know, another way that we can learn
is through the magical tool of LinkedIn.
And if you would like more ideas and insights and inspirations
about being a more effective leader
and team member, and to further yourself personally and professionally,
I hope that you'll choose to follow me on LinkedIn, where we post stuff
regularly that can help you in just that way.
The link here to follow me on LinkedIn can be found.
I hope you'll do that and hope you'll be back next week
for another episode of Remarkable TV and the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.