The Performance Improvement Blog

Organizational Learning in the Age of Ideas

Most organizations are “locked in an industrial mindset.”  They think of their workers as cogs in the wheels of progress, doing what they’re told, not smart enough to figure out how best to do their jobs or improve their organizations. Managers in these organizations are needed to tell workers what to do and how to do it.

That “Steam Engine” mindset, as described by Jonathan Gifford and Mark Powell in their new book, My Steam Engine Is Broken: Taking the organization from the industrial era to the Age of Ideas, creates a command-and-control culture that has become a barrier to success in companies today. The authors write:

1. Many organizations have a culture that is still unconsciously modelled on the managerial, ‘Steam Engine’ mindset of the industrial era; a culture which is fundamentally unsuited to the modern workplace.
2. There are a number of core Steam Engine behaviors which actively prevent or destroy the things that modern organizations know that they most need from their employees – engagement, commitment and creativity, amongst others.
3. Addressing and changing these core Steam Engine behaviors – little by little and piece by piece – will in time achieve a radical transformation of the organization, creating a working environment suited to the Age of Ideas and freeing up the energies of the organization’s members.

Some organizations are experimenting with alternatives to the “Steam Engine”. For example, Zappos is shaping its own form of Holacracy , Semco Partners has become known for a radical form of industrial democracy, and the Valve Corporation has eliminated managers.

A culture of command-and-control is a barrier to organizational learning. It’s a barrier to creativity, innovation, job satisfaction, engagement, self-motivation, risk-taking, communication, adaptability, self-respect, and retaining talent. Without these qualities, an organization can’t learn.

Gifford’s and Powell’s conclusion is that leaders need to realize that they might be able to control some processes but they can’t control people. High performance organizations need a culture that allows workers to grow at their pace and in their own way.

The authors ask us a provocative question, "What do you observe as examples of organizations ...where the comfort blanket of management control is stifling the natural creativity of people in the organization?"

Older-Worker Learning

What are we doing to support older-worker learning? They want to learn, too!

Older adults, who are traditional retirement age, are no longer an invisible segment of the workforce. In a N.Y. Times article titled “Disproving Beliefs About the Economy and Aging,” the author, Christopher Farrell, dispels three myths commonly held about older adults:

Myth No. 1: Older adults don’t work, so they weigh down the economy.

Myth No. 2: Older workers are not productive.

Myth No. 3: Older workers are blocking younger workers from the job market.

On the contrary, many older adults want to work, are very productive, and they are adding to the economy, not weighing it down. They are doing work that younger workers can’t or won’t do. Farrell writes:

…millions of older Americans are staying employed or looking for work well into the traditional retirement years. There are a variety of reasons: Boomers are well educated and healthier than previous generations. Work is less physically taxing in a service-dominated economy. More older people need an income to supplement slim savings.

In addition to these reasons, I believe a major motivator for boomers to continue working well past traditional retirement age is their drive to find meaning in their lives. It’s this need for fulfillment and to contribute to society that keeps many people over 65 in the workplace and even building new careers and businesses. Certainly this is related to their generation’s level of education and health. It’s easier to seek personal fulfillment when you no longer have to worry about putting food on the table or sending kids to college.

With 8,000 boomers becoming 65 every month, the implications for workplace learning are staggering. The popular attention to Millenials is good but if we don’t also assess the learning needs of boomers in the workplace, we will be marginalizing a large generation of wisdom and experience that can contribute greatly to the productivity and success of our organizations. And they want to continue learning, too. Becoming smarter and better is intrinsically motivating to boomers.

Much has been written about the adult learner with the conclusion that they can be a valuable resource to organizations. Today, companies need to think of seniors as a significant part of the workforce. We need to find ways to facilitate their learning just as we should be doing with younger employees.

Managers need to refrain from adopting a fixed mindset with respect to older workers, assuming that they can’t learn anymore, that they are frozen in time. Rather, managers should view older workers with the same growth mindset that they need to take with all workers, supporting their learning, performance improvement, and contribution to organizational results.

What do you think about the implications of seniors in the workforce? How do they/will they affect organizational learning, performance improvement, and results?

Culture of Learning Research from ATD & i4cp

The Association for Talent Development (ATD) and Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) collaborated on a study of a “culture of learning” in organizations and the impact of that culture on  performance. They define a culture in this way:

A culture of learning, or learning culture, is one in which employees continuously seek, share, and apply new knowledge and skills to improve individual and organizational performance. The importance of the pursuit and application of learning is expressed in organizational values and permeates all aspects of organizational life.

The investigators collected surveys from 832 “talent development leaders” in a wide range of organizations and also interviewed a number of “talent development leaders” from organizations “…recognized for both market performance and excellence in learning and talent development.”

The study’s authors concluded that…

Having a culture of learning is a hallmark of high-performance organizations.

In high-performance organizations, employees share knowledge with their colleagues at a rate four times greater than that of workers in lower-performing firms.

Learning cultures are rooted in the hiring process.

Three learning-culture-supportive practices related to employees are performance standouts:

• regularly updated personalized development plans for every employee

• worker accountability for the learning specified in those plans

• nonfinancial rewards and recognition for employee learning.

 

Less than a third (31%) of survey respondents indicated that they have a culture of learning either at a “high extent” or “very high extent”. Although it is not entirely clear what this means in practice, it’s probably safe to conclude that most organizations do not have a learning culture.

As with all survey research, some caveats should be considered when interpreting the findings. For one thing, there might be a problem of definition. Many training leaders in companies who say they have a learning culture are mistakenly equating amount of training activity with a learning culture. A training culture is not the same as a learning culture.

Secondly, this is a correlational study (as is typical of most studies of organizations) and, therefore, the evidence is not proof of a causal link between a learning culture and high performance. It might be that the reverse is true. That is, a learning culture exists because the company is very successful. Regardless, the study does confirm that many high perform companies have (or aspire to) a learning culture.

And third, it is doubtful that the respondents are representative of all corporations. The findings are based on relatively small samples of the various sectors of “talent development leaders” in national and global organizations. We can assume that there is significant statistical bias in the sample and significant opinion bias in the respondents.

However, even with these caveats, the findings and conclusions are worth noting. Simply the fact that “a culture of learning” has become a legitimate area of interest and study is encouraging. It’s not that companies have a learning culture; what’s important is that they aspire to create a learning culture. And many of the conclusions of the study lend further credibility to the content of the workshop I’ve been facilitating for ATD for the past two years: Essentials of Developing an Organizational Learning Culture. Sharing knowledge across the organization, individual development plans, accountability for learning, recognition and reward for learning, are all topics we discuss in the workshop. It boils down to this: for organizations to be successful in the global, highly competitive, multigenerational, knowledge economy, they must strive to create and sustain a learning culture.