The Performance Improvement Blog

Culture Change Can Stick

Lasting culture change is possible in organizations that have lost their way if they focus on current successes and start small. This is the message of an HBR article by by Jon R. Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley titled, Cultural Change That Sticks: Start With What’s Already Working. They write:

It’s tempting to dwell on the negative traits of your culture, but any corporate culture is a product of good intentions that evolved in unexpected ways and will have many strengths. They might include a deep commitment to customer service (which could manifest itself as a reluctance to cut costs) or a predisposition toward innovation (which sometimes leads to “not invented here” syndrome). If you can find ways to demonstrate the relevance of the original values and share stories that illustrate why people believe in them, they can still serve your company well. Acknowledging the existing culture’s assets will also make major change feel less like a top-down imposition and more like a shared evolution.

I’ve written before about the reasons why it is better to focus on success than failure. Organizations like JPMorgan Chase, Penn State University, and the U.S. Congress, were founded on the basis of a strong sense of ethics and commitment to their customers. Somewhere along the way, they lost their moral compass but they still have departments and individuals who are committed to doing the right thing every day.

That’s where the learning starts. Find those examples of exemplary behavior, people and practices that are aligned with the aspirational values of the organization, and help others learn from them. This is likely to gain greater acceptance from the wider organization than hearing a directive from on high. This is especially true in power-diffused organizations, such as hospitals and universities, where passive-aggressive behavior will block any mandated culture change, especially without input from those who will be affected most by doing things differently. All of us do best when we feel like we have a say in our own change.

And don’t try to change everything at once. Ford Motor Company started to become a more open and trusting environment when the CEO encouraged honesty in his management meetings. Invest your energy in pockets of success that will spread throughout the organization. As co-workers see what is possible and how the change will make their lives better in the long run, they will begin to support a different culture. 

 

Why Learn?

Why should you keep on learning? You have a college degree, maybe a terminal degree such as MBA or Ph.D. You have a job that you know how to do and you’re good at it. You get a regular paycheck, and, if you’re lucky, have a long-term contract and stock options. Other than your supplier’s new products and services, what is there left to learn?

Learning and work have merged. Izzy Justice, founder and CEO of EQMentor, Inc. writes: “…the successful working professional will not be the one who has accomplished a lot in the past, but the one who is constantly learning.” Whether it’s learning something new, unlearning something old, or learning how to learn, all employees, from front-line technicians to C-suite executives, need to make learning part of their jobs.

You know the trends. Technology is changing the way we work and putting information literally at our fingertips. Globalization is changing where we work and who are our competitors; they could be anywhere in the world and could crop up overnight. A demand for transparency in all institutions has made a high degree of ethics and compliance an essential part of doing business. Expectations of corporate leaders is to do more with less which means that employees need to be smarter about their jobs and how they do them.  Networking using social media is breaking down silos and building options for sharing information and know-how but it also is a capability that needs to be developed.

These trends are putting pressure on all employees for continually acquiring new knowledge and skills. Tim Hoff, of American Trainco, offers these eight reasons for continuous learning:

1. To enhance skills, especially those not fully developed in school or prior experience.

2. To provide job security by increasing value to company

3. To increase career options within and outside current employer

4. To improve adaptability to changes in organization and industry

5. To achieve more professional success

6. To have higher job satisfaction

7. To increase income

8. To stay current with industry trends and best practices

Vincent Belliveau, general manager at Cornerstone OnDemand, links continuous learning to employee engagement, which, he argues, results in greater productivity, reduced turnover, and a better company reputation. This link between employee engagement and company success appears to be supported by research.

Andres Fortino of DeVry College of New York, writing in The Evolllution, makes the distinction between training and education. Learners will benefit from both training and education. He writes: “To keep up and to advance it is imperative that professionals engage in some form of continuing education or they will soon find themselves less in demand.”

The solution is creating a culture of learning in organizations that utilizes external education courses, workplace formal training, workplace informal training, and opportunities for feedback and reflection that help employees learn from their workplace activity. Organizations need to support continuous learning continuously. The key to this is having managers who encourage, facilitate, and reward learning by their direct reports.

 

Program Evaluation: A Process for Learning

I was recently asked, “What is your view of program evaluation? How does it differ from research?” At the risk of over-simplifying these two approaches to knowing, I would say that the purpose of evaluation is to improve programs, services, and organizations and to be accountable for results. Research uses many of the same methods as evaluation but has a different purpose. The purpose of research is to advance our knowledge and generalize findings to a wide population, beyond a specific program, service, or organization. For example, if we want to know if a particular medical procedure is effective, we would do research to correlate that procedure with intended outcomes in a range of settings and with a range of people. If we want to know how well that procedure is being implemented in hospital X and what can be done to make the procedure more effective in that hospital, then we would do an evaluation study.  Similar methods of data collection; different purposes.

Even more important is how the data is used.  I believe that the primary purpose of evaluation should be organizational learning. Evaluation of a program, service, or organization should result in stakeholders learning how to achieve success and how to sustain that success over time. Evaluation should help them become smarter about what they are doing for clients, customers, and partners.

Following are the key evaluation principles I’ve concluded from my 30 years of evaluation work[1]:  

Involve staff (internal customers of evaluation) and other key stakeholders in deciding what to measure and how to measure it. Ask them what they want to know and why. Ask them for their thoughts about data collection methods. Ask them to help pilot these methods to determine if the methods will produce the data that is needed.

Choose the method of measurement only after deciding what to measure. The tendency is to use a survey to measure just about everything. But other methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, observation) can be more useful depending on what you want to know. The appropriateness of each of these methods depends on the kind of data needed, the sources of that data, the circumstances for collecting the data, and how the data will be used. For example, you probably shouldn’t send a questionnaire to users of a literacy program, and you probably shouldn’t convene a focus group of users of a drug treatment program.

Collect data that are credible to stakeholders. Managers might accept the accuracy of staff interviews and focus groups, whereas board members might listen only to output (e.g., number of people served) and financial data (e.g., cost per person served). One group wants to hear numbers; another group wants to hear stories. Know your audience so that you can collect data and report findings that key stakeholders will find credible.

Collect and report data that are useful. The fact that the average rating of the agency is 4.5 on a 5-point scale or that the cost of the adult day care program has gone down 10% in the past year are not particularly useful data for organizational learning. The distribution of ratings across different client groups and finding out why they rated the agency the way they did would be more useful to know. The reasons for the 10% drop in day care costs and the implications for improving the quality and future of the program would be useful to know. Consider what data will help stakeholders make critical decisions.

Report findings in a manner in which stakeholders are receptive to the information. This has to do with the format in which information is reported. You will want all of the various stakeholders to understand your findings and be able to act on the implications. Keep it simple, relate it to the goals that are important to the particular audience, and recommend what should be done about the results. Do not report numbers, only; explain what the numbers mean to the organization.  Tell the story that explains the statistics. If board members are influenced by statistics, then give them charts and graphs. If board members are influenced by client stories, then tell stories. Fit the method to the evaluation questions and learning styles of stakeholders, not the other way around.

Measure the process as well as the outcome. Continuous improvement is achieved by regular assessment of where people are in the process of achieving their goals. This starts by understanding what are key elements that make up the process. Then adjustments to the process can be made, especially as you learn more about staff and client needs and the organization becomes clearer about its goals. Do not wait a year. Give yourself the opportunity for short-term adjustments that will have long-term impact.

Provide just-in-time and just-enough information. Give staff the information they need, when and where they need it. Learning is maximized when people are not overwhelmed with new information, they can relate new information to their work, and they can apply that information to a problem on the job, immediately.

Measure to improve the process, not to blame or punish. Our tendency is to feel threatened by anything that might reveal a lack of personal competency. When we feel threatened, we become less cooperative and less willing to improve performance. Do everything that you can to assure participants that the measures are not being used to make judgments about individuals. Follow through on this promise. Use the data only to help individuals learn, make changes in the organization, and plan for additional activities that will make a difference in everyone’s performance. Do not use the data to chastise or penalize. As Peter Drucker said, “The question isn’t, Do you make mistakes? It’s, Do you learn from them?”

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[1] Adapted from Developing a Learning Culture in Nonprofit Organizations by Stephen J. Gill, Sage Publications, 2010

 

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.