Don’t tell me the theory of yarn

What my grandmother and granddaughter taught me about teaching

My grandmother taught me how to crochet. She gave me some yarn and a crochet hook and showed me what to do. I was a kid, I followed along as best I could. She sat next to me on the couch and crocheted the same thing I was trying to make, a simple square, helping me when I asked her for help but otherwise just crocheting.

My grandmother was an Italian immigrant who raised five kids and was always cooking, sewing, crocheting. She was good at making things. But she didn’t tell me too much about the process. She didn’t tell me the theory of yarn, she didn’t say I had to hold the hook in any specific way. When I floundered, she took the yarn and hook from my hand and showed me how to start, and then handed it back to me. And I learned how to crochet.

I didn’t realize until recently that she was also teaching me how to teach someone else a skill I already know.

I’ve done that thing many of us do as newer managers or even executive coaches; telling someone how to do the thing you’re good at rather than letting them try themselves. Like teaching someone to crochet by explaining the theory of yarn, and the appropriate way to hold a crochet hook and how to place your shoulders to minimize fatigue. And did I tell you about the time I crocheted something fancy for someone important? That’s not always a bad way to approach teaching a skill. Some people like that kind of instruction.

But now that I’ve been doing this a while, I’m much more inclined to do my skill and wait for someone to ask for help. I’m less inclined to believe there is one way to do things, and more interested in seeing how you hold things. I understand that what works for you might be different than what works for me or others. I’m more curious.

Leaders are always teaching some skill, whether we know it or not. I’ve studied lots of models and theories about how to manage, how to coach so that a person learns or improves a skill. The theories and models are often heavy with expertise and authority. This person with this degree did this research and developed this IP/process/assessment and it has authority now.

Evidence based research is interesting and, when it comes to medicine or psychology, a critical way to assess where to invest time and energy and public resources.

But theories of management are often still redolent of the patriarchal machine that gives too much weight to the thoughts of white men in academia and their intellectualized structures. Too often these structures ignore the complexity of the lived experiences, emotions, intuitions and understanding of people who are not white men in academia. I want a pedagogy that assumes I have inherent knowledge and potential and that my specific lived experience is valid and pertinent. I want an approach to teaching skills that privileges emotion, intuition and community, that considers the relational bonds we build with one another at work, and the ways in which those bonds can be damaged.  

I recently spoke with a potential client who was interested in learning more about executive coaching, a service she had never used before. She and her business partners were wondering if some coaching and consulting could help them reach their goals. After learning more about their situation, I told her that I believed she and her business partners probably had the knowledge and skills they needed to reach their goals and that my job would be to facilitate conversations that could clear away whatever might be blocking them from being as effective as possible. This was not what she expected to hear. Let’s face it, women aren’t generally told that they have the knowledge and understanding they need to succeed, or that their experience has inherent value and worth. I’ve been in multiple situations recently where women are being told they need to behave better to address a culture that is clearly hostile to women.

My grandmother assumed I was capable of learning. Assuming people are capable is a superpower. My father did that with me and my sister – we learned pretty abstruse concepts of physics when we were little kids because he was a physicist and thought the natural world was really interesting. We thought whatever he thought was interesting was cool.

My grandmother waited until I asked her to teach me. It wasn’t forced, it was requested. Learning can be exciting, especially when it is the student who gets to guide the learning. If we are trying to build organizations where people are encouraged to learn and discover and grow, are we making learning exciting for all the people participating, not just the extroverted intellectuals?

My granddaughter, who is three, was taking a walk with my daughter and I and my daughter pointed out that the trees that were changing color were deciduous trees.

“Ciduous?” my granddaughter said.

“Deciduous,” I said.

She likes words, she likes learning new words. She will open a magazine and “read” to me, placing her fingers beneath words she can’t actually read yet and making up a story. She is excited about learning new words.

She is excited about fall, about the sudden riot of color in the trees.

A few days later I was driving her to my house for the day and we were passing a row of trees that were bright with fall colors. At every tree she would call out “Ciduous! Ciduous!”. She had a new word to describe this natural phenomenon of fall foliage and she shouted it out until finally she stopped and said, “my throat is sore from saying ciduous.”

What if we learned from my grandmother and my granddaughter? What if we taught people when they were ready to learn and gave them information in a way that engaged them? What if we stepped away from the authority based hierarchical model and assumed that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn, regardless of the letters after their names? What if we taught skills in a way that was open to change, and invited people to find the way that works best for them?

Think about the ways you were taught new skills in your career, in formal trainings or from managers or mentors?  Where were you inspired and respected? What was it about those experiences that you want to capture for the people you are teaching next?