8 minute read
Q&A with Heather Kahlert
The Kahlert Initiative on Technology (KIT) at the David Eccles School of Business is a Digital Literacy Certificate Program available to students from any major. Students learn about cutting edge technology from industry experts, giving them the technical knowledge to succeed in any role and industry. We caught up with program founder and funder, Heather Kahlert, to talk about the role curiosity plays in KIT and her own life.
Where did the idea for KIT come from?
It was important for me to find a project that had a multiplier effect, so we started by asking a lot of questions. What do we need? What does the university need? What does the state need? What we learned was that industry needed people with a higher level of tech skills. That really got us thinking, how can we do this and how can we do this now?
What unique experiences do students get through KIT that help spark their curiosity?
KIT gives students a safe place to fail, and a place to be creative without boundaries. We want to change the narrative around tech, and make it applicable for everybody. My hope is to see this implicated across all majors. Whether you’re an education or dance major, or pursuing a psychology or law degree, we are living in a digital era where everyone can apply tech to their vocation and career aspirations, to become more valuable as they enter the workforce. The flexibility and excitement students get through KIT is something they don’t get anywhere else.
How does digital literacy promote lifelong learning and curiosity?
Technology is always changing and the companies that succeed are always evolving. If you are going to keep up, you have to stay curious. KIT fosters a space that helps students learn how to learn. Maybe you try something, and it doesn’t work out, but you can look back and say, “we built this, and we did this, and this is what we learned”.
How are you pursuing curiosity in your own life?
My motto for the year comes from Walt Whitman and Ted Lasso: Be curious, not judgmental. Whatever space I am in, I try to start by asking questions and not seeing myself as the expert. When everyone has a chance to share their ideas, we can all work together to push the best ones to the forefront. I am also back in school, pursuing an Executive MBA at the David Eccles School of Business, because I want to fine tune my skills and be able to do good, better. I am continuing my own learning because I want to make KIT better. And because there is always more to learn.
Survival
of the Most Curious
Companies with a culture of curiosity are thriving in the new corporate landscape. Research from O.C. Tanner shows what it takes to be one of them.
Curiosity goes by a lot of different names in the workplace — innovation, creativity, and ingenuity, just to name a few. Whatever you call it, one thing is for sure. Companies need curiosity to survive.
When employees left their offices at the outset of the pandemic, the normal and accepted ways of working, collaborating, and building a company culture left the building, too. According to research conducted by the O.C. Tanner Institute, organizations that tried to preserve the status quo have suffered, while companies that dedicated themselves to adapting and evolving have experienced more growth and success, even in a difficult economy and tight labor market.
“We’ve demonstrated that those organizations that are interested in curiosity are the ones that thrive,” said Gary Beckstrand, vice president of the O.C. Tanner Institute. “Companies that doubled down didn’t succeed like the ones that adapted.”
One common denominator for companies that adapted to create a culture of curiosity was a strong sense of psychological safety, said Alexander Lovell, Ph.D., director of research and data science at O.C. Tanner. The Institute’s research found a 39% decrease in curiosity when psychological safety is low. “If you don’t feel safe at work, like you can experiment and try new things, you won’t be naturally curious in your work,” he said.
Autonomy is another key factor to fostering a culture of curiosity in the workplace. The same global research found a 135% increase in curiosity when employees feel like they have autonomy within their role. This autonomy includes giving employees a say in what projects they work on, giving them flexibility over their schedules, allowing employees to prioritize their own workload, and letting employees decide where to work.
Giving employees autonomy lets them do their best work in the best place for it, Beckstrand said. For example, many employees prefer to be at home when they need to think and focus, and at the office when they need to collaborate with teammates.
Control over their own schedules and workloads also allows employees to work more productively so they can set aside regular time to get curious.
“My moments for curiosity and creativity are my reward for all my hard work during the day,” Lovell said. “It’s very energizing and it reduces my burnout quite substantially.”
CEOs and other high-level executives can put policies and procedures in place that support flexibility, autonomy, and even psychological safety, but when it comes to creating a culture of curiosity, team leaders seem to have the biggest impact. As team leaders create safe spaces for exploration and curiosity in their own departments, that culture can even trickle up to the organization as a whole.
At O.C. Tanner, teams across the company work to put the findings of their research into practice, and one place team leaders focus a lot is employee recognition, said Mindi Cox, chief marketing and people officer. And that recognition doesn’t only come when things go according to plan.
Cox recounted a time when a team within the company tried something new and didn’t get the outcome they were hoping for. Instead of continuing to try to make a bad solution work, the team leader pulled the plug and chalked it up to a learning experience. And instead of berating the team leader for a failure, company executives rewarded the team’s efforts at curiosity with positive recognition.
“We can learn so much from leaders admitting they got it wrong, and they wanted to reward that behavior,” Cox said. “They said, ‘Yes, it cost us some money and yes it cost us some time, but we didn’t try to make a wrong solution right because someone was too afraid to speak up.’”
That reframing of what actually constitutes a failure, and what is just painful learning, is key to nurturing and inviting curiosity, she said. And reframing what success looks like is also critical, Lovell added.
“Success is a bunch of incremental steps,” he said. “Success is not the absence of failure, and we need to reward all the steps that brought a project to fruition.”
The research conducted by O.C. Tanner shows that employee recognition can be a main driver of both positive outcomes and curiosity, but many companies make the mistake of using employee recognition too sparingly.
Cox describes it like this: You would never go to a baseball game and wait to cheer until you knew what team was going to win. So why should team leaders wait to applaud and reward good work just because the outcome of a project is unknown?
“You have to cheer,” she said. “The whole game is effort that leads to success.”
Here is another way to think about it: If your team is working on a six-month project and you wait until the end of it to recognize and applaud their efforts, they’ll spend six months wondering if they are doing a good job and worrying that they aren’t. That kind of fear stifles creativity, Beckstrand said, and it also causes employees to become disengaged in their work.
“Frequent, personal recognition is underutilized,” he said. “It should be integrated as part of the everyday employee experience. There are ways recognition can be brought to bear to drive this connection and desire to be creative and curious.”
All of these components — safety, autonomy, flexibility, and recognition — are the new bedrocks of the modern workplace, and they require modern leaders to succeed. Teams with a modern leader at the helm saw a 288% increase in curiosity, the Institute’s research showed.
A modern leader is a mentor or a coach, more interested in developing employees than evaluating them, Beckstrand said. Modern leaders don’t hold back information, and they are OK not being the smartest ones in the room.
They give credit where credit is due and understand that true success means programs, procedures, and people can stand without them. The result is a space where people can be vulnerable rather than fearful, and a space where employees feel comfortable and empowered to expand and go outside their role regardless of the outcome.
“Companies say all the time, ‘We want curiosity from our people but we don’t know how to inspire it,’” Cox said. “We think too often about what we want to get out of people and not about what they need from us to give us what we want.”
Though, to be fair, employees themselves also have a crucial part to play in creating and supporting these cultures of curiosity, she said. Especially in today’s tight labor market, employees want to know how companies are going to help them grow, not just how companies are going to extract their labor. But those same employees need to be prepared to embrace and maximize growth opportunities when they appear.
“You have to be a really committed continuous learner to stay relevant,” Cox said. “A curious learner is the only job description I can give you that will last forever.”
