Twenty years later, they still make me smile

I’ve been writing a book about the experiences that have shaped my life and the way I approach learning. As I worked through the beginning of my learning and development career, I went back to a video from my last day at TELUS, on 28 April 2006. More than twenty years ago now. 

Before I started writing, someone could have asked me about the people I worked with there and five or six names would have immediately come to mind. Then, as I thought about one person, I remembered another. Five or six became ten or twelve, then twenty, and then there were dozens.

Watching the video brought so many more of them back.

It runs for about half an hour. There are speeches, thank-yous and quite a few “I love yous”. Almost everyone I see is someone I had a personal connection with. I knew something of their story, what mattered to them and what they hoped to do. These were people whose company made my working days better.

I get a bit teary watching it. They still make me smile.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere quite as special as that team, at that time. We worked hard, and there was a great deal happening around us. But there was also an enormous amount of affection. I cared about those people, and I felt cared about in return.

As I watched, I began to recognise how much of that experience is still present in the work I’m doing now.

The work gave me a way to know people

I hadn’t joined TELUS intending to build a career in learning and development. I wanted work that would let me come home each night, after spending long periods away doing remote surveying.

I started as a deployment clerk. A few weeks later, I was asked to help three new starters learn the job. That became a more substantial learning role, and the business invested in my development, giving me training, mentoring and opportunities to take on more responsibility. I was helping other people learn while others were helping me build a career. 

What I appreciate more clearly now is the opportunity that work gave me to know people.

Helping someone learn meant paying attention to more than whether they could complete a task. I wanted to understand what made sense to them, where they were getting stuck and what they were trying to achieve. As we worked together, I learned more about their interests, their motivations and their lives.

The work gave us a reason to talk. It also gave me a reason to listen.

Over time, the person I was helping became someone I knew. Their progress mattered to me personally. I wanted things to go well for them, and our connection extended beyond whatever we had first been working on.

I wouldn’t claim that learning and development created that whole community. Many people contributed to what we had. But it gave me a way to participate in it, and to form relationships with far more people than I might otherwise have come to know.

Those relationships were shaping me, too.

I also don’t want to turn the experience into a story in which everything was wonderful. By the time I left, I was exhausted. We had been through an industrial dispute, a difficult return to work and a major expansion of the team. I needed to leave the circumstances around that work, even though leaving the people was hard. Both things were true. 

The affection I feel doesn’t make the difficult parts acceptable. It does help explain why, twenty-plus years later, those people still mean so much to me.

Connection has a value beyond the job

In learning and development, I can make a case for connection in terms of the work. I can talk about the value of understanding colleagues, asking for help or being able to have an honest conversation.

But that isn’t really what I’m thinking about when I watch the video.

I’m thinking about how fortunate I was to belong to that community. How much better my days were because those people were in them. How something that began through a job became a part of my life that I still hold with love.

Research into people’s wider social lives has found an association between stronger social relationships, greater wellbeing and living longer. That is a much broader finding than anything I could claim for a workplace learning program, but it reinforces the importance of connection beyond its usefulness to an organisation.

I don’t think we should have to prove that caring about each other makes us more productive before we consider it worthwhile.

That doesn’t mean a workplace should become someone’s whole community, or that colleagues owe each other friendship. People are entitled to privacy, boundaries and a life elsewhere. I would still like work to be a place where someone can feel known, respected and genuinely welcome.

I worry about the things that make that harder. In particular, the possibility of being filmed, shared or judged can make an ordinary moment feel more exposed than it needs to be. I don’t want people to feel they must always present a polished version of themselves before they can participate.

The video itself reminds me that technology isn’t simply the problem. A recording has allowed me to revisit people and a moment I treasure. What matters to me is whether we use these tools with care, and whether we leave room for people to try something, be uncertain or get it wrong without turning their discomfort into something for others to watch.

That is the kind of room I want learning to offer.

A reason to return to each other

When I build programs for Yzly, I think about the skills people need and the work those skills will help them do. I design opportunities to learn, practise, use something in a real situation and return to it with the team. Leaders take part in that learning and help connect it to the work around them.

Watching the farewell video helped me recognise another reason that returning matters so much to me.

A learning rhythm gives people a reason to return to the subject. It can also give them a reason to return to each other.

The topic provides a starting point. It might be feedback, a difficult conversation or understanding a response to change. My hope is that, as people explore it together, they also learn something about the people beside them.

Perhaps someone discovers that a colleague they thought was always confident finds some conversations difficult too. Perhaps they hear an explanation that makes a person’s response more understandable. Perhaps they realise they have been struggling with something that others recognise.

These are possibilities I want the design to make room for. They aren’t outcomes I can promise.

Returning gives those conversations somewhere to continue. People have another opportunity to listen, offer help and find out how someone went. The learning doesn’t have to end at the point where a little understanding has begun.

Of course, putting a recurring meeting in the diary doesn’t create trust. I would not expect people to become more open in a room where their uncertainty was dismissed or used against them. The way people are treated matters far more than the fact that they have been brought together.

Nor should connection depend on people disclosing things they would rather keep private. I’m interested in making it possible for people to know one another through learning and doing the work, without demanding intimacy from them.

A facilitator guide can support a conversation. It cannot decide what people will come to mean to one another.

That part belongs to them.

What I hope to pass on

I talk about Yzly as a way to make useful learning more accessible. That remains important to me. I want leaders to have the support to develop their teams, and I want people to have opportunities to grow without needing to work for an organisation with an enormous learning budget.

But the book is helping me understand more clearly what sits beneath that purpose.

I want the learning to be useful in people’s lives. I want it to help them understand themselves and one another. And I hope that, somewhere in those repeated opportunities to learn together, people find a connection they would otherwise have missed.

I can’t recreate my years at TELUS. That was a particular group of people, in a particular place and time. What we had belonged to all of us, and it was never mine to package up and give away.

But I can carry what they taught me into the things I build.

When I watch that half-hour of speeches, thank-yous and love, I see people who helped shape the person I became. I see a community I was fortunate to be part of. The years since I left haven’t taken away the care I feel for them.

I would love for someone else to look back on a team, twenty years from now, and feel something like that.

Helping make that possible is part of what I’m building Yzly for.