The Performance Improvement Blog

How to Create a Learning Culture in Start-Ups and Small Businesses

In this post, Rich Sheridan, Founder, CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations and author of Joy, Inc. - How We Built a Workplace People Love, explains what small companies and departments in large organizations can do to create a learning culture. He addresses fear, reward systems, hiring, on-boarding, learning, making mistakes, and experimenting. He writes:

1. We must come to grips with the role that "manufactured fear" plays as a technique for increasing performance in teams. There can be some short term benefits, near term gains, but in the long run, this destroys a learning organization.

The difference? In an organization where managerially-generated fear reigns, people are always striving to "be safe".

However, if fear is systematically removed, then people start to feel safe around each other and their leaders. Trust begins to form, and collaboration emerges and finally teamwork. True teamwork, not just an org chart with tee shirts. People gain productivity and quality through collaboration. Then innovation, imagination, invention and creativity emerge. These are the true signs of a learning organization.

2. Existing reward systems must be re-evaluated as they may be negating opportunities for collaboration and the results that learning in a collaborative system can produce. For example, one corporation I worked with seemed to have everything needed in place for their "learning organization" and yet it still wasn't happening. I asked them "what is your greatest reward here? What do you celebrate?"

"Patents", was their answer.

I asked, "And how do you celebrate this?"

They went on to describe an award ceremony, a small monetary reward and the presentation of a plaque by the CEO at the award ceremony, and then a small parade to the "wall of fame" where the plaque is hung in perpetuity. I asked to see the wall of fame. They proudly walked me back and I looked at all the plaques, and they all had the same attribute that was clearly killing their attempt at building a learning organization.

Each plaque had exactly ONE name on it. Their culture would not change until they dismantled this reward system. Collaboration will not occur in this culture. They did dismantle it, (at least reduce its relative importance) and the effect was profound. They changed their culture.

3. Recruiting, interviewing and hiring practices must change as well. Most companies hire for exact skills fit because they want their new people to "hit the ground running." This ensures that no new learning will occur because we only hire people who know what we want them to know, and we "bin" them into their long held silo because that is where they are the most productive. No learning. No growth. Stagnation.

Don't hire for skills. Hire for talents that fit your culture. Provide opportunities to learn new skills while doing real work.

4. On-boarding processes for new staff at most companies feel like a hazing ritual or, "I will try my hardest to get you productive before I demoralize you." This is our greatest opportunity to teach our new and different culture, but it is typically squandered.

5. Make books ubiquitous, and don't have a checkout policy. Don't worry if they get lost; just replace them. This sends a strong signal to staff that YOU and YOUR LEARNING are more important than a $20 book.

6. Establish a pattern of lunch & learns where staff present to each other on various topics of interest, including non-work-related topics. It exercises the mind and creates opportunities for community building and serendipity. Occasionally invite outside speakers in for these.

7. Make Mistakes Faster:  Encourage quick trials of new ideas, celebrate small mistakes with laughter. This goes hand-in-hand with pumping fear out of the room. One of my most tweeted quotes:

"Fear doesn't make bad news go away, fear makes bad news go into hiding." If mistakes are hidden they grow until they metastasize and kill the organization. Think about HealthCare.gov. The President of the United States declared to the nation that the project was going fine just two days before the launch. And then all the wheels came off. Why?  Fear-based management systems make good people lie.

8. Run The Experiment! When learning begins, ideas emerge. Someone suggests trying something. A peer or boss says, "That won't work here." The idea dies right then and there. Adopt the following cornerstone behavior of a learning organization. Look the person in the eye and say, "Yeah I know, but let's run the experiment. Let's try it first and see what happens."

Listen to Rich. I know from my personal experience with Menlo Innovations that he knows how to create a culture that makes a company a joyous place to work and financially successful, too. He knows how to align values with results.

Four False Assumptions About Leadership Development

Deloitte has identified “leadership development” as a major challenge for HR leaders in 2015. However, the research group observes that HR leaders do not have the capability to meet this challenge. As I reported in my last post, Deloitte asked “…more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries” to rate the importance of ten trends and their readiness to deal with these trends. From this study, they conclude:

Organizations around the world are struggling to strengthen their leadership pipelines, yet over the past year businesses fell further behind, particularly in their ability to develop Millennial leaders.

I don’t think that organizations are going to close this leadership gap until they confront four false assumptions about learning that are deeply embedded in their cultures.

1. Once is enough – This is the belief that people can learn something as complex and ego threatening as leadership the first time they are exposed to the material. Sue Fry and David Grebow ask in their blog post, “Would anyone consider handing a Bach score and a cello to someone who played a little guitar and expect him to master it after two hour-long seminars and a demonstration video?” I don’t think so. Yet this is what we do to aspiring leaders. We put them through intense one-shot programs and expect them to become high performers.
2. Experience is the best teacher - If that were true, I should be playing professional golf. Just because you are in a leadership role doesn’t mean you are an effective leader. Experience alone is not how we learn; we learn from reflecting on that experience, sharing those reflections with others (coaches, mentors, experts, etc.) and then applying that new found learning.
3. Paint by numbers - It seems so simple: just follow the ten steps, nine principles, seven habits, six ways, or five truths. Unfortunately, the art of leadership can’t be reduced to a list of do’s and don’ts. To be a leader you need to do the hard work of practicing leading, getting feedback, and practicing more.
4. Learn by osmosis - This is the belief that you can learn about leadership by being with other leaders. So we send high-potential leaders to a three-day meeting with other high-potential leaders in Las Vegas, or we have aspiring leaders meet together once a month to discuss leadership for a couple of hours, or we have them visit other organizations and interview their leaders. Each of these activities has value and might be fun for the participants, but if that’s all you do, you won’t develop leaders. This is not the way people develop new competencies.

As evidenced in the Deloitte study, the old models of developing leaders are not closing the gap between the current quality of leadership and the kind of leadership needed in high performing organizations. However, this gap can’t be closed until organizational leaders change their beliefs about training, learning, and performance improvement. The four assumptions described above are sustaining a “training culture” in organizations at a time when what is needed is a “learning culture”.

 

 

The Corporate Learning Gap

Each year Deloitte studies trends in human resource development. This past year, Deloitte asked “…more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries” to rate the importance of ten trends and their readiness to deal with these trends. One major conclusion from this 2015 study is:

… more than 8 out of 10 (85 percent) respondents cited learning as “important” or “very important,”—up 21 percent from last year. Yet, in a troubling development, more companies than ever report they are unprepared to meet this challenge. The capability gap between the importance of the issue and the ability to respond grew in magnitude by an enormous 211 percent over the last 12 months (from -9 to -28).

While we should be cautious about over-interpreting this data (true of any survey), the comparison of findings with previous years does suggest that employee learning has become more of a concern to HR leaders and that they believe they are less able to respond to that need in their organizations. The investigators attribute this change from previous years to:

• Increasing need for high performing employees, especially leaders
• This talent cannot be recruited; it needs to be developed internally
• Corporate training and development programs are not meeting this need
• Many employees demand learning opportunities based in the latest technology
• Organizational cultures don’t support employee engagement and learning

I think the risk is that companies will leap to technology solutions to improve learning without examining the barriers to performance improvement that exist within their own cultures. You can install the most sophisticated LMS, register employees for the best MOOCs, give them the latest mobile learning apps, and have them participate in fun and engaging online business games and simulations, all with no impact on organizational performance.

If your managers don’t encourage, support, and recognize learning, if your leaders don’t communicate the value of continuous learning and its application in the workplace, if the alignment between learning and achievement of performance goals is not clear to employees, then all the latest technology will make no difference. You need to ask yourself, “What is it about our organizational culture that is getting in the way of employee learning (and application of that learning) and what can we do to overcome those barriers?”

Reasons Why You Need to Create a Learning Culture

I have argued in previous blog posts that organizations need a learning culture because training is not sufficient to develop the necessary competencies of 21rst century workers. For one thing, the learning from training events is often not transferred to the workplace. Also, formal training cannot be responsive to the kind of learning agility that is needed in the high tech, competitive world that we live in today.

Still another reason is that training doesn’t reach all the people who need it, when they need it, and how they need it. Young workers and older workers, in particular, receive very little of the formal training offered by companies.

In a blog post titled, Job Training Funds Go to Workers Who Need It Least, Liz Suman cites a report by Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, and Artem Gulish in which they write:

…prime-age workers are the primary recipients of formal employer-provided training. Eighty-six percent of employer spending on formal training goes toward training prime-age workers, while only 3 percent goes toward training young adults.

Clearly, training fails the workers who could benefit most from acquiring new knowledge and skills: young workers hungry to show what they can do and be valued in an organization and older workers who want to continue to contribute and postpone retirement.

Another group that training fails, is leaders and aspiring leaders. The reliance on formal leadership training programs has proved inadequate and misguided. Mike Hyatt makes this case in a blog post. He writes that training is “…the #1 reason leadership development fails.” He argues that leaders need to be allowed to develop over time with the help of coaches and mentors. He writes, “Don’t train leaders, coach them, mentor them, disciple them, and develop them, but please don’t attempt to train them.”

By being selective in who receives training, and where and when they receive training, by not being agile enough in face of change, and by not developing their leaders, companies are not fulfilling the implied promise to develop all of their employees.

In a learning culture, training is part of the mix of activities and processes that contribute to learning, not the primary source of knowledge and skills. In a learning culture, managers, coaches, and mentors all play a key role in helping all employees develop the competencies they need to be successful and to help their organizations be successful.