Finding a Learning Group's Identity

I sat there, the unspeaking sets of eyes of my learners on me, wondering how fast I could develop telepathy.

Training new hires doesn’t ever faze me; this group did. I’d been with them a week, running dialogue-and-participation-driven sessions, trying to break through the awkward silences. Sparking dialogue was like pulling teeth, except it’s whale teeth, and the whale is cranky, and also this procedure is happening underwater. Chatting individually was fine, but finding a facilitation style that meshed with all three of their learning styles felt impossible. In short, I had no idea how to get them to work together as learners.

And I never figured it out.

The group didn’t get everything they could have out of our time together. Fortunately, their talent carried them where I couldn’t; they’re all doing great things for the company today. Some are even buddying new hires. But yeah; as a facilitator, I failed.

After that I had to learn how to read and respond to a group as a group, not as a cluster of individuals. The answer fell out of the sky six months later, and it wasn’t what I expected. It was Working Agreements.

New Outcomes from Old Exercises

Working Agreements is a well-known exercise. The goal is to create a set of norms so that learners and the instructor know what to expect from each other. The definition, process, goals and traditional advantages of Working Agreements are well-documented; this resource is a good one.

I’m not proposing a new way of approaching Working Agreements. Rather, I believe that we’ve been ignoring key data that comes out of the exercise: the agreed-upon values, preferences, and learning style of the entire group.

As facilitators, we know that it’s important to get to know our learners individually. We ask them about their favourite ice cream flavour, or the last book they read, or which Hogwarts house they’d be. This is good. We should get to know our learners as people. The better we understand their passions, motivations, and personalities, the better we can help them learn.

There’s no similar shortcut to getting to know their identity as a group. You can’t ask a bunch of people what their favourite ice cream flavour is collectively (though that would be an entertaining consensus-building exercise). Establishing the identity, preference, and best practices for a group is hard, and our traditional methods for divining group identity are spotty (more on that later).

Back to our story. Shortly after that tough cohort, my team incorporated Working Agreements into the beginning of our four-day onboarding program as a way of establishing learning norms. In the beginning, the output was predictable: there was always some variation of Manage Your Tech, Don’t Be Mean, and Talk Sometimes But Also Listen (and for some reason, every cohort adds “have fun!”. Mandatory fun is weird). Over the course of five or six cohorts, however, I started noticing alignment between each group’s Working Agreements and my perception of their group identity. Let’s look at another cohort example to show you what I mean.

Case Study: The Sales Feels

One of the ways facilitators try to define group identity is by role. Salespeople are money-motivated and brash, engineers are detail-oriented and practical, account managers are empathetic, and so on. There’s danger along this path. People are not defined by their job, and there’s no role where only one personality type can be successful.

Our onboarding involves primarily sales reps and account managers. Four months after the tough cohort, I had two nearly identical cohorts: one of four, one of five, both a majority of sales folks with only one account manager. Their working agreements would probably similar, right?

Here’s the first group’s set: Be on time, no distractions (phones down, laptops closed), ask questions, have fun!

And the second: don’t interrupt, ask followup questions, respect diverse opinions, have fun! (Author’s note: sigh.)

Two groups, identical in terms of role makeup, with vastly different norms. If we look at Group 1, we see that they don’t want their time wasted. They want to maximize the return on investment for every minute spent. They are textbook Sales.

Group 2, however, is interested in creating a psychologically safe space. They want to have input, feel comfortable challenging, and create a personal experience. They are not textbook Sales. They have Sales Feels.

So what can we do with this information?

How to Action It

We already have a blueprint for how we can act. Remember those individual questions we talked about before? Ice cream, favourite books, Hogwarts, etcetera? We ask those questions to get to know our learners, understand their preferences, and then customize their learning experience as much as possible.

As much as possible is a necessary modifier. If one learner prefers interactive learning and the other prefers a didactic style, you wind up doing theoretical whale dentistry like I did.

Decoding working agreements is the missing step; your learners have already worked together and agreed on what they want to prioritize, and what they’re willing to sacrifice, to create a mutually beneficial learning environment. All you have to do is respond.

For Group 1, that meant that I started every session with a very clear explanation of what they could expect from the session, and how it would apply to their role performance. It meant respecting their time and not needing to “warm up the room” before I started. It meant being merciless with my Parking Lot and not spending time on questions outside the strict boundaries of the session goals.

For Group 2, it meant taking extra time to warm up the room. It meant stopping to check for understanding and comfort multiple times per session. It meant letting the learners pursue lines of questioning out of personal interest, as opposed to adherence to the session agenda.

The Future

Clearly, there are more than just two group identities out there. Fortunately, they map well to our understanding of individual learners. Perhaps in the future I’ll expand on strategies for other responses; for now, I hope you find this helpful in putting you on the path to understand your groups not as people, but as learning units.