Leanda Lee
To dismiss arguments for the hiring and promotion of foreign workers, and to justify and support the position that the interests of the resident workforce are paramount, Macau has been focused on upskilling and training its workforce – developing talent. We tend to focus on the formal methods of education, such as the 15 years of free education, life-long learning, structured company-based training, vocational training as promoted by the Talents (sic) Development Committee and internships. Learning and development, however, comes in many forms.
Real sources of learning can come from unexpected places. Chit-chat around the coffee machine is not always proactively encouraged, as aside from providing the opportunities for social cohesion and collegial relationships that make work enjoyable, it can also be the epicentre of rumour and gossip and the creation of cliques. Recent research published in the Journal of Management, however, suggests that certain types of informal conversations can have a profound influence on individual and organisational learning; learning in business and in some professions is overwhelmingly a social activity. These conversations facilitate ongoing improvements, common understanding and deeper insights into how things are done and should be done, setting expectations and standards of behaviour and performance. Indeed, they have benefits that cannot be replicated in formal meetings.
These gatherings, or huddles, are conversations that have aspects of informality about them but are not completely informal. They are interactions focused on particular issues and work tasks and are particularly productive events for organisational and job-related learning. They are distinguished from casual conversations by their task content and distinguished from formal meetings by their level of informality. In some fast-paced workplaces they are the most important form of work interaction, happening multiple times a day.
Huddles between two or more people can achieve what is called ‘important learning’: learning that “meets, exceeds, or advances a community’s […] work standards”. Learning is social and that’s why people come together in huddles for help, to seek information, feedback and advice, for observational learning, and socialization into the ways things are done in company and the profession. The informality encourages discussion, helps to deal with problems as they occur and gives people access to others who have the real expertise rather than just rely on the formal hierarchy for guidance.
Huddles draw on learning from experience. An event is experienced, the huddle will reflect on what happened, it will then synthesise the experience into some explanation or pattern of behaviour, and then it will experiment with alternative solutions. To help this process along different beliefs and ideas help the group to perceive things in new ways – “tricks of the trade” knowledge together with fresh insights give both the experienced and the new hands the opportunity to learn. Learning also involves the whole person, including the emotional person, for all emotional responses are additional information about the importance of a topic and how it is evaluated and what standards are expected. Genuine conversations, even in the workplace, cannot take place without sensitivity to emotions.
Huddles should never replace formal meetings. If not managed well, huddles can go badly: they can interrupt work; they can set off emotions and cause hurt due to the lack of meeting-norm boundaries; they can encourage like minds to draw together, thus avoiding dissent and encouraging forced agreement – more so when there are mixed levels of seniority; real differences between people in huddles can also create discomfort and withdrawal when those differences are explored in depth. This is where sensitivity and focus on others becomes important. There is a sophisticated art-cum-science to mentoring and collegiality.
To have these huddles, managers have to be present. To upskill your team and bring the organisation into a cohesive whole, make yourself available: understand and attend to emotions; acknowledge relevance of the topic to others in the huddle, even if it seems irrelevant to you; recognise value in diversity of opinion and experience, and reflect on what everyone brings to the discussion. All this –
the ideal huddle – can offer ‘important learning’ (improvement to work standards). The message? Just be there to give huddles, lots of them.
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