Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping leaders and organizations fully activate their teams, driving both engagement

and performance. So I run a lot of leadership programs in service of activating teams.

I've been doing it for years, and I've picked up a lot of trade secrets along the way.

One of my favorites? It's not just knowing, but actually celebrating the fact that I am never the

smartest person in the room. I do not say that with false humility. I mean that. As a facilitator,

I know that one of my greatest strengths is tapping the collective

intelligence of everyone present. I love creating spaces in which peers can learn with and from each other,

to teach and be taught by their equals. We tend to overindex on the importance of formal training,

on learning from the experts, the pros. And yet, as my personal hero,

organizational psychologist Adam Grant says in his latest book, Hidden Potential, in the U.S.

intelligence agencies, if you want to predict which teams will produce the best work,

the most important factor to consider is how often colleagues teach and coach each other. In medical

schools, students learn as much when they're taught by peers as by faculty. In other words, as we all

strive to learn and grow, we should be paying way more attention than we are to the collective

genius that we and our colleagues are all caring with us every day. When I run a group leadership

program, I always build in peer learning and coaching components, exercises and conversations

that make us all teachers and coaches and students and mentors and more. Peer learning offers a number

of advantages that teacher-led experiences don't. They build trust

and connection between teammates, as they realize learning is not a competitive sport. It's okay to

share our challenges and failures with each other for the purpose of learning. They enhance

collaboration after the program. As peer learning experiences highlight the wisdom and expertise we didn't realize

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