Begin with the Role of the Leaders
Begin with the behavior and contribution of your leaders. Your leaders make four critical contributions to the development of a learning organization.
- Leaders provide the initial vision about why your organization exists and where you are going.
- They communicate this vision. They clearly communicate their belief that continuous growth, learning, and improvement will ensure its accomplishment.
- They build consensus and ownership around this vision, and are influenced by the views of others in the organization.
- They model the actions they want to develop in others.
Their expectations are verbal, but most importantly, actions that others can see. Leaders who want a learning organization continually learn themselves. They read books and articles and share the content with the rest of the organization. They attend training sessions and conferences.
They foster an environment in which people are empowered to make decisions about their work. They make intelligent risk-taking the norm. They assure that all information people need to make good decisions is communicated. They promote an organizational environment that supports learning and personal mastery.
Create Your Learning Organization
To become a learning organization, everyone must contribute. Following are my ideas about how you can ensure the development of this environment at work. (They are in no particular order; the more you do, the better your results.)
- Read together. One printing shop, with thirty employees, set aside two lunch hours per week to read and discuss the book, The Goal, as a group.The marketing staff of a software development company voted on a book to read. The department members took turns leading the discussion of various chapters at staff meetings. The leadership team in a student health center read, Leading Change, together. The group discussed concepts and chapters at their weekly leadership team meeting.
- Attend training and conferences. A recent study by the American Society for Training and Development suggests that there is a direct “causative relationship between training and performance but doesn’t prove it.” (The ASTD Benchmarking service continues to gather data each year which may prove the relationship over time.) Create the expectation that anyone who attends training or a conference will make presentations to other staff about the most important learning they took away from the event.
- Provide alternative sources for learning such as CDs and online learning.
- Debrief every project and initiative. If you have developed a new product, designed an ad campaign, or purchased new equipment, to cite a few examples, don’t just move on to the next activity. Bring together everyone in the organization who contributed to the success or failure of the initiative.
Debrief what went right, what went wrong, and what you will do differently in the future. Learn from each project, initiative, and activity. In the debriefing process, seek not to place blame; aim for shared understanding. In the process, create an environment in which people feel safe to share the truth about what really happened.
