The power of colleague-led learning

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Colleague-led learning. Peer-led learning. What if I told you some of the best learning and development in your workplace doesn’t need a big budget, a slick platform or an outside trainer on speed dial?

Sounds unlikely, right? But it’s happening.

Confidence through collaboration

I’ve just been working with a group at Beazley, a global insurance firm. They didn’t wait around for the “perfect” training course on presentations. Instead, they built their own.

A colleague-led club, now 100 members strong, where people practise speaking, swap feedback and support each other to go from “just about okay” to truly compelling.

They call it Beazpoke and it’s buzzing

It began with small groups of six, each person giving a short two-minute talk about themselves. Nothing scary, just practice in a safe space.

Over time, the groups merged into larger circles of around 12 people, with talks expanding in topic and duration. Step by step, the confidence grows.

Along the way, they invite external input — that’s where I came in, sharing some professional tips and tricks.

The result? Skills sharpened. Confidence lifted. And the culture shifted from “we’re on our own” to “we’re in this together.”

Listen to my 8-minute podcast - The power of colleague-led learning

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Why peer-to-peer learning matters

When people take ownership of their learning, something powerful happens. They stop waiting for permission to improve. They build networks, share ideas and create a culture of encouragement.

And it’s not just about presentations. Imagine the same approach for:

New managers sharing challenges and solutions

Sales teams swapping strategies

Colleagues tackling multi-generational working

A “pitch club” for honing big client presentations

The possibilities are endless.

How to kick-start colleague-led learning

If you’re thinking, “This sounds great, but where do I start?” here are some simple first moves:

Start with two key members who share challenges. They might know each other already, they might not. That doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re at a similar level, facing similar issues.

Get them together and put the idea to them: it’s perfectly fine to set up a group where they can explore ideas, solve problems and build their network. Simple, but powerful.

From there, let it grow. Encourage those two to bring in four or six more people to join their gang. And remember, this doesn’t have to be about leaders only. Any group of colleagues can benefit.

Workplace mastermind groups thrive on variety. Avoid the same old crowd and aim for diversity of background, role and perspective. The group will be stronger and more effective for it.

Learning then becomes social, immediate and confidence-building

Cont:

Bit Famous works with businesses and organisations
to help them communicate with confidence.

By Penny Haslam

MD and Founder - Bit Famous

Workplace Confidence

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I’m such a fan of this approach that I’ve commissioned research into its success with Northumbria Uni. I'll keep you posted!

I’ve also put together a free how-to guide on starting a mastermind group in your workplace. It covers how to get started, maintain momentum and even how to bow out gracefully if it’s not for you.

Bit Famous - How to start a mastermind group.

Why work in isolation when you can learn, grow and thrive together?

Podcast transcript: Colleague-led learning and development

We are discussing colleague-driven learning and development. Now this is really interesting if you are in a position of leading an organisation or leading a team and you you can't quite satisfy everybody all of the time with what they need in the learning and development space. So yeah, you might be an L &D lead, you might be an HR and people come to you and say I really need to know about this, I need to learn this but maybe budgets are tight.

Or maybe there's just not capacity to get everyone the learning that they want. You know, we could just dump that all into the bucket of challenges, right? So it'd be gorgeous to be able to send everybody on courses all the time and get them learning, but it's not always possible. Now, I have been speaking this week with a group of people who are self-learning, right? So this is about colleague-driven learning and development.

So this is a colleague group who self-assembled with a bit of a nudge from the L&D person. And they have over 100 members now. And they are dedicated to learning about presentations and speaking. I was brought in to do a session for them online about some of the structure that I use in my talks and how to be coherent, but also how to handle nerves. And it was brilliant. It was such a good group.

Peer-to-peer learning in practice

(01:40.382)
They were so excited to be learning on this topic. They knew each other a lot as well, so they'd been working with each other a bit on just doing short little presentations and getting some feedback. And now they were taking the learning a bit higher. A bit higher? Well, you know, a bit more in-depth is probably the right phrase to use. And, you know, it's a curious thing because it wasn't a particularly unusual or disruptive sort of organisation.

It's an insurance firm, right? They've got 3000 employees around the world. And the insurance firm, the employees are like, yeah, we want to know about presentations. We don't feel great doing them. We're not sure that we're getting them right. We could do with polishing and going from okay to compelling to even brilliant. Who knows where it could go.

It started off with one of the employees, one of the colleagues going to the L &D person and going, hey, what have we got on presentations? Because I want to improve my presentations. Have we got a course I can do? And what they had on the learning platform was all right, but it was more of an introductory kind of like clear your throat before you speak. Don't walk around. You it's very basic. And they really needed something a bit more. So with a couple of other colleagues, they got the ball rolling and founded a group.

The insurance firm is called Beazley and this group is called Beazpoke. I love that and the excitement and the enthusiasm from the members who, as I say, are now 100 strong is enormous. Imagine the power of that in your place. It's really cheap. It's just time, right?

And a bit of effort on the communication front, not a big deal. They started off with small groups of six, presenting to each other just two minutes about themselves. They then have merged a couple of the groups. there's groups of 12 now who are, you see a speaking for two or three minutes now in front of larger groups and they've got the stabilizers on, you know, they're setting off on the learning how to ride a bike journey.

Building confidence through colleague-led groups

(03:59.03)
And at the moment they've got their stabilizers on and soon they're going to be flying down the road, just absolutely flying. So my input was, you know, a little bit more advanced from a professional, you know, tips and tricks side of things. But yeah, they got it. And it was so nice, like preaching to the converted and being and to people who were as enthusiastic about presenting as I am.

And I have been, you know, over the last 10, 11 years, I've really lent into learning about it, like an A level or I'd like to think masters now, actually. yeah, sort of really seeing it as a learning journey, not as a, I can't do presentations or I can do presentations. And they've really run with that idea. So I love that. So Beazpoke is exemplar as to how to do employee learning groups. It's a special interest group, essentially, isn't it? The benefits, you can imagine, can't you?

I mean, not only do you learn some skills and develop in your own way, you build your confidence because you're suddenly able to do it and you're supported by the people around you. They're not going to criticise you and will likely be horrible about you. They're going to go, yeah, go on, you can do it.

You're going to get help with real sort lifetime live workplace issues, workplace challenges, you might do a presentation and head back to the group and go, hey, it went really well or it didn't, or this is what I think I could have done better. You're to get feedback, which is going to be nice critical friend feedback. And of course, in of itself, it's creating a network of like-minded colleagues and in of itself, you are raising your profile. It's just a win-win. And of course,

Special interest groups and mastermind learning

You know, these groups don't need to be about presenting, although that's a really practical one to think of. It might be that you've got groups that can form around other interests, like understanding the four or five generations that we work together, that we work amongst, know, multi-generational working. How can we form groups or what I call mastermind groups, actually, to look at that and understand each other?

(06:15.725)
It might be that you've got managers who are new in post who want to have a sort of supportive group for problem solving, know, live time, you know, real time workplace challenges being solved or hey, sales skills. What I did this week was it works well because or I'm struggling with this or my mindset isn't quite right or I'm feeling under confident or, you know, how would you build your sales team up?

through this masterminding or this special interest group method or might be pitches even, you know, why not form pitch club if you're in a business that's going out on the road and pitching all the time, why work alone? Why work alone? So that has inspired me enormously, the brilliant insurance firm Beasley and their Beazpoke, having a massive impact on culture as well.

Interestingly, we're doing some academic evaluation of the power of mastermind groups with Northumbria University at the moment and the early indication is that they are a force to be reckoned with. You know, why not? Why should people work in isolation when they could be learning from each other and benefiting in so many ways?

I have actually put together a brilliant step-by-step how to guide, it's free, to starting a mastermind group at your place. You know, how to get it going, how to seed the idea, how to build momentum, how to run them when they're actually happening and how to keep them going and interestingly, how to exit it. It's quite a good one, isn't it? Join something you actually want to know how to leave it as well, in case it's not for you and you know, that's reasonable. So you could look in the show notes. There's a full link to that on how to do it. A full link, I should hope so, right?

If you go to the show notes, there's a direction to find that. Or you could just Google, bit famous mastermind groups. Easy as that. Mastermind groups are genius. Go ahead, set one up, see how it goes and let me know. Thanks for listening.