What Facebook Has to Teach Us About How to Teach

In his latest column for Forbes online, Drucker Institute Executive Director Rick Wartzman writes about the way that Facebook is building a culture of continuous learning throughout the company.

At the heart of Facebook’s effort, Wartzman explains, are a few key principles: “speed, brevity and small bites of information delivered at the point of closest relevance.”

A new training curriculum to enhance manager effectiveness, for example, “has been broken up into 90-minute, biweekly teaching nuggets,” Wartzman writes. Also “sparking excitement inside Facebook,” Wartzman says, are peer-led coaching circles composed of six to eight colleagues. These groups have become a powerful way for “more senior employees to mentor younger ones.”

What Peter Drucker recognized, according to Wartzman, is that those doing the mentoring also grow from the experience. “Knowledge workers . . . learn most when they teach,” Drucker wrote. “We often hear it said that in the information age, every enterprise has to become a learning institution. It must become a teaching institution as well.”