involve me and I learn

Tell me and I forget,

teach me and I remember,

involve me and I learn.

Quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, although no substantive evidence that Benjamin Franklin crafted this expression. The earliest partial match known to QI occurred in the writings of Xunzi (Xun Kuang), a Confucian philosopher who lived in the third century B.C.E.

Quote Investigator. "Tell Me and I Forget; Teach Me and I May Remember; Involve Me and I Learn". Accessed on July 5, 2023. 

straight conversations

 

I think the first 3:25 seconds of this interview is powerful. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

Reporter: Following the huge win against the Pelicans we saw this team take to the court, take the locker room, go to the weight room – and that was after a big win. What has this team’s emotion and reaction been like after the Clipper’s loss?

Coach Monty Williams: It’s been the same approach…. One of the culture pieces we’ve tried to implement is we don’t let win’s and losses dictate the atmosphere and the culture we feel like we are establishing…. That’s something that I’ve learned over the years, I cannot change – no matter what happens on the floor our gym stays the same. We want everybody here excited about coming to work, and I think that allows for us to have a level of consistency in how we approach development. The most important thing is that people are excited to come to work. Nothing changed. Yesterday was the same as any other day…. We teach, we grow, we get after it. 

Reporter: You’ve been preaching staying in that middle ground for a while now. When did that mentality really set in for you?... Why is that such a key in order to get this team where you want them to go? 

Coach: …Listening to the guys that I had coached before, they didn’t always feel excited about coming to work because they thought that I was going to push them in a way that diminished their talents. I really had to take a deep look at my approach. It was one of my prayers that if God ever gave me a chance to be a head coach again I wanted to be excited about work everyday myself, but I also wanted the players to have the same feeling – when they got up out of the bed they felt really good about coming to work…. I had some straight, black and white conversations with guys that I coached, and what I heard back – I was ashamed to be honest with you. I didn’t realize it and that’s why the communication with those guys was really important for my growth. 

Monty Williams

Post-Practice Media Availability. 1/5/2021. https://www.facebook.com/suns/videos/163428998468163

constant opportunities for improvement

Once Pal’s [Sudden Service - a burger joint] selects its candidates, it immerses them in massive amounts of training and retraining, certification and recertification. New employees get 120 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own, and must be certified in each of the specific jobs they do. Then, every day on every shift in every restaurant, a computer randomly generates the names of two to four employees to be recertified in one of their jobs—pop quizzes, if you will. They take a quick test, see whether they pass, and if they fail, get retrained for that job before they can do it again. (The average employee gets 2 or 3 pop quizzes per month.)

“People go out of calibration just like machines go out of calibration,” CEO Crosby explains. “So we are always training, always teaching, always coaching. If you want people to succeed, you have to be willing to teach them.”

Bill Taylor

"How One Fast-Food Chain Keeps Its Turnover Rates Absurdly Low". Harvard Business Review. January 26, 2016.