How to Build a Learning Organization

A learning culture imparts several competitive advantages to a business, including increased efficiency, productivity and profit. (Training Industry) But culture change challenges even the most motivated leaders. Some researchers have suggested that 70% of strategic initiatives are doomed to failure. Those who succeed pursue their goals relentlessly, making one small change after another, inching closer and closer to their ideal culture.

Just like our desire to exercise more or learn to speak Swahili, the change is not in the declaration; it’s in the small daily activities that move us very slightly closer to our goal day after day.

 

Stack up small changes.

Why is it more effective to make a string of small changes rather than a sweeping grand gesture? Big resolutions are exciting to talk about, but they’re scary to implement. They push people out of their comfort zones too far and too fast. Small changes invite less resistance. They’re easier to handle so they’re more likely to stick.

If you’re an accomplished couch potato, running 1 mile is hard. Running .1 miles is easy. And once you can do that, it’s easy to add another .1 until you’re up to a mile. It seems counter-intuitive, but you’ll get to a mile faster by stacking up the tenths.

It works the same in a company. Instead of asking people to change everything they do in a day, you can ask them change one thing, like taking 10 minutes at the end of each day to reflect on their work. Once that becomes a habit, you can ask them to work on another good learning habit.

Here are a few actions you can take to get started.

 

Turn work experience into deliberate practice.

Make better use of the tasks employees are already doing by turning them into deliberate practice. Deliberate practice as described by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson refers to working on a task with the intention to improve your ability. It means that when an analyst writes a report, she views it as an opportunity to improve her report-writing skill.

As a manager, you can help employees incorporate deliberate practice by:

• Asking people to critique their own work.
• When assigning a task, ask employees to focus on improving in one specific area, such as fewer errors.
• Review progress in focus areas prior to starting the next assignments.

 

Turn teamwork into collaborative learning.

Ask employees to help each other learn. Bersin’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report suggests that the future of learning will center around coaching and mentoring, rather than simply offering courses on discreet skills. Plus, people enjoy learning from each other. In fact a recent survey by the Centre for Learning and Workplace Technologies found that employees value learning from other employees over independent learning or formal courses.

Mentorship and peer-to-peer coaching encourages people to share tribal knowledge and experiences with others, which in turn helps the entire organization learn faster in response to changes in the market.

What a manager can do:

• Ask more experienced employees to help newer ones accomplish clear objectives.
• Create small teams for the express purpose of learning together.
• Ask people to share their experiences with their team and discuss how that experience can help the whole team improve.

 

Develop the habit of reflection.

Just as you ask people to self-critique their work as a part of deliberate practice, ask them to take time each day to reflect on their activities and identify what went well and what didn’t. Again, the point is to get into the habit of seeing common experiences as possible learning opportunities.

Researcher Ruth Heylyer writes in the Journal of Work-Applied Management, “Learning, especially in the workplace, does not always occur as a “light bulb moment”, it can be hard to pinpoint due to its gradual and ongoing nature.” Regular reflection helps people put the small lessons add up over time.

What a manager can do:

• Ask your team to spend 10 minutes at the end of each day writing their reflections on the day. If writing is uncomfortable, they can share verbally in pairs.
• Meet regularly with each team member to review recent observations. This meeting isn’t to judge, but to help employees reach their own conclusions. Your feedback should focus on the process, not the results.
• Model reflections on your own work day and budget project time for reflecting with the team.

 

Reward the process.

In building a learning culture, your goal is not that employees learn something, it’s that they adopt the habits of continuous learners. Once those habits are in place, the learning comes naturally.

So your recognition, rewards, objectives, and bonuses need to focus on those habits. An employee may not turn in the best work, but if he can self-critique his work and find areas for improvement, he’ll be learning how to do a better job the next time, the time after that, and on and on.

As a manager, if you announce that learning is a key initiative to the organization, you need to back up those words with real recognition and rewards. Otherwise, employees will realize that you aren’t serious about this learning stuff.

What a manager can do:

• Focus quarterly objectives on learning behaviors like reflection and self-critiques.
• Focus performance reviews on how well employees have adopted these habits.
• Set team goals around collaborative learning and peer-to-peer coaching.

 

Measure what you want to improve.

Just as with recognition, you have to measure and track learning activities if you want everyone to take it seriously. Track the behaviors as well as associated performance metrics.

If you don’t see improvement, adjust your strategy. The data will either reinforce the work you’re doing or show you that it’s not effective and you need to aim elsewhere.

What a manager can do:

• Identify metrics that reflect key business goals, such as project time to completion.
• Track these metrics and share the results with employees.
• Ask employees to evaluate whether their learning habits helped them achieve those metrics and what else they can do to improve.

In a 2015 article in Forbes, John Hall writes, “Most businesses don’t facilitate learning; they conduct training.” That’s why businesses that create cultures of learning lead their industries. They figured out that incremental changes over the long term will get them to the finish line faster. Whatever your team does to build a culture of learning today will be one tiny step for you, one missed opportunity for your competition.

 

At Pract.us, we’re dedicated to helping you take those small steps everyday. Learn more.