The thing about experience is: it’s different for everyone.

The thing about experience is: it’s different for everyone. Even the same event is experienced differently by people. How do you make the most of experience in an organisation or team?  I’ve shared some advice and suggestions like:

🗺 Use experience maps

🕘 Schedule an experience share meeting

📌 Put experience on the agenda of regular meetings

❣️ Protect people while they’re presenting their experience maps.

And it’s helpful to remember the power of ideas. Any two ideas can be connected, creating an incredible third idea. Their experience plus your experience, plus the situation you’re all in now, it can be combined to solve what you're working on.

Bringing the experience of your team together, to be used together, tapped together and understood together is better than information sitting in a spreadsheet cell or filed away in an enterprise people system. Make experience something of the ’now’, talked about and acknowledged in the now, not just of the past - when it happened - and you’ll bring your team into a strong position able to cope with the future.

>>What experience do you have that you just know will set you up for the future?

Put experience on the agenda

I’ve been writing about the untapped expertise that lives in your team and business. It’s vital you uncover it because there’s much to be gained.

Be sure to allow some time for it, like at your next meeting. Just put some time on the agenda. You could hold an entire meeting to go through everyone’s expertise, but there are other ways too.

A couple of people could present at each meeting, sharing their ‘experience maps’ as I explained a couple of days ago.

Set the time aside, and then provide some protection of the people while they’re sharing their experience. Why protection? I know some organisations where this meeting would be the most wonderfully respectful experience. I also know other teams and organisations where some people will be rude, impatient, checking their device, agitated that things are moving too 'slowly'. So you may need to chill a little. Allow time, knowing that what you’ll uncover will build connections and trust and help you know more about the people you lead. Let people share their experience - then watch what happens in the team.

>> How might sharing your experience in a team you're part of help enhance and change culture? 

Map your expertise

Yesterday I lamented the waste of not knowing what people have experienced when they join the team. So here’s what to do: Map the expertise.

Not a spreadsheet or a folder of resumes/CVs that no one will ever read. Make a map of your expertise and make it visible and available. I call them ‘experience maps’.

1. Schedule an 'experience share' meeting now.

2. Give people time to prepare their map.

3. Everyone talks through what they’ve done and shows their experience map.

4. The map lives on and can be updated over time.

A learning-focused organisation sees the efficiency, and practicality of involving people to capture, hear and see the experience in the business. And then they leverage it. It’s wasteful, ignorant and unproductive not to.

What about you? What skills or experience do you have that people wouldn’t know?