Did You Know???

When your employees coach each other they can have a very strong impact on the organization’s overall performance. If they do not somehow make it a priority, though, it will always fall behind the immediate value-creating work they do. This is especially true if your employees feel like they’re in some sort of competition with each other — why would you share good practices with someone who is trying to get ahead of you?

But cooperation between employees — not just on specific projects, but as a regular part of business — is as necessary as it is difficult to achieve. Is there a good way to cooperate, and a good way to get your employees to do it?

Well, of course there is.

We recently spoke with a manager from a creative firm in Sydney and he shared his DYK method. DYK stands for “Did you know…?,” and he expects his team to send DYK emails around when they learn something new or find a practice that works especially well. Rather than having one person be super-smart, he basically wants everyone to be super-smart, and if you think about it, that makes for a much stronger team overall.

How does he get them to do this, to overcome their reluctance to share good ideas or the normal lack of priority they give to peer coaching? Simple: he requires it. He writes it into his employees’ objectives, expecting a certain number of DYK’s each quarter depending on their level of experience (junior employees aren’t expected to be as insightful as more experienced ones, for instance)

So, how do you get YOUR employees to share great ideas???