The Performance Improvement Blog

Steps to Developing a Learning Culture

Changing an organization’s culture is not easy. It doesn’t happen simply because of the pronouncements of the CEO, or a reorganization of business units, or by conducting an organizational pulse survey, or by hiring new managers. Culture is much too complex; it’s the how and why of what an organization does internally and externally. Culture is the collective beliefs, assumptions, and values of employees (and other stakeholders) and culture affects every aspect of organizational life.

As I have argued in previous posts, to be successful in today’s world, companies need to have a culture that values and supports learning. Becoming this kind of culture takes strong leadership and a concerted effort by all stakeholders, in addition to new and repeated efforts over time.  However, some CLOs feel pressure to change things immediately.

In my online course for the Association for Talent Development (formerly known as ASTD) titled, Essentials of Developing an Organizational Learning Culture, participants want to know what they can do in the short term to create a learning culture. I’m reluctant to make specific suggestions at the risk of over-simplifying the work that needs to be done. On the other hand, some experts have offered ideas about actions that can be taken relatively quickly to enhance organizational learning. For example, Jane Hart has a five-point plan for increasing social learning. She writes:

1. Create and support on demand, self service content (courses, tutorials, guides, resources and job aids)
2. Scaffold and guide social learning experiences (for the training room, online and continuously in learning flows)
3. Help work teams, groups and communities share their knowledge and experiences to learn from one another
4. Help individuals (create and) share their own resources to support one another
5. Help individuals acquire the new modern learning skills (building their professional networks, locating appropriate resources, managing information overload, recording their learning, building a personal brand, learning out loud)

These are excellent recommendations that should help leaders be intentional about the social aspect of learning in their organizations. However, these actions alone will not overcome the barriers to learning that are part of the culture of many companies, such as: leaders who are afraid of risk-taking and experimentation; managers who don’t believe in change; an incentive and reward system that doesn’t recognize individual and team learning; and team leaders who do not ask the group to reflect on its actions. Implementing a plan to increase social learning is a step in the right direction but leaders also need to confront their organization's underlying values and beliefs about learning.

Cultural Barriers to Organizational Learning

All organizations have a culture. Some cultures support learning more than others. Some cultures stifle learning by marginalizing the training and development function, by discouraging risk-taking, by not rewarding learning, by not allowing opportunities for informal and social learning, and by undermining performance improvement efforts.

It’s not that managers are sitting around discussing how they can prevent learning; this is rarely consciously intentional. Rather, their behavior is shaped by the values and beliefs, routines and rituals, symbols and artifacts of the organization.  

Chris Cancialosi provides us with a good example of how culture gets in the way of learning in this description of a client company:

Under intense pressure to deliver, the firm no longer tolerated “failures to launch” on every single deliverable. Rather than driving innovation, this created a dynamic that stifled the behaviors needed to achieve it. Employees no longer took risks, and the firm established an underlying culture that affected its ability to compete in the marketplace.

In this failure-is-not-an-option environment, people are not being allowed to learn by trying something new, putting their knowledge and skills into practice, and learning from successes and failures.

In a learning culture, the values and beliefs, routines and rituals, symbols and artifacts of the organization are quite different from what we see in this example. In a previous blog post, I wrote:

A “learning culture” is a community of workers continuously and collectively seeking performance improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieve the goals of the organization. A learning culture is a culture of inquiry; an environment in which employees feel safe asking tough questions about the purpose and quality of what they are doing for customers, themselves, and other stakeholders. In a learning culture, the pursuit of learning is woven into the fabric of organizational life.

I’m sure most executives would claim that this definition describes their organizations.  However, they don’t see the barriers to learning in their own organizations because of their blindspots. They look in the rearview mirror and, seeing a clear path, continue forward only to be sideswiped by something in the culture that's not in their field of vision.  

What Gets Measured Gets Done…Revisited Again

The phrase, "what gets measured gets done," has become a rallying cry for trainers and evaluators. We use this to justify our work and convince CEOs that they should invest in performance measurement. However, as I've argued in previous posts, the saying is not always true and, in fact, is misleading.

One implication of the phrase is that if you measure something (customer service, productivity, sales, revenue, etc.), people will pay attention to what is being measured and do what they can to improve those outcomes. Many examples refute this logic. GM measures quality of every part and every car yet still has recalled 29 million vehicles so far this year. The Veterans Health Administration measures patient waiting time yet still is under congressional scrutiny for wait times that were much too long. Lehman Brothers, once one of the largest investment banks in the U.S., constantly measured the performance of the securities it owned and managed, yet still had to declare bankruptcy in 2008.

In each of those cases, it appears that key stakeholders had the data but did not use the data to make their decisions. It’s as if they were trying to fulfill a compliance requirement without a commitment to improvement. Or they didn’t want to know because that would mean they would have to change something. Measurement alone is not sufficient; it’s the application of those results to decision-making that gets things done.

A variation on "what gets measured gets done," is, “what you measure is what you get.” To me, this saying has a slightly different meaning. This is more about the importance of choosing the right measure for the situation so that you are reinforcing the intended behavior and not something that you don’t want. I once consulted with a state Blue Cross Blue Shield office that proclaimed their commitment to customer service but evaluated customer service reps on the basis of how many calls they handled each hour. Number of calls handled went up; customer service went down.

Jane Bozarth, in her recent column for Learning Solutions Magazine, writes this about choosing the right measure:

Begin with the end in mind: who is the target audience, what do they need to do, how do we measure whether they are the ones accessing the program, and how do we measure their performance?

So: When looking for measures, try to find things that are meaningful, that give you real information to help real people do their jobs and to help organizations perform more efficiently. Beware of easy measures and vanity metrics.

Good advice! The tendency so often is to look for the lost key under the streetlamp because that’s where the light is. Measures are chosen because “we’ve always done it that way” or because “that’s what we know how to measure” or “that’s what everyone else does.” As Bozarth suggests, decide on what behavior you want and then decide on the best way to measure that behavior. In that way, you’re more likely to get the data and results that you need.

However, here too, the phrase has limits. What you measure is not always what you get. Many organizational factors can intervene. Maybe you are measuring the right things in the best way, but managers don’t value those outcomes, or the findings are not communicated to the stakeholders, or intervening events and unintended consequences are not factored into the results. Again, it’s not measurement per se, but what is done with those measures that makes the difference.

Learning How to Learn at Honda Motor

Honda Motor Company has become a good example of a culture that supports organizational learning. In the August 1 issue of strategy+business, in an article titled “For Honda, Waigaya Is the Way”, Jeffrey Rothfeder describes how Honda has learned to solve problems. Waigaya is a decision-making meeting of key stakeholders that can be called on a moment’s notice or can be continued over a period of months, until a decision is made.

Participation in waigaya requires learning how to act in egalitarian groups that might include a member's superiors and direct reports.  It means speaking up and offering ideas without threat of retribution. This is a strikingly different kind of experience, with different rules and norms, from the typical work team. Rothfeder offers this explanation:  

Although waigaya may seem too free-form to be productive and may appear to lack a leadership component strong enough to produce real results, these meetings actually have an organizing framework that, at least in theory, ensures their success. Indeed, the central tenets of Honda Motor’s waigaya approach can best be explained by four straightforward rules:

1.     Everybody is equal in waigaya, and all can express their thoughts with impunity.

2.     All ideas must be debated until they are either proven valid or rejected.

3.     Once a person shares an idea, he or she doesn’t own it anymore—it belongs to Honda, and the group can do with the idea what it will.

4.     At the end of waigaya, decisions and responsibilities are generated—a precise list of who is to do what, and by when.

In essence, Honda has learned how to learn from its teams. Participants violate the rules from time to time (Rothfeder gives some examples) which means that team members have to continually re-learn how to learn. That’s to be expected. When you grow up in a strong hierarchy with deference to senior leaders at home and at work, it is not easy to change to a democratic process. However, if Honda wants to surface the best ideas and get buy-in to those ideas from stakeholders, they will have to continually work toward the ideal of an open exchange of ideas from everyone involved.

Warren G. Bennis 1925 - 2014

Warren Bennis, who Bill George calls the "father of leadership", died this week after establishing a legacy of research, writing, teaching, and advising that is unparalled in leadership studies. In the nature-nurture debate, he came out strongly on the side that says people can learn to become leaders. He writes in On Becoming a Leader:

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

We can all learn to become better leaders by heeding the words that Bennis left behind.