Elements of Learning Inside a Foundation

Learning About Learning Files
Elements of Learning Inside a Foundation

Whose job is it to think about learning in your organization?  Often it’s not an explicit part of anyone’s job description,though CEOs,program directors,and others can do it well.

However,some larger foundations devote part of someone’s job,all of someone’s job… or even multiple jobs to this function.

Recently,the LearnPhilanthropy team had a chance to sit down (virtually) with some of the people responsible for structuring learning cultures and experiences within foundations – including learning officers,human resources directors,and organizational effectiveness folks.  We began to explore what works within a foundation to get grantmakers up to speed,keep them learning,and make sure that learning is happening across the foundation.

Learning officers felt that their institutions hadn’t yet fully cracked the nut of professional development.  They described the following types of in-house activities to get grantmakers up to speed and create a culture of grantmaker learning.

1. Assess the strengths and areas for growth in new hires – and more experienced staff

.  While some of this comes out in the interview and hiring process,it’s still useful to have a dedicated process for sitting down with a new hire and working with them to figure out what they need to know.  As folks progress in their jobs,this can be revisited during annual performance reviews or other reflection periods.

2. Define what grantmakers need to know and be able to do in your foundation.  Some foundations develop an actual “competency” or “success” model,but many haven’t codified the knowledge and skills needed to be a good grantmaker.  Some of this is role specific – obviously a program officer and a grants manager need different skills and knowledge.  Some may be foundation or even program area specific.

For general competency models,some of the field’s existing learning frameworks propose different takes on what’s essential to the well-rounded grantmaking knowledge and skills:

• GrantCraft’s map of the craft
• The Forum’s Framework for Grantmaker Education
• Categories of learning from the Essential Skills and Strategies course

3.  Provide orientation to systems and culture. Some folks discussed providing intensive orientation to the foundation’s values and practices,through multi-day trainings,“modules” taught over time by experienced staff,online modules,or a combination of these modalities.  They described detailed orientations (otherwise known by the slightly sinister-sounding  “on-boarding”) that walk a new staff person through everything from the locations of the bathrooms to the basics of operations to the foundation-specific philosophy of grantmaking.

4.  Use experienced staff for instruction,mentoring,and coaching. Experienced staff are the best teaching resource,and many of the foundations I’ve talked with had formal ways to connect experienced grantmakers with newer hires,including:

• Mini-courses or modules taught by experienced grantmakers
• Formal mentoring programs
• Informal sharing and mentoring expectations

5.  Provide regular “peer assist,” reflection,and analysis opportunities. Staff meetings can be more than updates.  They can also be a chance to bring a problem or sticky situation to the full staff (or a portion of it) for in-the-moment feedback and discussion.  The learning element varied from foundation to foundation,and included:  report outs from program area teams;analyzing a specific problem or issue (also called “peer intelligence sessions”),and reviewing evaluation data.

A few other ideas that didn’t seem to be as widely shared,but struck me as interesting:

• Assembling a cross-functional team to make recommendations about learning needs across the foundation.
• Choosing an annual learning theme for the whole foundation,and focusing programming and dialogue around that theme.
• Creating online mini-courses that can be accessed at grantmakers’ convenience.

The foundations involved in this call were all fairly big ones,but the things they talked about could be adapted and explored by foundations of all shapes and sizes.

I’m interested in hearing about the learning practices of your foundation.  How do you make sure that new staff aren’t adrift,that experienced staff are engaged,and that a culture of learning and reflective practice permeates your work?