The Performance Improvement Blog

Mindset: Barrier and Driver of Learning in Organizations

A key to learning in organizations is the belief system of managers and their employees. Yes, training and other kinds of on-the-job experiences are important interventions that contribute to learning and performance improvement, but without a belief that all people can grow and change, the best designed and delivered learning interventions will have little lasting impact.

In her HBR post titled, “People Won’t Grow If You Think They Can’t Change”, Monique Valcour writes:

Have you ever worked hard to improve a valuable skill and made real progress, only to have your development go unnoticed by the people who told you that you needed to improve? Perhaps this led you to look for a new job. Or maybe you’re a manager who’s been disappointed by poor performance and concluded that your low-performing employees are simply over-entitled? So you gave up on trying to help them improve and vented your frustration with colleagues behind closed doors.

Both of these commonplace experiences point to problems caused by a fixed mindset, in which we find it hard to believe that people can change. In the first scenario, an employee is judged as having low potential—and this assessment blinds leaders to the progress he’s made. In the second, the manager’s conviction that her employees will never change makes her less likely to engage in leadership behaviors that support development. The bottom line in both cases is that employees are less likely to reach their potential.

Valcour is making us aware of the self-fulfilling prophecy that is a result of having either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Carol Dweck has addressed the fixed-mindset vs. growth-mindset dichotomy in her book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.” She makes the point that whether one has a fixed mindset or a growth mindset has a profound effect on learning. I wrote about this in a previous blog post:

Organizational leaders can talk about training, learning, and performance improvement all they want but unless they confront the underlying beliefs that are a barrier to learning, all of that activity will have little impact. Those with a fixed mindset do not develop themselves and do not support the development of others. They do not value training and other types of less formal learning opportunities because they don’t believe people can learn and change. They do not create and encourage learning experiences because they believe it’s a waste of time and resources.

The expectations managers have for employee learning are critical to the impact of any learning intervention (This is the “Anticipation” element of the 5As Framework.). If managers expect that employees can’t or won’t become more effective in their jobs, then this becomes a barrier to the acquisition of new knowledge and skills and to applying that learning in the workplace. If managers expect that employees can and will become more effective in their jobs, then this becomes a driver of learning and performance improvement.

If you want a high performing organization, you need managers who believe in employees and employees who believe in themselves.  This starts with hiring and promotion. Look for people who have a growth mindset. Belief systems can change, so make sure your leaders communicate their own beliefs about growth...if they believe that employees can learn, change, and become more successful in their work.  

Managers Managing Minds: Their 21rst Century Job

It’s All About Brains, Stupid! | David Grebow | LinkedIn

[The following is an excerpt from a book I am writing with David Grebow --working title Managing Minds. We'd like to know what you think...]

Imagine the following ...

You’re looking around the floor of the company where you work and see … brains. That mass of grayish wetware that makes everything possible. All the bodies stayed in bed this morning, and only the brains came to work. The brains are everywhere, thinking, planning, and somehow communicating. A meeting room full of brains. Brains in their cubes. Brains behind office doors floating above computers. Everywhere brains are learning, sharing information, and providing help to other brains. Brains at work.

Jump to later that day. You are the last one in the building. All the brains have gone home. You stand by the window watching as the last car leaves the parking lot. All the desks and cubes are empty. The space is eerily silent. It occurs to you that your company has effectively evaporated because all the brains are gone.

You suddenly realize that your company is the collective brainpower that comes back every morning, and your job is to enable these brains to be as smart and as effective as possible because that’s your corporate IQ. And your job is to make the company smarter by helping those brains grow smarter every day.

David Grebow and I have been working in the area of corporate education since Moby Dick was a minnow. Long time. We believe companies and managers are at an inflection point. During the previous Industrial Economy we managed hands. We produced things. In this new Knowledge Economy we produce ideas and need to manage minds. The problem is that too many of us are still managing hands. We believe it’s time we changed our basic understanding about what it means to manage people.

It does not matter what title you have. It makes no difference where in the company you work. If you manage people, you are managing their minds and the most important question you need to answer is this: Are you enabling or disabling the ability of those minds to be smarter? Are you focusing on what is really the most impactful and important management task, the one that needs to come before all others? Are you helping the Corporate IQ to grow or shrink? Are you managing minds?

The Corporate IQ is the total brain power of your organization. It is an indicator of how smart your company is. That tells you what chance it has to succeed. The Corporate IQ includes what everyone knows and does every day. It also includes what they discover, learn from failure, learn from one another, share, innovate, tell each other, and more. It all adds up to how smart the organization is today, and how well it will perform tomorrow, how the expected will be handled and, more importantly, how the unexpected will be encountered.

If your Corporate IQ is growing, you’re on the right track for the future. If it is shrinking, you and your company have a problem. A very serious problem.

 About those  Brains

A shrinking Corporate IQ is a function of many forces currently at work:

• Brains need to learn how to learn — Technology has changed the learning equation. It used to be that one person had the knowledge and shared it with one other person or many others. Knowledge was power. In a technology mediated environment, the new rule is sharing knowledge is power. The people who do not have the talent to learn from each other, using technology, will fail. Developing learning talent means developing the ability to learn how to learn in high tech world.
•  Brains are jumping out of the workforce - According to recent numbers from Yuki Noguchi in her article “Businesses Try To Stave Off Brain Drain As Boomers Retire,” important company knowledge is walking out the door. She writes, “In the U.S., roughly 10,000 people reach retirement age every day. And though not everyone who turns 62 or 65 retires right away, enough do that some companies are trying to head off the problem…Losing veteran workers is a challenge, even for big companies like General Mills… But the older-worker brain drain is a big concern for industries like mining and health care.” When all the smart, experienced people are leaving, the Corporate IQ shrinks.
•  Brains are made BIG on the Internet - These days a single individual has the collective brainpower of the Internet and all the people connected to it which is, according to the latest figures, 3.7 billion people or 40% of the planet and increasing exponentially. Just to give you an idea of what “exponential” means, the first billion was reached in 2005. So smarts are no longer simply hired and kept inside your corporate walls. Smarts can be found anytime, anywhere, by any one of the 3.7 billion people who has a smart phone.
•  Brains which are connected build virtual organizations - Smart people are everywhere on the planet today and they are finding one another and creating virtual organizations that pump out services and products at an amazing and (to those companies left in the dust) alarming rate. Your competition many not yet have a brand or an office, but if they have access to the Web, they can become a competitor overnight. They have easy access to all of the information and support services they need to bring a new product or service to market quickly and cheaply.
•  Brains that are bored, tired, overworked, and not challenged are not effective - Survey after survey indicates that only about a third of employees are engaged in their work which means that two-thirds are probably not learning what the company needs them to learn. If they are not motivated to do their best and give their all, then they are not motivated to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in their current organizations. And the Corporate IQ won’t grow and the organization as a whole will not get smarter.

The common assumption is that the need for new knowledge and skills is a training problem. However, training alone does not make organizations smarter. Training, and it’s more well-dressed cousin education, are almost always delivered out of context. A classroom is not the workplace. Transferring what you learn is always a problem. Only a small percentage of employees who participate in training apply what they have learned to make a difference in their companies. Why? Because most of what people learn in training is forgotten within a very short time. 

And there is a raft of other reasons. Often, the people that need training the most don’t or can’t participate. Training, because it requires time to develop, cannot be as timely as is needed in the fast-paced organization of today. That also means that the shelf life of a program is shorter than ever. And training, relegated to HR or a training department, is not supported in any meaningful way by managers and leaders across the organization after the event. All of these factors mean that training is not the answer to growing the Corporate IQ or managing minds and developing the talent for learning.

 So, What is the Answer?

We believe that 21st century companies need a culture of learning in order to grow their Corporate IQ. They need an environment and activities that facilitate and support learning on a continuous basis. They need managers and executives who model and communicate the importance of learning to everyone in the organization. They need managers who help their direct reports learn, develop and grow as employees. Managers need to enable employees to be able to use technology to “pull” the learning they need when they need it, where it’s needed, and reward people for managing their minds. The 21st century company needs people who believe that sharing knowledge is power instead of hanging onto the outdated notion that keeping knowledge to themselves is power.

In sum, companies need a culture in which teams and the whole organization are getting smarter by learning how to learn together and applying that learning to becoming more effective and more successful. By focusing on creating and sustaining a culture of learning you can control the direction in which your company’s Corporate IQ is moving. A culture of learning is designed to make you and your company smarter. And smarter means successful in today’s flat world hyper-competitive faster-than-ever and getting faster marketplace.

 

Beyond Training: Three Models

Organizational learning is so much more than training. Three models of learning convey the breadth of options that, depending on what an employee needs to learn, are more effective, cheaper, and easier to implement than formal training programs.

One of these models I call “50 Ways to Lever Learning.” The "50 Ways" includes training but also suggests many other options. This list fits into the push vs. pull model of learning in organizations. Knowledge and skills that employees need to learn are decided on by SMEs and managers and then pushed at employees, or knowledge and skills are pulled from the organization by employees when and where they want this information. The first 25 Ways on the list are typically push learning and the second 25 are typically pull learning.

Another model is what Bersin by Deloitte calls the “Learning Technology Stack.” This model is made up of digital technologies that have been designed for or adapted for learning. The model makes it obvious that digital technology has become an important part of enhancing learning in organizations.

Jane Hart is the author of the third model, “L&D Roles to Support Learning at Work.” This model incorporates the ways employees learn in organizations, the activities that support these various ways of learning, and the roles that training and development professionals need to play in order to enable these ways of learning.

Of course, any model is only a representation of the real world. These three models oversimplify the true process of learning in organizations and do not show all of the ways and combination of ways that people learn, as well as all the aspects of culture that drive or block learning. The main point is that there are many ways employees can learn in organizations, beyond formal training programs, and integrated into the daily life of the organization. These models provide useful tools for starting the examination of options.

A Manager's View of Employee Learning

I rarely post a guest blog, but in this case I couldn’t resist posting Bernard Donkerbrook’s reaction to my last blog post. Bernie is a long-time automotive company manager and experienced engineer. Having retired from the auto industry, he is now an executive coach focused on improving Emotional Intelligence (EQ) in leaders. I have tremendous respect for Bernie’s wisdom and insights that come from years of experience. Bernie wrote this in response to my last blog post:

Steve, your 5As material is so good.  The logic and specifics are great.  I love the sense of understanding, enthusiasm and acceptance the leadership team conveys here regarding their role in learning.  This is a really good-news story for you and their company!

As you might expect, based on my input to a previous blog (3/25, Training Isn’t Learning), I was delighted to see the emphasis on the necessary role of the manager!  Allow me to offer some further viewpoints on how strongly I feel the necessity is to strengthen the individual manager’s ‘obligation’ to be ‘actively and personally accountable’ for ensuring delivery of results from the learning intervention. For me, ‘accountable’ means managers are as much, and maybe more, responsible as the individual learner for applying learning and delivering results.

It’s hard to over-emphasize the role and impact that managers have in the daily lives of their employees in a large, long-standing corporation. This is especially true for those organizations with a culture of hierarchy, command-and-control, departmental/functional silos, active and sometimes manipulative competition between managers for recognition and promotion, and less-than-excellent history of departmental collaboration. 

Managers control the weekly priorities which go to solving the current crisis, inevitable quality glitches during mass-production, next quarter's targets, budgeting/interviewing/staffing problems, daily work issues, etc.

I’ve taken the liberty of suggesting strengthening a few of your points relating to the manager’s role. See below.  It is my personal attempt (and tone) to address these conflicts of priorities, especially when a new learning intervention is adopted (or mandated), and to unambiguously make clear the expectation of the manager’s prime role in the success of any learning intervention and to make it one of his/her prime priorities.  If the company is going to the time, commitment and expense of a learning intervention and is serious about it, then it needs to be led and executed on a daily basis by the manager.

From my long personal history in this kind of corporate work environment at the management level, and knowing from more recent years of managerial coaching what it takes to change behaviors, my views are more directive, more forceful in tone than yours. It takes clarity and intention to change behaviors, and it takes practice.  If bosses and senior executives are on-board and involved, then it makes ALL the difference, as you so well know and advocate.  Recognizing and rewarding the leadership team and individual managers for facilitating this continuous learning and obtaining performance improvement results is so important, and a catalyst for success.

In order for any kind of learning intervention (training, coaching, mentoring, action learning, etc.) to have a positive impact on achieving the organization’s goals, managers have to take an active role in supporting learning and become active, personally-responsible leaders for their immediate staff in delivering actual results from new learning. Both learner and boss should be held clearly accountable for improved business results in their organizations and operations.

This is the role of managers from the perspective of the 5As Framework:

• Alignment: managers explain to employees the importance of a particular training program and how that learning will help them help the company be successful; make this conversation part of employees’ performance reviews; define this effort as the leadership role expected of managers and, therefore, clarified in their performance review objectives.
• Anticipation: managers clarify expectations for what they want employees to learn; managers should communicate high but reasonable expectations for employee learning; this should be part of informal conversations managers have about performance and expected deliverables on a frequent basis (not only at annual performance review time).  Success depends on managers establishing a regular process for status, progress, issues and results with each key direct report participating in the learning intervention.
• Alliance: managers meet with employees before training to identify learning goals, meet with employees during training to discuss progress (a pre-scheduled process by manager works best), and meet with employees after training to identify what was learned, how employees will apply that learning in the workplace, and what additional learning/tools/resources they might need.
• Application: managers lead the department efforts to determine and provide opportunities for employees to immediately apply learning in their work in a way that will make a difference
• Accountability: managers give employees feedback on an ongoing basis, typically regularly scheduled, on their application of learning and measure the impact, measure the beneficial results/improvements of that learning on their teams, the organization and how it’s affected their personal skills, competencies or effectiveness