What is a learning organization?
A learning organization is a group of people working together to enhance their capacities to create results they really care about. – Peter Senge
In fact, Peter Senge popularized learning organization in his groundbreaking book – The Fifth Discipline – published in 1990. Peter Senge was a visionary who saw how the world was changing and why learning was a key driver or performance, way ahead of its time. In 1990, many of today’s technologies were in their infancy – internet, world wide web, smartphones, cellular connectivity, and computing capability. The enormous advances in these technologies have drastically changed the way we live and work.
Do we need learning organizations?
Today’s business environment has been aptly described by the acronym VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The speed of change is fast and getting faster. Rapid change and disruptions are the norms. There are uncertainty and ambiguity around strategy and implementation. Work is complex and needs cross-functional teams with diverse expertise. The world has become flatter, and competition is global.
The average tenure of an S&P 500 company is shrinking. So are product cycles. So are competitive advantages. Yesterday’s business models are already outdated or will be soon. Kodak, Nokia, Blockbuster, etc., are just a few of the examples of companies who held on to their extremely successful business models just a little longer than they should have. They tried to change, but it was too little too late.
The high cost of not learning
The half-life of any degree is estimated at 5 years and shrinking fast. Half of what a fresh graduate learns in a degree program will be outdated in 5 years or less. Think about the employees in your organization. What would happen if they didn’t learn anything new since they joined the company? Would it impact performance? Could you still keep up with a competitor that focuses on organizational learning and invests in employee development so they keep up? Creating a learning organization needs time, money, and relentless efforts. But the alternative is worse. Consider the classic dialogue between CEO and CFO
CFO asks CEO – What happens if we invest in developing our people, and then they leave us?
CEO replies – What happens if we don’t, and they stay?
In today’s VUCA business environment, investment in learning is essential to survive and thrive. However, relentless focus on results at the cost of ignoring organizational learning is penny-wise and pound foolish.
Learning organizations have a huge competitive advantage.
To survive and thrive in a VUCA world, organizations must adapt, explore, experiment, and innovate. And none of this can be done without continuous learning both at the individual and the organizational levels. Learning faster than the pace of change is essential to survive and thrive. Learning organizations can respond to change quickly. They can unlearn and relearn quicker to stay ahead of disruptions. They unlearn outdated or ineffective practices and develop innovative products, services, and business models to meet and exceed customer needs better than the competition. They can address problems quickly and efficiently. They also tend to attract and retain the best talent.
Individuals and organizations must continuously learn and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. As a result, individuals may become unemployable, and organizations may go out of business.
Benefits of becoming a learning organization
Most of the work done today is complex. It requires contributions from multiple team members with diverse expertise. A learning organization can utilize the collective intelligence of these diverse teams. It unlocks individual employees’ potential and aligns their efforts to learn, change, innovate, and grow.
There are several benefits of creating a learning organization. Here are a few of them
- Attract and retain talented employees
- Enhances an employees’ sense of purpose and engagement
- Reduced employee turnover
- Open sharing of knowledge
- Learning from mistakes
- Better teamwork and collaboration
- Increase ability to change and adapt
- Continuous change and innovation
- Better problem solving and decision making
- Improved efficiency and productivity
When employees learn, they grow and thrive, which in turn helps the company grow and thrive. Conversely, when the learning stops, both employees and the organization stagnate.
Leader’s role in creating a learning organization
The first step towards building a learning organization is to create a learning culture. According to Russell Sarder, the author of the book – Building an Innovative learning organization – there are four components of building a learning culture.
- The right leaders
- The right people
- The right behaviors
- The right resources
Transforming the culture to a learning culture takes time, effort, and commitment from the top management. But the rewards of such a culture are worth the effort.
The right leaders
The leader who wants to create a learning organization must have a vision. The leader must sincerely believe that learning is a key competitive advantage. Be a promoter or learning every day. Communicate the value of learning to everyone in the organization. Paint a picture of how learning will allow the organization to achieve its vision and mission.
If you are a leader, you are always leading by example. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, whether you want it, you are leading by example! What kind of an example are you setting for others to follow? What behaviors are you role modeling to others? Eventually, these behaviors cascade down and create a culture for your team.
What behaviors should a leader role model create a learning culture?
Be a lifelong learner. Be open to new ideas. Be teachable. Be curious. Ask questions and listen carefully. Learn from everyone, especially those who are at a lower level of the corporate ladder. Share what you learn. Encourage others to share ideas, feedback, suggestions openly with other team members. Make learning collaborative, not competitive.
The right people
To transform the culture into a learning culture, you need the right people. These people have both the right mindsets and the right skills. In addition, they should have a track record of having a learning mindset and delivering organizational learning. Today organizational learning is a complex issue that requires expertise from a variety of fields. In addition, there are a variety of tools and methods that need specific expertise.
Online learning, blended learning, instructor-led learning, off-shelf courses, custom-designed courses, microlearning, mobile learning, instructional design, learning management systems are just some of the many aspects of organizational learning today.
To manage it, you need experts from various fields – Instructional design, administrators, content creators, marketers, computer experts, and more.
To oversee all of it, you need a position of CLO or chief learning officer. Learning technologies are constantly changing. The right people will ensure that the organizational learning keeps up with and leverages technologies to help the employees learn – anytime, anywhere, on any device – in a way that engages them and challenges them.
The right behaviors
Eliciting the right behaviors from employees is a task that is both challenging and rewarding. The right behaviors create the right culture where engagement and performance can flourish. The wrong behaviors create a toxic culture with a vicious cycle of disengagement and underperformance. Culture change starts with the top leaders and cascades down from there. It is a long-term commitment by the senior leadership team. The top leaders need to lead by example and role model the right behaviors for others to follow. Just lip service doesn’t do the job.
The leaders themselves have to be humble and teachable. They themselves have to demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning and change. They have to create an environment where people can speak up, express opinions, and bring up problems without fear of being embarrassed, ridiculed, or punished. Leaders have to create an environment of psychological safety.
Read Leadership development plan example template – a real-life case study.
Learning, change and innovation cannot happen unless employees feel psychologically safe. They feel comfortable challenging decisions, expressing opinions, giving candid feedback, and admitting mistakes so everyone can learn from them.
Besides, the leaders have to understand the learning needs and the learning style of their teammates. This can be done through well-structured one on one meetings. This one on meetings works best when they are short, informal, and frequent. Many organizations are changing their performance management meetings between the managers and subordinates (that happens once in a quarter or even a year) to performance conversations that happen weekly fortnightly or at least once a month.
The right resources
All organizations aspire to become learning organizations. However, to translate these good intentions into concrete results, organizations need to allocate proper resources to learning.
Progressive organizations understand that learning is not something that you besides work, but see learning as an integral part of work. Hence they give learning due importance. They allocate time and budget and provide resources. They hold leaders accountable for business results and learning. Learning is part of their KRAs and KPIs.
The first critical resource is money.
One example of a company that prioritizes organizational learning and allocates money is General Electric (GE). GE includes learning and development spending on their line-item budget year after year. So instead of just paying lip service to “learning is important,” they put their money where their mouth is!
For any company wishing to become a learning organization – money has to be allocated on an ongoing basis for various resources, some of which are listed below.
- Deigning and purchasing – Internal and external learning programs
- Training rooms, equipment, and material
- E-learning and mobile learning
- Learning management systems
- Various software and technologies that aid learning
- Administration, monitoring, and evaluation of the entire learning operation
- Travel and accommodation
The second critical resource is time.
Employees need time away from work to engage in learning activities. They also need time to assimilate and apply the learning to their jobs. In addition, they may need to collaborate with peers, attend follow-up sessions, and try new things at work. All of these require unconditional understanding and support from the employee’s manager.
Managers need to help employees discover what they need to learn (with or without the learning department’s help). The managers have to be open to try new approaches, allow mistakes, and learning from them. Unfortunately, many managers treat learning as secondary and business urgencies of primary importance. For them, training is important but never urgent. Business priorities supersede learning programs. In such an environment, there is little room for employees to learn and for the organization to become a learning organization.
Is your company a learning organization?
Here is a questionnaire to reflect and evaluate how your organization is doing in its quest to become a learning organization. (Reference – Building an innovative learning organization – Book by Russel Sarder). An honest self-evaluation provides a good idea of where you currently are and what you need to do to progress.
- Do we continuously discuss, evaluate and improve our processes and work on improving them?
- Do leaders openly acknowledge errors and mistakes and work to rectify them?
- Do employees ask questions, offer different perspectives, and challenge decisions when appropriate?
- Do managers see themselves as taskmasters or facilitators whose job is to help employees do their best work?
- Do people listen to and respect the ideas and opinions of others at all levels?
- Do employees feel safe enough to take risks, even if it means making mistakes and failing?
- Do leaders and employees openly share information?
- Do leaders and employees work to reduce bureaucracy and redundant procedures?
- Does the company value learn enough to allocate a learning budget even in tough times?
- Do people help one another succeed
- Has HR put learning as part of the leaders’ and employees’ KRAs?
- Do leaders allocate enough time to employees for learning programs and follow-up activities?
- Does the company offer a wide variety of learning options to reach all levels and suit learner tastes?
- Do senior leaders themselves serve as role models for learning?
- Do you extend learning and sharing with customers and vendors?
- Does the organization learn from the best practices of other companies?
- Do you assess and improve learning programs regularly?
What factors hinder organizational learning?
What are the factors that hinder organizational learning? Two culprits that kill organizational learning are ego and fear.
The detrimental impact of a leader’s ego
For leaders with egos – it is always about winning. They put personal gains ahead of the greater good. As leaders move up the career ladders, they often get only positive feedback, inflating their egos. As a result, the amount of critical and corrective feedback reduces. This continuous positive reinforcement combined with a lack of negative inputs is bad for the leader’s further development. Often successful leaders fall into this trap and suffer from ineffective habits that derail learning, engagement, and performance.
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Read Qualities of a leader – based on validated research.
The grave consequences of fear
Fear and learning are incompatible. Fear shuts down blood flow to the neocortex – the thinking part of our brain. Fear gets compliance, not commitment. And yet, many organizations and leaders are stuck in the 20th-century paradigms of command and control. They still think that carrot and stick is the best approach to leading people.
Instead of commanding leaders, they have to transform into facilitating leaders. Instead of motivating by fear, they need to support dialogue, openness, transparency, and learning.
For organizational learning to thrive, leaders have to create a climate of psychological safety. They have to be aware of their behaviors and their impact on organizational learning. What is the current level of psychological safety on your team? How do you create a climate of psychological safety?
Create a culture of psychological safety and organizational learning
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