Tl;dr: We’re big on learning at Huddle. I’ve mentioned before that we have an internal slack channel where we list what we’re learning as we go. Mick, a Managing Partner at Huddle, got meta with me this week as we spoke on ‘learning about learning’ at an early stage startup.
Mick: Learning is so essential for early stage company building. And everyone knows learning is essential. But I think the thing that’s so important is making sure that there is continuous learning. That makes such a big difference. And the question is, how do you actually learn?
As leaders, as founders, Steph and Mike have created a culture where they’ve said, “Guys, we’re in learning mode. We’re not in growing mode.”
Diana: And that empowered our internal team to test out our hypotheses and make mistakes where we need. Like that one day Mike stopped the meeting and said, “Let’s all just give ourselves full permission to make mistakes.” That was so freeing for me, personally.
Mick: Yes, and then we come back with our findings and discuss them as a team to serve as the key learnings and then identify, okay, what are we going to do with these learnings? That really sets us up for impactful progress.
It starts with leadership empowering the entire team to learn, which then creates a continuous mechanism of learning: we have our group conversations, our slackbot that asks us ‘what did you learn this week?’, our bi weekly product learning meeting where sales and community and team assembly come in and say hey, here are the things we’ve learned. We’ve created a culture of learning.
Diana: What’s one of your favorite things you’ve learned at Huddle?
Mick: I think because I’m working so closely with founders, it’s that a lot of early stage founders have an idea of what they need, but in a lot of cases it's actually so different or so much more than what they initially thought they needed. And that's either because it's a first time founder or perhaps it's a founder that hasn't gone through product discovery of validating the idea that they have. And that’s where we can step in and help them.
Being empowered to make mistakes has had a huge impact on me. Hoping that by sharing this you get a little of the magic too 🪄
Until next time,
Diana