The Performance Improvement Blog

Reprise: Learning to Compete

The rate at which an organization learns may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. . . . If you are learning more rapidly than the competition, you can get ahead and stay ahead. (Garvin & Edmondson, 2008)

Every organization faces some kind of competition. Manufacturers compete for market share and for talent. Retail businesses compete for space and for customers. Hospitals compete for patients, staff, and government as well as private funding. Colleges and universities compete for faculty, students, and for funding. Government agencies compete for funding and talent.

This competition can come from global, virtual, and newly formed rivals. Airbnb is shaking up the hospitality industry. Uber is providing an alternative to taxis. Coursera is challenging popular notions about a college education. Health care providers from around the globe are attracting patients with lower cost surgeries and treatments. New competitors in every sector are cropping up daily.

Marcia L. Conner and James G. Clawson in their chapter in the book, Creating a Learning Culture, write this about competition and learning:

Today it seems that organizations need to be able to do more than just adapt: they must become agile in the face of constantly changing conditions. And if organizations are to respond intelligently, they must make learning a central part of their strategy for survival and growth. If they do not, the future looks more and more bleak; it will just be a matter of time. If, however, leaders and the people within the organization are learning all the time, faster than competitors, and applying the right strategies at the right times, the organization has hope. (p.326)

“Learning all the time” means making learning part of the culture of an organization. This means  that learning (using Schein’s definition of culture) is one of the underlying assumptions of the organization, that everyone is expected to continually develop their knowledge and skills, that learning is valued and expected at all levels of the organization, that learning is ingrained in the routines and rituals of employees. Asking questions and giving feedback is just what people do. Sharing successes and failures is done openly and without risk of disapproval. Employees tell stories that dramatize what they are learning. Action learning permeates all team activity. Performance reviews are focused on learning and capacity building. Managers encourage their direct reports to acquire new knowledge and skills and apply that learning in the organization.

These are signs of a learning culture. A learning culture isn’t a program; it’s all of these things and more. An organization that is creating and maintaining this kind of culture is ready to compete in the world today and in the future.

- See more at: http://stephenjgill.typepad.com/performance_improvement_b/2014/07/learning-to-compete.html#sthash.T7UhVQA3.dpuf

Pull, Don’t Push, Employee Learning

*This post first appeared in The Business Thinker and The Knowledge Star Blog and is co-authored by David Grebow.

"The major change in business today is the rate of change. For example, it used to be that the time between conception of an idea and market acceptance was five to seven years. Now a new car model goes from idea to market in 24 months. “Internet time” is just a few months for most things. My public offerings of JP Industries used to take months or years. Now, crowdfunding can raise millions of dollars for a new business in a few weeks."  – John Psarouthakis

As the digital revolution continues to fuel the faster rate of change, transforming all aspects of business, from supply chain management to communication, the highest-performing corporations are abandoning traditional “push” training for the “pull” learning model.

Push training is a centralized, top-down model that occurs when management determines what it is people need to know or do and ‘pushes’ educational programs out from a central training group. It’s going to a class or taking an assigned online program.

 

“In a push training model, learning is test-based.

 It is all about what you know."

 

The push training culture was developed to serve the old Industrial Economy that no longer exists. Long before “Internet time”, producing products and delivering services changed slowly. The shelf life of both, compared to today, was almost glacial, and most workers did not need to learn volumes of information to perform their jobs.  Despite the change from the Industrial to the Knowledge Economy over 100 years ago, the vast majority of organizations are still pushing out training to employees the same way now as they did then.

We are hard-pressed to think of any other business function still managed as it was a century ago. Especially when the research clearly shows that push training is an inefficient way of developing skills, abilities and attitudes. Estimates of the learning transfer rates from push training programs to the workplace range between a miserly 10 to 20 percent. This is a huge waste of 80 to 90 percent of the investment in those programs.

Pull learning is the model for the new Knowledge Economy. It is a decentralized, bottoms-up approach in which employees access the information they need when it is needed. Employees are connected and collaborative and make the best use of the supporting technology which connects them to one another and to the sources of information.  Imagine employees facing a new situation in which they require more instruction. The employees can find the relevant information in a variety of ways because it is there just in case they need it, when and where they need it.

 

“In a pull model learning is performance-based.

The focus is on what you can do when you need to get it done.”

 

Figure 1: Push vs. Pull

 

 

Replacing Push with Pull: The Learning Culture

Replacing push training with pull learning transforms an organization into a learning culture. A learning culture is an organization that can provide relevant, useable and on-demand access to the knowledge and skills employees need to perform their jobs. This includes technical, operational, and managerial skills. Our research over the past two years shows that corporations that have made this commitment to become a learning culture experience measurable, significant and sustainable increases in on-the-job performance, talent-retention, sales revenue, and innovation. 

Our research and consulting with leading corporations has convinced us that the smartest, highest performing, most successful organization in the current global idea-based economy are learning cultures. They can respond instantly to the ever-changing requirements and demands of a fast-paced, hyper-competitive marketplace. Their employees can quickly access the technology and support to find what they need to know, when and where it is needed. Shifting from training and knowing to learning and doing improves the thousands of job-related actions and decisions performed each day, and makes mission-critical corporate-level decisions more immediate and effective. 

Yet surprisingly few organizations and their leaders have fully grasped the enormous benefits to be realized by becoming a learning culture. It has become obvious to us that a fundamental shift needs to occur in the way senior managers think about how they provide knowledge and know-how to their workforce. It is time to stop seeing the workplace as a relatively static 9-5 schoolplace where employees receive an occasional invitation to a training event. Leaders need to reimagine the workplace as a constantly moving beehive in which employees continuously learn whatever knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs more effectively.

 

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If you would like more information about what it takes to transform your company into a high-performing learning culture, contact Stephen at [email protected]  or David at [email protected]

Top 10 Questions to Evaluate a Learning Culture

In a discussion started by Camilla Keen on LinkedIn, she asks, “In order to find out and evaluate if a company has an effective learning culture, what would be your top ten questions?” I commented:

1. Are leaders communicating the importance of learning (acquiring new knowledge, skills, and capabilities) and holding managers accountable for learning and applying that learning to making a difference for the organization?
2. Are managers helping their direct reports create an individualized learning plan linked to strategic goals of organization?
3. Are managers monitoring learning progress and providing feedback; are they structuring opportunities to apply learning on the job; and holding direct reports accountable for results?
4. Are managers coaching; are they partnering with direct reports to develop their capacity to achieve organizational goals?
5. Are leaders mentoring; are they using their experience to advise new and less experienced employees on how to fulfill the functions of their jobs?
6. In recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of new employees, is learning part of the conversation; is learning conveyed as a value of the organization; are expectations for employee learning and development discussed during recruitment phase?
7. Can employees see how their learning is aligned with the strategic goals of the organization; do they understand how acquiring certain knowledge and skills will help the organization be successful; is a direct link from learning to results made clear?
8. Are a wide range of formal and informal, hi-tech and hi-touch methods being used to facilitate learning; are the methods used determined by the intended outcomes for the organization?
9. Are expectations for employee learning discussed with employees; do employees know what they need to learn and why they need to learn it and what criteria will be used to monitor progress and assess results; are high expectations communicated?
10. Is learning applied throughout the organization to continuously improve performance and achieve strategic goals?

These are my top ten but not my only questions for a company that wants to evaluate its learning culture. What’s important here is to realize that questions like these are a tool for learning, not blame. I want to help leaders reflect on the culture of their organizations and how well that culture supports learning so that they can make changes that help individuals, teams, and the whole organization be successful.

Reinventing Organizations: From Command-And-Control to Holacracy

I admire Tony Hseih, not because he built a billion-dollar shoe company that he sold to Amazon, or that he wrote “Delivering Happiness,” a book that has reached #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List, or that he is helping to rebuild downtown Las Vegas. All of those achievements are laudable. I admire Hseih because he is constantly experimenting in order to keep improving Zappos as an organization and as a place where people want to work and do their best. He has created a culture driven by values and improved through continuous learning.

About a year ago, Hseih implemented the Holacracy model in Zappos because he wanted greater employee involvement and commitment.  Now, because Hseih believes that Zappo’s employees “…haven’t made fast enough progress towards self-management, self-organization, and more efficient structures…,” he is shaking up the culture again.

He wrote in a recent email to employees:

Something key to note here is that Holacracy just happens to be our current system in place to help facilitate our move to self-organization, and is one of many tools we plan to experiment with and evolve with in the future. Our main objective is not just to do Holacracy well, but to make Zappos a fully self-organized, self-managed organization by combining a variety of different tools and processes. Reinventing Organizations calls this type of organization a Teal organization. You’ll learn examples of successful Teal organizations below and in the book. Each of the companies cited below and in the book have different tools and processes to help with self-management and self-organization. We won’t necessarily adopt all of them, but instead we will experiment and figure out the right tools and processes for Zappos, using Holacracy as the initial starting point and continually evolving as we dive deeper into the world of self-management and self-organization.

As an outsider and knowing only what I’ve read about the company (and what friends have said about the high quality of products and service), I am reluctant to make any judgements until the data is in on Hseih’s latest experiment with culture. However, I do wonder about an apparent disconnect between the intention to create a company in which there are no managers and self-management and self-organization are highly valued, yet the decision to become that kind of company was decided by the CEO and is being enforced as if the company is still hierarchical and command and control. Zappo’s might aspire to be leaderless, but that will be very hard to achieve for a company in which the charismatic founder and inspirational leader is still around and the parent company is a much more traditional organization.  

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD echoes my concern in a HBR blog post titled Making Sense of Zappo’s War on Managers. He writes:

Under the guise of freeing people up, self-management is often an effort to free the organization up first and foremost. Self-managed and self-organizing systems are meant to make a company more flexible in ever-shifting markets. They do so by increasing demands on its people.

They make it a requirement—not an option—to pour one’s heart into one’s job. While they abolish managers, they increase the amount of management. People work harder, and control gets more pervasive once it is exercised by everyone rather than by one boss. Issues have to be sorted out rather than delegated up.

Petriglieri is cautioning us that with self-management and self-organizing comes more individual responsibility and greater individual accountability. Although, this might be good for the kind of agile, adaptive organization that is needed in a highly competitive, global business environment, not every employee wants or can handle this kind of responsibility and accountability.

Kris Taylor, in her blog post, asks, “Is Holacracy a new organizational structure that will catch on?” She withholds judgment, expressing appreciation for some aspects of the model (roles more important than job descriptions, shared leadership and decision-making, breaking down organizational silos, fluid rather than fixed roles) but raises questions about whether Zappos’ values are compatible with a 39-page Holacracy rule book.

Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations has, because of his research, become a strong proponent of the values underlying the Holacracy model. He argues that self-management and self-organization are not new ideas and that these concepts have decades of proof in very successful companies, such as W.L. Gore, Whole Foods (in the stores), Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Wikipedia.

I am rooting for Zappos. I don’t think hierarchical, command-and-control organizations can create the kind of agile, adaptive learning culture that we need in most businesses today. Companies need to be willing to experiment with new ideas and new ways of organizing themselves. Companies need to learn how to learn from experiments to create the structure and culture that aligns with their mission and values. I’m hoping that Zappos will become another example of an organization that has created and is sustaining a learning culture.