The Performance Improvement Blog

Lifelong Employee Learning

The Evolllution, in a report titled, Lifelong Education and Labor Market Needs, presents findings that support a key role for post-secondary institutions in educating workers for jobs that have gone unfilled while unemployment remains high, and in continually improving the position of workers within companies. The report’s conclusion states:

Many North Americans have trouble keeping pace with the changes occurring in today’s workplace. Despite the existence of 9.3 million unemployed Americans, the country experienced a shortage of 7 million skilled workers in 2010, a shortage that is expected to climb to 21 million by 2020. A lack of educational attainment sits at the root of the issue. So much so, that unless more North Americans strive to achieve a higher level of education, average income per capita is going to decline within the next decade.

Much of this unemployment is structural. Employers just don’t need as many employees today as they did a few years ago to do the same jobs. Technology and automation have made companies much more efficient. The only hope for workers is to continually upgrade their skills. Alvin Toffler, the futurist, has been quoted as saying, “The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Colleges and universities will remain one key resource for this learning, unlearning, and relearning.

However, let’s not put all colleges and universities into the same pot. They have different missions, structures, and cultures. For example, large universities are not adept at making quick and timely changes in their curricula to respond to changing needs in a company’s workforce. In my region of the U.S. there is a severe shortage of IT engineers. Companies do not need people with four-year computer science degrees nor do they necessarily need people with two-year, community college degrees. They need people who have had enough education to be able to do the job and solve problems for customers. Some employees might only need a class or two. For others, a two-week “bootcamp” might be all that is necessary. Universities tend not to look at education this way. They are oriented towards the academic year, academic terms, and academic requirements.  These programs are often designed around the intellectual interests of faculty, not around the needs of students and their employers. That’s fine, but this is not what employees need in order to be successful in their work places.

Community colleges, by virtue of their mandates, can be more responsive to the development of workers. Living up to their name, these institutions strive to meet the needs of employers and learners in the communities that they serve. They can add and subtract courses and programs from term to term, and sometimes in shorter time spans, as long as there is a demand from students and there are available instructors (full-time or part-time) to teach the courses.

Universities often have to go through a much longer process to change curricula, sometimes taking several years with required approvals from departments, central administration, and state-level committees. These institutions can be effective partners in employee learning and development, but employers and learners should not assume that every institution can be responsive. Their mission and culture will dictate whether or not they can meet the needs of employees.

For these partnerships between employers and post-secondary institutions to work, employers must demand more cooperation from colleges and universities. And employers must be prepared to encourage and support employees who want to take advantage of this kind of resource.  

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations

Several excellent blog posts have recently come to my attention that, when combined, provide a how-to for creating a learning culture in organizations. One of these posts appears in Jane Hart’s blog, Learning in the Social Workplace. In this post, she writes that workplace learning is:

1. Structured learning experiences (e.g., training) and informal learning experiences (e.g., communities of practice)
2. Helping workers learn continuously on the job
3. Peer-to-peer learning that is “lite on content and rich in interaction”
4. An integral part of everything that is done in the organization, supported by technology and social networks
5. Managed by learning professionals who facilitate both formal and informal learning experiences

Hart writes further that learning professionals should, therefore, take on a new role, that of “Enterprise Learning Community Managers.” I see this role a little differently. I think we need this role but learning professionals should teach all managers how to serve in this capacity. A learning culture needs every manager encouraging, facilitating, and holding people accountable for learning.

In another post titled, How to create sustainable behaviour change, Tom Quayle writes “learning and development needs to move away from the fixation that the way to grow the capability of your staff and improve performance is through training.” He explains that training doesn’t change long-term behavior. Employees must be motivated to change. This is done by managers communicating a compelling reason for the change, measuring the new behavior and giving feedback to employees, creating “triggers” in the work environment that remind employees what needs to be done, and building communities of employees that support shared learning.

Quayle offers some specific ideas for sustaining learning and change, such as:

Do your homework on your employees. If they're sales people and they're out on the road, how can you bring development directly to them? Is there an app or social networking forum you can communicate through? And what type of individuals are they? Are they likely to respond to emails or do they prefer face to face interactions?

In this suggestion, he is imploring managers to adapt the method of learning that they use to how particular individuals and networks learn best given the content. Use the ways they tend to communicate when conveying information to them.

In a blog carnival started by Enterprise Collaborative, Harold Jarche contributed a post titled, The learning organization: an often described, but seldom observed phenomenon. In this post, he writes that we need to:

move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time. Learning must be an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function.

Jarche observes that learning organizations have these three characteristics:

• People at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment
• The daily routine supports social learning
• Time is made available for reflection and sharing stories

What I think Jarche is saying and what I think is missing in most discussions of organizational learning, is an organizational routine of feedback, reflection, and active social learning. That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Do You Need a CCO and CLO?

Should your organization have a CCO and CLO? Paul Hebert argues against organizations appointing a Chief Culture Officer.

Hebert writes:

…as soon as you codify, quantify and assign responsibility to something it ceases to be everyone’s responsibility…Culture is a defined as a set of shared values, behaviors, norms.  Shared.  Operative word.  Shared means we all have a part in the outcome and the input…If you create a job called “Culture Chief” you’ve just provided a backdoor for every manager, every employee to use as their personal escape route when culture starts to go wrong at your company.

I agree with Hebert and I have similar concerns with having a CLO (Chief Learning Officer). Learning is what employees in high performance organizations must do continuously as part of their jobs. Companies don’t have CWOs (Chief Work Officer), so why do they have CLOs? I suspect CEOs appoint CCOs and CLOs because it makes them feel like they are doing something about the work environment and employee development. The risk is that responsibility for employee engagement and learning will be relegated to a department and not owned by every executive, manager, and employee in the organization.

For a long time, organizations have built a department around training and given it a director in order to give it status and to protect it from the budgetary absorption of other units. The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.

I see the need for a CFO and a CIO. They are leaders of operational areas that require specialized focus on managing, maintaining, and improving systems that support those operations. Those areas need a voice at the executive table. But culture and learning are who we are and how we work collectively. They should be nurtured and actively fostered daily by everyone. 

On the other hand, any kind of major change in an organization needs a champion. Employees want a face on actions that affect the way they do their work and how they are rewarded. They are more likely to commit to doing things differently and going in a different strategic direction if they believe that the leadership of the organization fully endorses the new direction.   A credible, respected leader that frequently reminds people of the change can play a key role in ensuring that the change happens and that it sticks. Also, it’s good to see the visibility for culture and learning that comes with appointment of a person in those positions. However, if sole responsibility for the change rests with that leader, it will not be sustained over time. Eyes will roll every time that person opens his or her mouth. A high performance culture and continuous employee learning will not become woven into the fabric of the organization.

Change in culture, such as transforming an organization from high fear to high trust, has to be done collectively and requires that everyone in the organization accept responsibility for doing things differently and recognizing and rewarding people differently. Change in learning, such as managers forming an alliance with their direct reports around learning and performance improvement, also requires shared responsibility and mutual support for doing things quite differently. Learning is everybody’s business whether at the individual, team, or organization level.

Leadership for culture and learning should come from CEOs. It’s their job to set the strategic direction for the organization and ensure that the organization is aligned with that direction. Culture and learning are the foundation for that alignment. I understand the desire of CEOs to departmentalize those roles, but the downside risk is significant. 

 

The Future of Work and Learning

I have been asked to speak to a group of 14 to 16 year olds about the importance of finishing high school and attending college. It’s one of my favorite topics. But as I thought about the talk I realized that I better say something about the future of work and why college has become more important than ever.  It’s fun but risky to speculate about the future of work and learning. The world is changing so fast. It’s hard to know what will happen next week, let alone 10 years from now.

As leaders, we should be thinking about the future, including whom we will be leading and what they will be doing in our organizations. We need to be prepared and we need to make sure our employees are prepared.  

A good place to start is with the tech industry because that industry will affect the nature of everyone’s work in the future. Chris Jablonski, in a ZDNet post titled, 5 trends driving the future of work, describes five major ways in which work is changing:

1. More independent workers (one estimate is 20 million by 2013) – These are the independent consultants, contract workers, free lancers, free agents, and temps who cycle in and out of organizations in a constant flow. More people want to work with more flexibility and choice in what they do and more companies want to have more flexibility and choice in who they hire.  I think we will see the rise of a permanent-temp labor force.
2. Working online – Workers will find jobs and do their work via email and Web sites and apps, possibly without ever setting foot inside their employers’ organizations. It’s outsourcing and it’s telecommuting and it’s working remotely; not as an exception, but rather as the principal mode of work.
3. Co-working – For cost reasons or social reasons or convenience, workers are choosing to share work space with people from other occupations and organizations. Sometimes they start out in business incubators and then grow into a more cooperative arrangement. Co-working is more about community than entrepreneurism, although it is some of both.
4. Lifelong learning – Workers need to be learning continually because of a world that is constantly changing.  Jobs are evolving and new jobs are being created in much shorter time frames than ever before. Whether one stays in the same job or moves to a new job, there will always be more to learn just to stay current. People will be working longer, much past the traditional retirement age, and doing that in new careers that require new knowledge and new skills.
5. Businesses that solve new problems – For example (from a list prepared by the World Future Society), we might need chef-farmers who can bridge the gap between farm and restaurant, or clone ranchers who can raise cloned animals, or drone dispatchers who can manage remote-controlled vehicles, or space junk haulers who can clear the skies of unwanted debris. It's fascinating to think about the possibilities.

To Jablonski’s list, I would add five more trends:

1. More small, entrepreneurial businesses – A desire for autonomy, control, and meaning, will drive many new workers (as well as baby-boomers) towards starting and growing their own businesses. New technologies and new consumer attitudes make these kinds of endeavors possible. However, there is a limit to this growth; not everyone is psychologically and financially equipped to take the risks associated with starting and managing a new business.
2. Knowledge workers needed for nearly every job – From assembly line workers to auto mechanics to farmers to truck drivers, jobs will require increasing sophistication in the management of information. Because they have the tools, workers today, especially in developed nations, are retrieving, storing, sorting, and making sense of vast amounts of information as a normal part of their jobs.
3. Changing jobs and careers frequently – Workers will no longer seek stability in their careers. It will become normal to move from job to job, “stop out” of the workforce from time to time, move in new directions and with different organizations, and form different kinds of work relationships with their primary employers. Change, not stability, will be the order of the day.
4. Just-in-time learning – New technology is connecting more people globally and bringing more information to our fingertips (literally) whenever and wherever we need to know something. Workers will become mobile learners and learning will be on-demand rather than learning according to HR’s schedule.
5. Solving complex and difficult global problems – Workers will be called on to solve, not just observe, the most intractable problems of our era: poverty; hunger; disease; global warming; energy conservation; violence; war and peace; and economic equality. We believe that we should be able to solve these problems and many young people are choosing to dedicate their careers to these issues.

Each of these 10 trends suggests that we need a workforce that is more informed, more able to integrate information from multiple disciplines, more able to interact effectively with diverse co-workers and business associates, and more skilled and knowledgeable about technology of all kinds. This is why I think a college education (two- or four-year degree) will be the “cost of admission” in the future, if it hasn’t become this already. To work for someone else or to work for yourself will require the breadth of knowledge, skills, and emotional intelligence that is developed in college.

What workforce trends do you see and how do you think a college education plays a role in the development of workers that will be needed in the future?

 

Active and Passive Learning in Organizations

Many of the typical methods of learning in the workplace make the learner a passive recipient of knowledge and skills. Employees are asked to read, watch, or listen to information being dispensed. The method might be entertaining, interactive, and of their own choosing, but fundamentally these methods are passive for the learner. Another approach is to make the learner an active creator of knowledge and skills. In this role, employees (as individuals, teams, or the organization as a whole) receive feedback about what they are doing and how they are doing it and, through individual and collective reflection, learn how to make themselves, their teams, and the enterprise more effective.

Jane Hart has provided us with an excellent list of “passive” ways in which people learn in their workplaces. She includes:

1. Company training (face-to-face workshops and e-learning)
2. Self-directed study of external courses (of their own choice)
3. Company documents (manual, policies, strategy documents etc)
4. Internal job aids (to support use of systems, processes and activities)
5. Working collaboratively within their team (sharing resources, ideas and experiences)
6. General conversations and/or meetings with people (formal or ad hoc)
7. External personal and professional networks and communities(including online social networks like Facebook and Twitter)
8. External blog and news feeds (reading subscribed resources)
9. Content curated from external sources (daily summaries of key articles, blog posts, etc)
10. Google search for Web resources (looking for and using external resources)

Although “active” methods might be implied by some of the items on Hart's list, I think “active” ways of learning should be made more explicit in our organizations. Otherwise, I fear they will continue to be overlooked even though for many individuals, teams, and organizations they are more powerful learning methods and more likely to result in organizational improvement than the “passive” methods.

Here are ten of these “active” ways of learning in organizations that I would add to Hart’s list:

1. Action learning (structured reflection on one’s own actions and experience)
2. Logs, diaries, and journals (recording reflections and learning as it occurs)
3. Simulation and debrief (group exercises to test assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes about processes and systems)
4. Shared visioning (whole organization identification of collective values and goals)
5. Large-scale events (whole organization system change)
6. Appreciative inquiry (identifying strengths of individuals, teams, and organizations)
7. Dialogue (conversation that seeks mutual understanding of beliefs and values)
8. Coaching (facilitating an individual’s self-awareness and performance improvement)
9. Learning histories (structured group reflection about the meaning of past events)
10. Benchmarking (comparing processes of one organization to those of another)

 

What's Better: eLearning or Classroom?

We need to examine the proliferation of Web-based education before it gets out of hand (It may be
too late.). Online college courses are being promoted as the panacea for producing more college graduates and strengthening the workforce. The Obama administration has been touting the educational value of online courses since coming into office over three years ago, and many colleges, especially community colleges, have adopted that mantra.

Many companies are also convinced that “elearning” is the answer to their employee training and development needs. They are told elearning will be cheaper, faster, more convenient, and more effective than traditional, classroom training. Also, using elearning programs makes managers feel like they are staying on the cutting edge of technology. Nobody wants to be left behind.

Feeding this appetite for online programs is research that seems to support the notion that online is better than face-to-face, classroom instruction. A study by the U.S. Department of Education found a small advantage for online (blended) programs. However, they qualify that finding by writing:

Despite what appears to be strong support for blended learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for blended learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages.

The problem is that whether online programs are better than face-to-face depends on the purpose of the course, learning goals of the program, skills of the instructor, and expectations of learners, among other things. I published an article about this nearly 10 years ago in Educational Technology. At that time, I wrote (in ilalics):

1. E-learning will not revolutionize training; it is only one instructional method among many, each better at achieving some instructional objectives than others. (I was wrong; e-learning is revolutionizing training. However, the change has been in the accessibility of information, not in the impact of instruction.)
2. Putting a course on the Web or on a CD-ROM does not ensure performance improvement.(Learning and change depend more on expectations of learners and organizational culture than on the mode of delivery.)
3. Employees learn in many different ways. (For some, online instruction fits their style of learning, but for others it is not always the best mode.)
4. E-learning is not a low cost alternative, especially if it is not aligned with the organization's strategic goals. (If the content is not aligned, it will be a waste of time and energy. No matter how cheap it is per learner, it will be too expensive.)
5. Having a vast selection of courses is meaningless. (It’s wonderful, for personal edification, to have access to thousands of courses from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other prestigious colleges. But if these courses aren’t related to what learners need to know on the job and can’t be applied immediately, then more is not better.)
6. Work and learning are the same. (The tendency of managers is to think that by having instruction online, employees can use non-work time for learning. But this separation between work and learning is a false dichotomy. Especially in this day and age, employees have to be continually learning; it must be part of their job.)

In the past 10 years, the technology of online instruction has evolved considerably. Interactivity has advanced. Audio and video have continued to improve. Practical mobile tools for just-in-time applications of elearning are now available (e.g., smart phones and tablets). However, the danger is that organizational leaders and technologists will assume that any learning that is computer enabled is better than direct human contact. For some learning, this could be true. For other learning, it is not. We need to align method of content delivery with intended learning outcomes.

photo credit: Mr_Stein via photopin cc

The 0% Solution to Learning

Ideally, organizations should be striving for a culture in which every aspect of the workplace supports continuous individual, team, and whole organization learning. It should be a place where Individuals are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, where teams are learning how to help the organization achieve its strategic goals, and where the organization as a whole is learning how to achieve its strategic goals.

In this kind of culture, formal classroom training is superfluous. The most important learning occurs in the conversations that employees have with their supervisors and co-workers, in the conversations that teams have about team development and effectiveness, and in whole organization experiences with problem solving and planning. Learning occurs from the feedback and reflection around individual, team, and whole organization successes and failures. Learning occurs because of a performance management system that permeates every aspect of organizational life, not because of isolated instructor-based courses, workshops, and seminars.

Robert O. Brinkerhoff makes this point in his writing about measuring the contribution that training makes to learning and performance improvement. He argues that the isolation score, that indicator of how much training contributes to performance results, should be zero. He writes:

An isolation score of zero, on the other hand, seems to me to be the perfect solution: it means the organization has figured out a way to drive a desired performance improvement and resultant business result solely by manipulating the performance system, so there is no need for any training at all. Isn't this scenario exactly what the performance-oriented practitioners would seek? Training is always an expensive solution. If you can get to the desired business outcome without spending a dime on training - by just adjusting incentives, motivation, performance support, etc. - isn’t this what a thoughtful HRD leader should strive for?

The implication of striving for an “isolation score of zero” is that the whole organization owns learning, not just HR and the CLO, and when the organization needs performance improvement, training is not the first course of action. We have to change the way we think about learning and performance improvement, especially as people need to learn faster and achieve better results.

Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult mental model to change. In a recent post on ASTD’s Learning Circuits Blog, Connie Malamed asks, “What do you think the future role of the training professional will be?” She offers this model of future roles:

Malamed's model is an accurate representation of the current state of things but not where I think the field needs to go in the future. My model would not include “design and create courses.” My model would put “align learning with the strategic goals of the organization” at the center and “create a culture of learning throughout the organization” as the next key role. We have so many learning support options now, including just-in-time elearning (desktop and mobile), coaching, mentoring, simulations, on-demand video, experiential learning, internships, and on and on, that we rarely need to develop courses. Learning and development professionals need to be focused on performance results, not on training. 

 

Investing in Training in Downturns and Upturns

The U.S. is emerging from a training drought that occurred during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. At least, that’s what’s indicated by organizations that do this kind of
research. ASTD reports an increase in spending on L&D in 2010 (latest year for which data is available); they estimate companies spent about $171.5 billion. Bersin & Associates reports that corporate spending on training increased 9.5% in 2011 – the largest gain in three years.  And Training magazine’s research found a 13% increase in spending on L&D in 2011. Each of these studies uses a different method for calculating spending. However, the trend is undeniable: spending on employee training is increasing.  

With this increase in spending comes a great opportunity to do things right. In our book, The 5As Framework, Sean Murray and I wrote that most training programs significantly impact only 10% to 20% of their participants. This represents a huge waste that no organization can afford any longer. As the worldwide recession comes to an end, organizations must use every dollar very wisely. Garry Marsh, director of the U.K. company THM Business Simulations, gives us some thoughts about best ways to use those dollars. Here are those seven ideas with my spin on each one:

• Get it right first time – Think in terms of what learners need, not the latest training fad (content or delivery). Only provide experiences that will help learners improve performance and contribute to achieving the strategic goals of the organization – no more and no less. Pay attention to the quality of content and quality of the learning intervention.
• Keep employee satisfaction high – Involving employees in opportunities to learn is an effective way to increase engagement. Many employees value learning more than a pay increase. To keep engagement high, make continuous learning part of the culture of the organization.
• Train your managers – Many managers did not reach that position because they were great managers of people. This is something that all managers need to keep learning. And if organizations want to prevent their top talent from leaving as the economy improves, they must give managers the opportunity to learn and grow.
• Focus on customer experience – All organizations should have the improvement of customer experience as one of their top strategic goals. To achieve this goal, they will have to train employees in how to create a better experience. Learning about the customer experience should be on every manager’s agenda.
• Spend less, get more – Organizations should not rely on the usual suspects and usual methods for delivery of training. It’s about learning; it’s not about glitzy programs. It doesn’t have to cost much to develop talent. Maybe a manager will become a more effective team leader with the help of a mentor. Maybe a manager will become more effective at giving performance feedback with the help of a coach. Maybe a manager will become better at financial management by attending the CEO’s “open-book” meetings.
• Be ready for the upturn – As the economy improves and companies start hiring again, the best talent will look elsewhere. They have stayed only because nobody else was growing and hiring. Unless managers continue to see opportunities in their current organizations and they feel respect from their leadership, they will be gone. Organizations should do something about these conditions now.
• Look after yourself – Many resources are available to help any organization be successful while keeping costs low. Look for help internally and externally. Use what the organization already owns when that makes sense and then go outside to peers, consultants, and training organizations when they can help you improve performance and achieve your business goals.

 

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

It’s that time of year again. It seems like everyone has their top this or top that from 2011. Not to be left out, I thought I would do a little year-end reflecting of my own.

Throughout 2011, I used this blog to shed some light on critical leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from “the vision thing”, to shaping organizational culture, to improving the effectiveness of employee training programs, to building trust, to breaking down communication silos, to doing better presentations, to seeing organizational blind spots, to increasing employee engagement, and more.

Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. They are:

Hospital Culture Trumps Equipment and Techniques - Culture, with all of its values, assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms, is a powerful force within organizations. Culture shapes how things are done. In hospitals, culture has life and death implications. Evidence suggests that health care outcomes are improved when the culture of a hospital encourages trust and honesty among staff and with patients and when people act consistently in accordance with these values.

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation: A Critique – I explain why evaluating training by using a survey that asks trainees questions about each of the “Kirkpatrick Four Levels” is a flawed way to determine if that program is having a meaningful impact on an organization. Although a four-levels survey is a very common way to approach evaluation of training in organizations, it probably will not provide managers with the information they need. I suggest an alternative approach.

Performance Management is Broken - What is intended to pass for performance management in too many organizations today is the annual compulsory performance review. To label this a “performance management system” is to give the process much more credit than it deserves. A perfunctory meeting between a manager and employee once a year to review a standard rating sheet that lists competencies and goals that are probably no longer relevant, is not a performance management system.

How to Use PowerPoint – Millions of presentations are given every day using some form of slideware, often PowerPoint. It is an important communication tool of managers. Yet, management’s messages are not getting across. I frequently hear that employees didn’t know something that had been mentioned in an all-staff presentation, or that they didn’t realize its importance, or that they didn’t understand what it had to do with them. Apparently, PowerPoint slides are, in many cases, failing to communicate key messages. I refer the reader to suggestions for more powerful PowerPoint presentations.

20 Signs of Employee Disengagement - An important question for all managers is, “Do I have an employee engagement problem in my organization?" You don’t need an organization-wide survey to answer this question. Pay attention to what your employees are saying and doing. Look and listen for the clues. This blog post lists twenty tell-tale signs of disengagement.

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2012! 

 

Barriers to Learning in Organizations

Continuous acquisition and application of knowledge, skills, and beliefs by individuals, teams, and the  whole enterprise is an essential aspect of high performance organizations. However, barriers to this learning are common in organizations. These barriers must be overcome in order for organizations to have long term success. Twelve of these common barriers are:

1. Program focus – new programs and services are evaluated in isolation rather than as interdependent parts of the whole organization, e.g., a diversity workshop is evaluated by the participants at the end of the workshop, not by everyone in the organization weeks and months after the workshop
2. Limited resources – learning is not given adequate funding and support, e.g., staff are not given resources to experiment with new ideas before risking large scale implementation
3. Work-learning dichotomy – producing and selling things is valued whereas learning is merely tolerated, e.g., little involvement of supervisors in the training of their direct-reports
4. Passive leadership – leaders don’t ask themselves the hard questions and their boards and co-workers don’t question their actions, e.g., a hospital CEO continues to push for hospital expansion while nobody asks, “Is expansion in the best interests of patients, employees, doctors, and the community?”
5. Non-learning culture – organizational values, assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and norms do not support learning, e.g., recognizing (praise, reward, promotion, etc.) individual success but not recognizing team success
6. Resistance to change – trying new ways of doing things is not encouraged, e.g., individuals are told to be creative and innovative but not allowed to implement their ideas
7. Not discussing the un-discussable – everyone has a shared but un-spoken understanding that certain issues are not to be confronted and resolved, e.g., one employee’s negative attitudes are bringing down morale of the organization but nobody will talk about this problem for fear of retribution
8. Need for control – managers intentionally and unintentionally use organization charts, policy manuals, rules and regulations, performance evaluation, compensation, budget and expense monitoring, security systems, and work-space arrangements to constrain and limit sharing and applying knowledge, e.g., lines of communication are enforced within an organization to the point that a manager in one department may not talk to a manager in another department
9. Focus on short-term, simple solutions – managers taking the most expedient course of action without solving the long term problems within their organizations, e.g., doing multi-person layoffs to reduce costs when the real problem is not offering products and services that customers want
10. Skilled incompetence – the tendency of managers to avoid embarrassing or threatening interactions, place blame on others, and not accept responsibility for problems, e.g., the leader of a team that failed to complete an assignment avoids asking himself, “What is it about what I am doing or saying that contributes to other people behaving in ineffective and destructive ways?”
11. Blame, not gain language – employees tend to use mostly language that is judgmental and punitive rather than language that facilitates learning, e.g., when something goes wrong, the first words out of a manager’s mouth are, “Who is responsible for this problem?”
12. Selective attention – not seeing (literally) and, therefore, not learning from unexpected events, e.g., two employees attend the same presentation by their CEO but understand the new organizational direction in very different ways

What additional barriers to learning have you observed in organizations?