Sitting next to Nellie

On learning by proximity, the five people you spend the most time with, and why the best training course in the building might be the desk next to yours.

Jim Rohn used to say that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

I've done the maths on this. I'm married, I have three sons, and I spend a staggering amount of time watching Jim Rohn on YouTube. So my five are my wife, three boys and a motivational speaker who, through no fault of his own, has never once asked me how my day was.

The average, as you can imagine, is a bit of a mishmash.

But Mr Rohn was onto something. Excellence rubs off. So does pretty much everything else: enthusiasm, standards, grumpiness, negativity, hope, the habit of saying "let's just get it done." We are, it turns out, very absorbent creatures.

Which makes it rather interesting that, at work, we put so much faith in courses and so little in chairs.

The oldest training scheme there is

I was inspired by this article by Mr Rohn and a wonderful rabbit hole I found myself in regarding mid-century workplaces in Britain. I discovered a phrase I'd never heard before. It's a phrase for learning a job by watching someone who already knows how: sitting by Nellie.

Nellie was the experienced hand on the factory floor or in the office, and the new starter sat beside her until they could do what she did. From what I could glean, it seems by the 1950s, government ministers were grumbling that there was too much of it happening, and that training ought to be more technical, more standardised and more centrally orchestrated.

I guess it makes sense in an abstract way. Sitting by Nellie sounds rather quaint, and pretty unfair on Nellie. It's also, as far as I can see, how most of us learned nearly everything that matters at work, and in life.

Nobody teaches you, in a session with slides, how a good manager tells someone their work isn't there yet without making them feel small. You watch it happen.

You see the pause before someone answers a tough question. You see someone prioritises when two things matter and there's only time for one. You notice that, when something goes wrong, some people get curious before they get cross.

The philosopher Michael Polanyi put it neatly: "we can know more than we can tell." Or, as I've written before, nothing worth knowing can be taught.

The best people in any trade know far more than they could ever write down. I've tried reading the manual. Tacit knowledge doesn't travel in PDFs.

It travels by sitting nearby.

My own experience from The shed at the bottom of the garden.

As a young boy I spent a lot of time at my grandparents'. They lived in a small but perfectly formed terrace house on the outskirts of Sheffield, and at the bottom of the garden was a woodworking shed. It was my grandad's. He was a cabinet maker. He once made me a toy multi-storey car park, all in wood; I wish I still had it. He made the desk I used right up until I left for university. And whenever I visited, we always ended up in the workshop.

It smelled the way wood workshops do – sawdust and timber and the distinct smell of stain and varnish. His tools were old but beautifully kept, everything laid out to hand on hooks with labels, each thing with its place and returned to it before finishing for the day. As he set about making something he'd talk me through it, and I'd ask my curious questions. But he knew – from a lifetime of both doing the work and teaching it – that there was only so far words and (sometimes) a demonstration would go.

The curriculum that's not written down

When you sit near someone excellent, you pick up a whole syllabus that no one has ever printed.

How the real standards work. You don't learn the ones on the wall. You learn the one they show at ten to four on a Friday, when others have left the customer issue live and decamped to the Crown & Anchor for a pint.

How to give feedback. Precise enough to be useful, kind enough not to flatten anyone. You learn to name what's wrong without making it personal.

How to own a mistake. I've come to think a whole organisation's attitude to mistakes gets set the first time a senior person says "I got that wrong" in public, and everyone sees that the business didn't crumble.

How to stay decent under pressure. This is the one you won't find in any course catalogue. It's holding a high standard without humiliating the person who fell short of it, and disagreeing with grace.

See these once and they register. See them every week and they start to feel normal. Give it long enough and they become your behaviours, the standard you demonstrate without thinking.

It works the other way too, of course. I spent eight years working in a supermarket under a store manager we called Big Bad Pete, and I learned an enormous amount from him, most of it what not to do. Anger is every bit as catching as craft. It's worth remembering, particularly about yourself.

Corridors and loos

Here's the bit I love. Some of the cleverest organisations of the last century put an extraordinary amount of thought into where people walked and worked.

When Bell Labs built its research centre at Murray Hill in New Jersey, Mervin Kelly made some of the corridors so long you could barely see the far end. That was the point. You couldn't walk to lunch without bumping into a colleague, a problem or an idea. The building was designed to make people sit next to Nellie whether they meant to or not. And whether anyone was actually called Nellie too.

In the 1970s, an MIT professor called Thomas Allen measured how often engineers talked to each other, against how far apart their desks were. Communication fell away steeply with distance. Past about fifty metres, regular technical conversation more or less stopped. Fifty metres. And here we are on video calls all day.

And at Pixar, Steve Jobs fussed endlessly over the central atrium and over exactly where the loos should go, because he wanted people to run into each other.

A course is easy to buy, easy to count and looks lovely on a CV. A chair next to the right person is none of those things, so it doesn't make the budget. But some of the most valuable learning in the building is free, and it depends on who sits where, and on which way people walk to the kettle.

A chair is cheaper than a course

You don't need to rebuild Bell Labs. Small, cheap moves do most of the work:

• Bring someone along. Take a newer colleague into the meeting you'd normally attend alone. Let them watch how it's done, then talk about it on the way out.
• Think out loud. Narrate your thinking when you make a decision, so the judgement becomes visible.
• Pair on real work. Do it on a real piece of work rather than in a mentoring programme with quarterly check-ins and a made up scenario.
• Let people watch work happen, not just hear about it in a presentation.

Proximity doesn't have to mean the next desk, either. I work mostly on video calls these days. Being near excellence just takes a little more arranging and planning: an open call while you work, a screen share of the messy middle rather than the finished slide, a voice note talking through why you did what you did. In my early career our CTO used to live in Spain and we'd have an open video call running all day with him and everyone in the office.

If you look after a team or an organisation, there's more on the conditions that help this grow in Building a Learning Culture. Proximity is one of the most reliable ways it does.

Pull up a chair

For the rest of us, it's a personal choice, and a nice one.

Seek out someone excellent. The aim isn't to copy them. Copying the moves, behaviours and attitude without understanding them is borrowed seeing, and you end up with an impression rather than an ability. Sit near them long enough to start seeing what they see. They don't have to be in your company, or even alive – there's a reason people watch Tony Robbins, Sir Ken Robinson, Rory Sutherland, Jim Rohn, Alan Watts – just spending time listening to people is enough sometimes, and the internet has opened up many people who could be role models for you.

Stay long enough to be changed. A week near someone excellent tells you what they do. A year tells you how they think.

Then become someone's Nellie. It's the nicest part of the deal. Somebody newer is sitting near you right now, picking up your standards, your timing and how you handle a bad day, whether you meant to teach them or not. Give them something good to pick up.

I'll be keeping my five, thank you, mishmash and all. But I've started thinking about a sixth chair: someone who's simply better at the thing than I am, and who doesn't mind me sitting nearby.

Somewhere near you, someone is very good at their job. Pull up a chair.