The Performance Improvement Blog

Future of Employee Learning

“if anybody says to you here’s where learning will be in five years, run in the other direction.” This is what Elliott Masie, Founder & President of The MASIE Center, said this week at the beginning of his Keynote session at the Human Capital Media Symposium for Chief Learning Officer. Masie went on to talk about trends that have the potential for changing the field dramatically. I want to expand on the three trends that have the most salience for me.

One is personalization of learning. We have the technology now to individualize both the push and pull of information. Courses, books, articles, videos, and online practice groups can be accessed according to the learning needs of each employee. If a manager wants to know how to conduct a performance review session with a low-performing worker shortly before it is scheduled to happen, she can view or download instructional material that will help her with that session. If a manager wants to help a direct-report learn the new safety standards, he can send a video on the subject to the employees smartphone. Traditional, classroom-based, mass instruction is moving into the background as just one of many options for helping employees develop the knowledge and skills they need to be successful.

Another major trend is mobile learning. Devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones are making learning possible any where at any time and with any one.  Some learning is best done in a social,
collaborative environment and in-action. For example, learning how to solve a product marketing problem with a creative and innovative solution, is best done with co-workers (located, possibly, at sites around the world) and in an online environment in which participants can share and explore ideas with each other.  To maximize learning, this global team should reflect on their experiences and archive what they learned and how that learning could be applied to similar situations in the future.

A third major trend identified by Masie is learning agility. This is the ability to find and acquire the knowledge you need as you need it. It’s not about memorizing facts and figures or methods and procedures any longer. We need employees who know how to search, locate, evaluate, select, and apply information. We need employees who can take information from a wide variety of sources, not only from trainers and educators, and translate that information into knowledge and wisdom. Employees need to learn how to be curators of information. 

What other major trends do you see that will shape the future of employee learning?

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Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

Leaders today face many challenges in facilitating organization performance improvement. Fifteen of these problems are listed in a survey of organizational performance challenges. The link to this survey follows this paragraph. Please click on the link and take a few minutes now to rank order the items on the list. I think you will find the exercise to be enlightening. If I receive a sufficient number of responses, I will report the results in a future post.

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

What would you add to this list?

If you wish to find resources that can help you with any of the challenges listed in the survey, go to Learning to be Great. 

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Culture vs. Control

The dust has settled a bit on the working-from-home issue which was stirred up about a month ago when Yahoo's 11,500 employees received an email from the HR department putting an end to “work-from-home arrangements” throughout the company. Apparently, Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, is trying to change a culture that had lost the nimbleness and creativity that it needs in order to compete in the world today. Whether you agree with this action or not, it is clear that she needed to do something about Yahoo’s workplace culture and reign in the behavior of some folks who were taking advantage of Yahoo’s work-at-home policy.

Unfortunately, the media debate quickly focused on the future of telecommuting and the plight of working-mothers rather than on the real issue which is creating a culture in which everyone is focused on innovation and results. Sometimes, to change culture, especially in a large, complex, global organization in a fast-changing industry, one has to exert greater control in the short-term to create a culture in which collaboration and teamwork will be how work is done in the long-term.

In a results oriented culture, how one works is determined by what one needs to achieve. If that goal can be achieved by working from home, then that could be an option. If achieving a particular performance goal is best done by face-to-face contact with other employees, then being in the office is probably the answer. 

For example, if my work objective is to write code for a particular Web site transaction and I can write that code from home just as well as I can from the office, then maybe working from home is a good option for me. If my goal is to create a new look and feel for an online news service, and I need the creativity that comes from give and take with other employees, then I should be in the office.

The problem is not with working from home per se; the problem is how to achieve the intended results. To start with location without consideration for the performance goal is to put the proverbial cart before the horse.

If a CEO is concerned with how employees are using their time, then she needs to talk with her managers about helping these employees set goals and be accountable for achieving results. Often, employees are not clear about what is expected of them. In the absence of this specificity, they (like all of us) fill the void with their own ideas of what they should do and how they should do it (within a general policy). When their actions come into conflict with the goals of the organization, then leaders may have to institute controls on behavior until managers can shape the expectations of employees and create a culture that is aligned with intended outcomes.

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Meetings: Love Them or Leave Them

Why is it that after all that has been said and written about wasteful meetings, managers continue to conduct meetings that are unnecessary and wasteful?  Carson Tate writes in the New York Times:

The meeting culture that is dominating corporate America is unsustainable and unproductive.
How many meetings did you attend last week that didn’t even have an agenda? How many resulted in a new idea? And at how many meetings did you think, “Why am I even here?”

Time is a commodity. And time spent in a meeting should generate a return on investment. But how often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.

This problem is not new and neither are the solutions. The famous John Cleese video, Meetings Bloody Meetings, was first produced in 1976 and dramatizes humorously the ineffectiveness of most meetings. As I have written in previous posts, meetings are overused and under-designed. We can no longer afford to have meetings just because that’s what we do at 1:00 on Mondays, or because the planning committee has something to report, or because the COO wants to announce a new policy. These are not good reasons to bring people together, wasting their time and energy. 

Technology has been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to meetings. On the one hand, location is no longer a barrier to group conversations. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops are all devices that allow people to participate in meetings remotely. On the other hand, meetings can be called with little planning and often with little consideration whether this is the best use of everyone's time.

In his 2003 book, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, John Tropman offers
very practical advice on how to have a useful meeting. His research on this problem found that when leaders had successful meetings they almost always had these four features:

1. Their meetings were characterized by decision accomplishment. Decisions got made in these groups. Participants appreciated the sense of closure that almost always occurred.
2. There was little decision rework. The group did not have to get together to decide again something that had already been decided or, as likely, had been avoided.
3. The decisions were good. There was a feeling, buttressed by reality as time passed, that the work of the group was of high quality. These were not just decisions made to “get something done.” They were thoughtful and reasoned, and they were actions that made a difference to the bureau, company, or agency.
4. People had fun! These were meetings that participants looked forward to. There was a sense of enjoyment and involvement. Participants felt that their time was well spent. They felt the meeting they were in was the “real” meeting. It was an authentic team experience.

Meetings can be productive, meaningful, and fun. However, this requires leadership that is intentional about the design and facilitation of these gatherings. Meetings should have a plan, involve group decision-making, and create a collective sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, there is no need to meet. 

Learning and Performance Improvement in 2013

The Internet Time Alliance principals have made predictions for 2013. Charles Jennings offers this picture for the year:

A confluence of technology and improved connectivity, increasing pressures for rapid solutions and better customer service, and demands for higher performance, will force the hands of many HRDs and CLOs to refocus from models of ‘extended formal training’ to place technology-enabled, workplace-focused and leader-led development approaches at the core of their provision.

Clark Quinn predicts that “…we’ll see more examples of the notion of a ‘performance ecosystem’ of resources aligned around individual needs and responsibilities, instead of organized around the providing silos.” While he expects greater use of mobile devices to support individual needs and responsibilities, he thinks many organizations will fail to use these methods effectively.

Harold Jarche reminds us that “…work is learning and learning is the work in the network era…” However, he also believes that most organizations will continue to deliver formal courses and instructor-led training programs.

Jane Hart says that no matter what IT and T&D departments continue to do, individuals and teams will find ways to bypass these units and use technology to access what they need when they need it.

Jay Cross, similar to Jarche, argues that because of the speed and complexity of change, “Learning will continue to converge with work. Increasingly, workers will learn their jobs by doing their jobs.” He believes that “smart companies” will recognize the need for a management style that supports this kind of learning.

This group of thought-leaders seems to envision a world that is making strides away from classroom-based, formal learning and towards informal, social, mobile learning. My prediction is that 2013 will be a time of sorting out instructional delivery methods, with mobile devices taking center stage. But I don’t think there will be much overall gain in support of learning. The economic and legal pressures on organizations, perceived and imagined, will prevent most from adapting to the technological, social, and demographic changes that are going on around them.

To make learners accountable for their own learning, to push down responsibility for learning to customer-facing employees and project teams, and to engage workers in continuous performance improvement, means admitting that the way managers have been doing things might not be best for employees and it means giving up centralized control. This is difficult stuff for CEOs and other managers to accept.

So, while I hope the ITA prognosticators are right (Full disclosure: I have co-founded a business to support individual, team, whole organization, and community learning.), I’m afraid that 2013 is not going to be a year of substantive change in our organizations. Executives will talk a good game, and may even look like they are adapting to the new reality, but when faced with a choice most will opt for the familiar and safe path. 

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching

Executive coaching has quickly become a nearly two billion dollar industry. Many companies now rely on coaching for the development of their leaders. Having a coach, once perceived as an admission of failure, is now perceived as a normal part of managing large, complex organizations. And coaching has also become common for entrepreneurs who need help transitioning from leader of a start-up to manager of a rapidly growing company.

With this acceptance of coaching, CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in it is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies of coaching tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

For example, an American Management Association survey of coaching found that respondents from organizations that use coaching more than in the past are also more likely to report two kinds of advantages:

1. They’re more likely to report that their organizations have higher levels of success in the area of coaching.

2. They’re more likely to say that their organizations are performing well in the market, as determined by self-reports in the combined areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

The problem with this kind of study of coaching is that it is correlational and correlation does not necessarily mean causation. It is highly likely that high performing organizations choose to use coaching more than low performing organizations. In other words, high performance predicts coaching rather than coaching predicts high performance.

Survey studies of coaching are problematic in other ways, too. One, they lump all coaching into a black box without examining the many variations of coaching. Two, they are based on the assumption that the purpose of coaching is to change the individual when, in many cases, the purpose is to change a team or the organization as a whole. Three, they don’t tell us exactly how the coaching contributed to performance improvement within an environment in which many other factors may have contributed to the change. And four, they rarely look at long term impact, which is what is often the intended purpose of coaching.

To evaluate executive coaching, first we need to define what is meant by "coaching" in the situation being evaluated. Do they mean coaching for greater self-awareness, for developing leadership skills, for making a transition to a new job or role, or for solving a specific problem? Do they mean face-to-face, by phone, or email? Do they mean an hour a day, an hour a week, an hour a month, or as needed. Is the coaching process mostly inquiry or mostly advocacy?  Does the coaching include interviews of supervisors and direct reports? Does it involve observation of work situations and interactions? In other words, what does coaching mean for that executive and that organization?

What we need are studies that tell us what kind of coaching under what circumstances contribute to what kind of results for the organization and over what period of time. Surveys are helpful for knowing the extent of coaching and the general attitude of employees toward coaching. But to understand coaching well enough to be able to replicate effective coaching or improve coaching for an organization, we need to tell the story of the coaching experience. How did the executive get involved in coaching? What were her expectations? How did she work with the coach? What did the coach actually do? How much time did they spend in coaching? What happened? What did the executive learn? What is the executive doing differently? What impact is that having on her team and organization? What evidence is there that this kind of change is occurring and that it is linked to coaching?

When we can answer these questions we will understand what it is about various coaching interventions that have an effect on results.  We will be able to compare coaching to other potential interventions and replicate effective methods. We will know the return on investment. We will know what makes an executive coach qualified to coach. We will know what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another.

Evaluation of coaching is also important to do because it reinforces client learning. When we ask someone questions about what they have learned, it helps to make that learning stick. This is what happens when we ask clients questions about the coaching they received. Their self -awareness is increased, behavior change is strengthened, and long-term follow-through is more likely.

I, Robot; You, Learn

Tom Friedman, in his op-ed column in the New York Times yesterday, describes his visit to Rethink Robots, a Boston-area company that develops easy-to-program, safe, low-cost robots for business and personal use. These are not the big, dangerous robots that you only find on the line in large manufacturing plants. These are small robots designed for doing repetitive jobs that low-skilled workers have been doing in all kinds of businesses for more than a century.  

I welcome these new, intelligent machines, especially if they can do jobs that human beings don't want to do. But make no mistake about it; robots will eliminate jobs for humans. They are reliable (with proper maintenance), they don't take breaks, and they don't ask for wage increases and promotions. However, they are a bore at the company party. In any case, they are the future and leaders need to be prepared for how these machines will change the work environment.

Friedman writes:

This is the march of progress. It eliminates bad jobs, empowers good jobs, but always demands more skill and creativity and always enables fewer people to do more things. We went through the same megashift when our agricultural economy was replaced by the industrial economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This new robotics "megashift" has huge implications for the workplace. Employers will need workers who are better educated, more willing to change, and more flexible in their schedules and work habits than ever before. These workers won't be needed for simple, repetitive jobs. They will be needed for computer-assisted jobs and for jobs that require creativity, innovation, and teamwork. They will have to be continuous learners, keeping up with technology, globalization, and new ways of organizing work.

Company leaders will need to be able to manage a smarter, more dispersed, more demanding workforce. Change will be (already is) constant. Robots (and computer automation) will be doing the simple, mind-numbing work. Leaders will have to inspire humans to think, learn, improve, and contribute in ways that repetitive work did not allow them to do in the past.

Sports and Business Are Not Analogous

As the 2012 London Olympics goes into its final weekend, I feel compelled to write about sports and leadership. For the past few weeks it seems like all we’ve heard from the news media are analogies between sports and business. These are stories about perseverance, commitment, being single focused, working hard, and, of course, a desire to win. All admirable traits but it’s very different having these traits as an athlete and having them as a leader in an organization.  

We do love our sports, whether player or spectator. Billions of people around the world watch the Olympics every four years. They express exaltation in winning and pain in loss. The usual explanation for this enthursiasm is loyalty to team and country, as well as admiration for the athletes. I think it’s more than that.

Sports give us the respect, control, and membership that we don’t get from our work organizations and life in general. With sports the rules are simple, the goals are clear, what we have to do to reach those goals is known to all, feedback is immediate, and there is a beginning and an end to the competition. With sports we feel a sense of belonging (membership) to something bigger than ourselves, win or lose. How else can you explain Chicago Cubs fans?

Our work lives are chaotic, unpredictable, and filled with disappointments. We know that we have little influence over many aspects of what happens to us day to day. We have no simple way of keeping score or knowing how well we’re doing. Feedback on our performance is rare. There is no beginning, middle, and end, it just keeps going.

As human beings, we need more than this. We need respect, control, and membership. Those qualities are not readily available in our organizations, so we turn to playing and participating in sports. We play and watch sports, not because they are analogous to our organizational lives, but because they are so different.  

David Waltz alerts us to this false analogy. He cites five ways in which the Olympics (and sports in general) do not teach us about business. He writes:

1. In business, winners and losers are not easy to determine.
2. In business, more than one person or team or organization can win.
3. In business, not every “player” is the best at what they do.
4. In business, the work never ends; there is no time to stop, rest, and rejuvenate.
5. In business, there are no permanent successes (Gold Medal); success is fleeting and “champions” can become has-beens overnight.

I love sports. I love competing and I enjoy watching my favorite sports. But I don’t think I learn much about leading an organization from this pastime. That’s okay. What I get instead is an experience that I can’t get from my business or my work consulting in organizations. I get a feeling of respect (from others and from self), a sense of control over events (real or imagined), and a belief that I belong to something bigger than myself (real or imagined). 

 

Organizational Learning Tools

What are the tools of organizational learning? As I’ve stated in a previous blog post, a high performing organization needs a comprehensive approach to learning and a set of tools to facilitate learning. A training program, or an educational event, or even a CEO’s speech about the importance of learning is not enough. Continuous learning requires continuous learning interventions that encourage and facilitate knowledge acquisition and application to the workplace. An online leadership course is nice but it will have little to no effect if not integrated with a long-term learning and performance improvement plan and an organization-wide culture of learning.

One way to think about organizational learning is to consider who are the learners (hint: everyone) and what kinds of tools would help them learn.  Learners are: 1) individual employees/members/volunteers; 2) work teams; 3) the enterprise as a whole (company, nonprofit, government agency); and 4) the communities in which the organization lives and interacts. Types of tools that can be used for learning are: 1) assessments of level of functioning; 2) models of organizational systems; and 3) solutions to deficiencies in individual, team, organization, and community performance.

These categories of learners and tools translate into a four by three matrix of learners and learning tools. In the left-hand column are the targets of learning interventions and in the row across the top are the types of tools for learning. A true learning culture is constantly considering what tools to apply in order to enhance learning in every cell of this matrix. I’ve inserted examples of tools in the matrix below.

Learners	Assessments	Models	Solutions
Individuals	Interview questions to Identify causes of performance problems	Chart of the learning process in organizations	How to have a learning conversation between manager and learner
Teams	Survey of team readiness for high-performance	Table of characteristics of high-performing teams	How to apply action-learning to teams
Whole organization	Survey of employee engagement	Chart of process for achieving strategic goals	How to overcome barriers to organizational learning
Community	Survey of community's capacity to support organization	Chart of community pressures on organization	How to engage external community in mutual learning and change

 

Each tool in this matrix is intended to be used in a reflective environment. To ensure learning from each tool, participants must be willing to collect information and feedback and then have conversations with others about what the data mean to the organization and what can be learned from this data. It’s the feedback and reflection that results in learning, not simply the application of a tool. For example, assessing team readiness for high-performance isn’t useful unless the team looks at that assessment data, reflects on its meaning, and intentionally learns from the information. 

 

Learning Organization is Culture, Processes, and Leadership

“Organizational learning” and “learning organization” are terms that continue to be misused. It seems like these days any business, nonprofit, or government agency that provides training and education to its employees calls itself a learning organization. They might do a lot of training and education but that doesn’t necessarily mean employees are learning and, most importantly, it doesn’t mean that their individuals and teams are learning what they need to know in order to become and stay high performance organizations.

With the proliferation of elearning and mlearning, I’m afraid that more accessible training and education is being confused with learning. Companies are rightly proud of themselves for the quality and quantity of online performance support that they are providing. Whether employees are continuously learning and applying that learning to achieving strategic goals is another matter entirely.

It is organizational learning that will make some organizations more successful than others over the long run. Quoting Ray Stata, co-founder and former CEO of Analog Devices, Harvard Business Professor David Garvin says that learning may be the only sustainable competitive advantage for organizations today. He explains that products, services, and processes can be copied. This observation is being played out today in the many Web-based companies. Having a search engine, online payment processing, or social networking capability was a competitive advantage only a short time ago. No more. Software engineers can create comparable services seemingly overnight. Companies have to be continually learning and changing in order to merely stay in the game, let alone win the game.

 

Garvin, one of the early thought leaders on organizational learning, and another Harvard Business Professor, Amy Edmonson, define “learning organization” in an interview he and Amy Edmonson did with HBR in 2008 (See video.). They say:

…a learning organization is an organization skilled at two things: one, creating, acquiring, interpreting, transferring, and retaining knowledge; and, second, acting, modifying its behavior to respond to [that] new knowledge and insights.  

Garvin and Edmonson go on to talk about the “three building blocks” of organizational learning: 1) environment; 2) work processes; and 3) leadership. I interpret “environment” to mean organizational culture. This includes the values, basic assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms of the organization. These aspects of culture must be aligned with continuous learning about and from the work of the organization. “Processes” are the routine ways in which the work gets done. Work and learning must be part of the same process. And by “leadership” they mean what top level leaders do to support, encourage, and remove barriers to learning and performance improvement. All three of these “building blocks” must be in place for an organization to be a truly learning organization.