Knowing your team's learning styles is good for business

Anna Stubbs • June 21, 2023

Why is it important to be aware of your own, and your team’s, learning styles? Knowing how each of your staff members best learn can enhance communication skills, improve performance and make your new-hire processes better. It can also reduce conflict and increase the range of communication strategies used in your business.


Everyone learns differently and while we’ve known this for centuries, the VARK modalities, developed by New Zealander Neil Fleming in 1987, were the first to offer a quiz with help sheets so people could use it to learn and teach better. VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinaesthetic. The idea is that we use one (or a mixture) of these modalities when learning information.



Whether it’s rules, guidelines, job changes, systems, and processes, or change within the business, it’s your job to ensure staff learn in the best way for them. Once you know how each of your staff learns (there is a range of online quizzes), assess your communication channels, and adapt them to ensure no one misses out on valuable information.

New ways to communicate with staff

How you best learn could influence the way you’re delivering information to your staff. To make sure you cover all your teams’ learning needs, pick a selection of these communication approaches:

  1. Visual: Learn by seeing - Charts, graphs, flow charts, lesson outlines, picture aids, and symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies, and other devices used instead of words.
  2. Aural: Learn by hearing - Reading aloud, verbal instructions, discussions, repeating to a colleague, oral feedback, email, phone conversations, texting, discussion boards, oral presentations, classes, tutorials, and talking with other students and teachers.
  3. Read/write: Learn by reading and writing - Manuals, reports, essays, assignments, PowerPoint, lists, diaries, dictionaries, quotations and words, words, words…

Kinaesthetic: Learn by doing - Demonstrations, simulations, videos, and movies of “real” things, as well as case studies, practice, and applications. If it can be grasped, held, tasted, or felt, it will resonate!

Grow your numbers – Increase leads generated

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
No one can deny that to grow your business, you must attract new potential customers (or leads). It’s how you generate these leads that’s important though. STEP is a lead generation acronym to help you generate quality leads without pointlessly blowing your marketing budget: S = Strategy T = Target E = Efficiency P = Process

Grow your numbers - Reporting and accountability

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure the performance of your business in order to grow your numbers. Of course, the measures themselves are pointless unless there’s reflection and discussion to ensure they’re met. Here’s a simple and effective way to link KPIs to a reporting and accountability framework. Firstly, make sure there is ONE leader for each of the departments in your business: Director, Leadership, Product / Service Development, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Admin / IT. One person can lead more than one department, but two people can’t lead one department. You can also contract out departments to avoid needing a large head count of team memebrs (finance, marketing and IT can be outsourced relatively easily). Be clear on who reports to who . One person can only manage 5 or so people effectively. Consider establishing teams with team leaders to enable you to achieve a ratio under 6 to 1. Set up regular department meetings . This may be the CEO with each of the other department heads, the Operations Leader with the Operations team (if less than 5 in the Operations team) or with the Operations Team Leaders (if more than 5 in the Operations team).

Grow your numbers – Control overhead expenses

By Anna Stubbs • June 3, 2025
One of the simplest ways to grow your bottom line is to tighten your belt and spend less.