LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT ANGELA BINGHAM
Create the space and hold it
Angela Bingham, Executive Director People and Capability at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, looks at how learning happened within her organisation, even despite the country being in lockdown. What were the critical factors for ensuring that this happened?
K
i te kotahi te kakaho ka whati, Ki te kapuia e kore e whati – Alone we can be broken. Standing together, we are invincible. Every morning, since Wednesday 25 March 2020, I told myself today was going to be a good day. My team and I had to take a leap of faith and believe in ourselves and our teams. With learning at the core of our organisation, I had to create the space and hold it. This article reflects on my time as a leader and a learning professional during lockdown. I share with you the evidence that learning has happened despite a lockdown. I look at what made this time unique in the context of learning and what we can learn from this. Four important things happened: 1. we prioritised pastoral care 22
HUMAN RESOURCES
WINTER 2020
2. we communicated 3. we were clear on the principles 4. we activated authentic leadership.
Prioritising pastoral care
I started to do a bit of reading, and I was reminded of Maslow. In an organisation where the basics (equipment, pay, health and safety) have been taken care of, individuals were able to get their heads around ‘this new way of working’ in a matter of days. We acknowledged the different makeup of bubbles, we connected with what was going on at home, and we welcomed dogs and children to online meetings. Essentially we cared at a very fundamental level. We met psychological needs through fostering belonging and connection with our colleagues. We checked in on wellbeing daily, before anything else. My team (as did many teams) started each day with a stand up: successes from yesterday, intentions for today, perceived blockers and a number from one to five on how we were feeling at that moment. No trying to bring the number up or justifying the high or low number – it was just a number. One of my learnings is that my team members were sharing problems, blockers and issues that I
couldn’t solve. And I shouldn’t have solved. I listened and acknowledged, and that’s all I could and should do. Create the space and hold it. The reality was, we didn’t roll out new software or policies. We turned up the dial on our pastoral care, thereby creating space for learning and change. It happened right before our virtual eyes.
Communicating; not just delivering messages
Meetings were shorter (although slower to start). By the time we all had sound checks sorted, people were concise. No one wasted time to speak for the sake of speaking. Brilliant. Organisational communications were short, sharp and action-oriented (no one felt the need to provide the history of pandemics). People compensated for the lack of body language by working on messaging. People asked how I wanted to meet (phone, Skype, Zoom, MS Teams, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and so on). Communication truly became two way. I have loved being involved in all the just-in-time learning that happened across our organisation. We took to MS Teams like it was our new water. We carried on with karakia, we giggled at jokes and made formal
