The Performance Improvement Blog

Year in Review - 2016

The theme of creating and sustaining a learning culture in organizations continued to influence most of my blog posts in 2016. David Grebow and I also used our blogs to introduce the concept of “managing minds” (not hands) and how that contributes to learning in organizations.

As a way of review, I’ve selected five blog posts about a “learning culture” and “managing minds” from 2016 that had the most interest from readers. Here is the title of each post with a short excerpt. Click on the title to go to the full post.

Managers Managing Minds: Their 21rst Century Job

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.

How Managers Put Up Barriers to Employee Learning

Organizational barriers to learning are often not as obvious as being given no budget for training, or no training facilities, or no LMS. More often barriers are put up from the subtle ways that managers talk about capability development with their direct reports. For example, below is a conversation between a manager and direct report that was recently overheard in a medical device company. Read the dialogue and then consider the questions at the end.

Aligning Employee Learning with the Organization

Improving employee learning and performance in organizations today means systems change. I wish it were otherwise, but learning is not just a classroom activity anymore, it must be a total system activity that takes into account strategic goals of the organization, the culture of the organization (values, beliefs, artifacts, structure, etc.), external inputs (home life, economy, social network, competition, etc.), and the quality of the learning interventions (formal training, coaching, mentoring, self-directed study, action learning, etc.). Learning that makes a difference occurs when all of these factors are aligned.   

Megan Torrance Talks About Learning in Organizations

I’m always looking for examples of companies that put learning ahead of training. TorranceLearning is one of those companies. They design custom learning experiences for client organizations by starting with the intended results and related performance problems and then, and only then, do they provide employees with the tools, structures, and processes to learn what they need to know and do to be successful.  I had the pleasure recently, along with my Learning to be Great™ business partner, James Stilwell, to interview the founder and CEO of TorranceLearning, Megan Torrance.

21rst Century Organizations Need a Learning Culture

Most companies today have a “training culture”. ATD’s 2016 State of the Industry report concludes:

…the traditional, instructor-led, face-to-face classroom continues to play a crucial role, and it was still the delivery mechanism for 51 percent of learning hours used in 2015.

The percentage would be considerably higher if the ATD study had included all push training, such as elearning programs and attendance at conferences. Which is to say that most learning in organizations is still delivered using formal, structured, leader-centered training methods. In a podcast produced for ATD, I explain why organizations need to change from this “training culture” to a “learning culture”. 

21rst Century Organizations Need a Learning Culture

Most companies today have a “training culture”. ATD’s 2016 State of the Industry report concludes:

…the traditional, instructor-led, face-to-face classroom continues to play a crucial role, and it was still the delivery mechanism for 51 percent of learning hours used in 2015.

The percentage would be considerably higher if the ATD study had included all push training, such as elearning programs and attendance at conferences. Which is to say that most learning in organizations is still delivered using formal, structured, leader-centered training methods.

In a podcast produced for ATD, I explain why organizations need to change from this “training culture” to a “learning culture”. And in the online workshop that I facilitate for ATD titled, Essentials of Developing an Organizational Learning Culture, we talk about what you can do to develop a learning culture in your organization.

This change requires, in part, engaging managers in helping to facilitate the learning of their direct reports. Managers have a key role to play in employee learning, but it means that managers must shift from “managing hands”, a twentieth century way of being a manager, to “managing minds”, a twenty-first century way of being a manager.

For more about managing minds, look for David Grebow and my forthcoming book to be published by ATD in the Spring of 2017, tentatively titled, Managing Minds, Winning Hearts.

Managing Minds, Winning Hearts

We are now in the "Knowledge Economy" which means that we must learn differently than we have in the past. As I wrote in a previous blog post titled, The Manager's Abridged History of Work and Learning: 

Today, work is more about having a keen mind than it is about having a strong back or skilled hands. This has profound implications for how we manage workers and how we facilitate learning in the workplace.

It no longer makes sense to use formal training as a solution to every performance problem nor to assume that workers will learn everything else they need to know on-the-job from the people around them. Rather, employees need to know how to learn, how to get the knowledge they need when and where they need it, and be accountable for results, not for attending a training program. In a blog post that David Grebow and I wrote for ATD titled, Changing the Way We Manage Learning in the Knowledge Economy, we said:

In the 1920s, the average lifespan of leading U.S. companies was 67 years. By 2013, the average lifespan had dropped to 15 years. The new environment is increasingly aggressive, hypercompetitive, and constantly driven by surprises, innovation and technological changes. And it’s all happening at an unprecedented, increasingly faster pace. We have no choice. We need to stop managing hands and focus on managing minds. 

Human hands are being replaced by robotic hands. And managing robots is not a job that requires hands-on managers. This trend towards automation is not stopping. The book, Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies on Leadership in Global Business, reports that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are likely to be automated. This is will change the nature of work in all industries. Robot hands can now thread a needle. As the steel fingers of automation reach even further and grab more of the work once done by human hands, an almost unimaginable future begins to appear. 

This future is one in which humans no longer need to make things or fix things or sell things or provide basic services. It is a future in which workers will have to be smarter, more agile, and more innovative than ever. As automation and robotics improve, the demand for globalization increases, and communities become more diverse, any organization's competitive advantage will be in its collective knowledge and expertise. This means managing minds. The primary role of managers will be helping the people they supervise to become more competent, capable, and engaged in contributing to the success of the organization.

To learn more about "managing minds", attend our webcast, Managing Minds,Winning Hearts, on December 9, 2016, at 1:00 Eastern.