Learning Outside Our Comfort Zones

Every business organization consists of people with assignments appropriate to their skills: marketers, engineers, accountants, salespeople, etc. They are hired for their experiences, expertise and talents in their particular field.

      So is there any value in having them learn about specialties outside their own area? Are there benefits for a software company, say, in having its graphic designers, salespeople, and marketers learn how to write computer code?

      The snap answer would be, “No, it would be a waste of time.” But one software company CEO felt differently and began to do just that, launching a program to teach every employee JavaScript programming language, enough so that after a year each would be able to develop a product that could theoretically be integrated into the company’s software.

      To what end? Certainly not to improve or expand the company’s product offering. Why, then?

      Michael Jaconi, CEO of 60-employee FreeCause, explains that he did it because he felt it “would facilitate more efficiency, bring teams closer together, and ultimately make our company perform better.”

      This is not a full-immersion course, intent on creating a back-up engineering team for code writing. Rather, the firm devotes just a few hours each week to lessons, plus lunch-hour “boot camps” led by company engineers. The program expects employees to be knowledgeable and moderately proficient after a year.

      So has this been yielding the expected benefits? Apparently so. According to employees interviewed for a Boston Globe article (“Software company wants all workers to know code,” July 11, 2012), internal meetings now take less time because fewer technical explanations are necessary. Time saved with shorter internal meetings creates “found” time for other more productive work related to one’s expertise.

      One sales executive says that his new coding knowledge enables him to better explain product attributes to clients instead of bringing an engineer into every customer meeting for technical explanations and insights.

Investing “Found” Time

Left unsaid is the fact that, instead of bailing out an uninformed salesman, that engineer is able to devote more time to what he does best – a far better investment of his (and the company’s) time.

      As I read about this and thought about its broader implications, the secondary benefits became obvious. For instance, because technology has become such an integral part of our lives, and continues to expand in that regard, it often creates barriers between technical and non-technical people inside companies.

      The non-technical side of the population, among which I count myself, knows that having a basic understanding of a relevant technical topic goes far in helping us do our jobs more effectively, especially when we have to interact with technical people or clients.

      We also have a better appreciation for the challenges and achievements of our technical colleagues.

      There’s an ancillary benefit for the individual employees, as the article points out. “At the very least, [employees] realize that knowing JavaScript makes them more marketable. ‘It’s another resume builder for me,’ said the director of accounting operations.”

      In addition, learning something new as a group, exploring an unknown field together, creates bonds among employees from different parts of the company, thereby building camaraderie and morale.

      It also gives employees a new understanding of and greater insights into the company’s products. Imagine the value for marketers, charged with creating and building product awareness among target customers. It’s not a leap for them to appreciate the full import and market potential of a new product. Similarly, as marketers, they are better able to talk with technicians about expanded market opportunities that an upgrade or product line extension might yield.

      This needn’t be limited to non-technical people learning technical subjects. Why not the other way around, too? Why not teach basic marketing or some other aspect of the business to the software engineers?

      And it needn’t be limited to software companies and code writing. No matter the product a company sells, there is a technical product research and development side of the business. Helping others in the organization learn the rudiments of the technical side, and vice versa, goes far in breaking down the walls of misunderstanding and ignorance that can develop in most organizations, in turn helping those organizations thrive and grow.

      At its heart, this kind of activity improves internal communications in the organization. And any time people with a common mission are better able to understand one another and better equipped to talk on a range of relevant business topics, it always accrues to the benefit of the business and, by extension, the bottom line.