| “Leading Learning”
Chapter 6 of David A. Garvin: Learning in Action: A Guide to Putting the Learning Organization to Work. Harvard Business School Press, 2000. pp. 187-220.
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An organization cannot become a learning organization without first becoming a teaching organization. The focus of teaching is knowledge transfer. Executives must become shepherds of learning, responsible for creating supportive environment, probing for insights and deeper thinking and constructing settings where employees can collect, interpret and apply information. The following are the rules to maximize benefits of learning from teaching:
- Leaders and managers must create opportunities for learning by designing settings and events that prompt the necessary activities.
- Cultivate the proper tone, fostering desirable norms, behaviors and rules of engagement
- Personally lead the process of discussion, framing the debate, posing questions, listening attentively and providing feedback and closure.
A. Creating Opportunity
Learning Forums – To raise its visibility, executives need to create learning forums--assignments, activities and events whose primary purpose is to foster learning, where employees can freely discuss great issues of the day. Forum should expose the participants to raw, unfiltered data and then offered time for reflection and interpretation, leading to improve understanding as well as concrete actions and plans. Forums should involve a well-defined learning agenda and complete compressed learning cycle:
- Systems Audits -- reviews the health of processes and delivery systems
- Internal Benchmarking Projects – identify and compare the best in class activities within an organization
- Study Missions – which dispatch employees to leading organizations around the world to better understand their performance and distinctive skills.
Shared Experience – At times when radical changes are required, senior executives may find it necessary to put managers and employees through a learning process that mimics one they have personally experienced. Participants should be asked to share information, pool insights and share innovative ideas, stretch their imaginations and broaden their experiences to a degree that they would not otherwise have.
B. Setting the Tone
The atmosphere must be one of challenge, skepticism and doubt. Participants must feel a sense of security so that they can stretch themselves in new directions without fear of failure and incentives must support experimentation and risk-taking. A sense of fairness must prevail with no group feeling that its ideas are getting short shrift. The rules of engagement must encourage the sharing of knowledge so that information is pooled and becomes a common property. Cultivating such climates requires special sensitivities, extraordinary attention to context and tone.
- Challenge and Dissent – Learning must be channeled and directed: otherwise, "the result is likely to be a series of random walks to personal enlightenment that do little for overall performance. Challenges must be framed in ways that encourage inquiry and foster a learning environment. Effective interventions typically take one of three forms:
- tentative, partially developed proposals that stimulate discussion
- novel, unexpected questions that prompt new thinking
- changes in processes and procedures that introduce contrary, dissenting views.
- Security and Support – Challenge alone does not guarantee learning. Individuals need a sense of security if they are to throw off old ways of thinking and acting. Senior executives must play a vital role for they can personally shape the environment in ways that provide protection and support.
- Open Communication – Executives must send the signal that knowledge is to be shared not hoarded, especially among peers. To overcome the problem of not sharing knowledge, executives can offer incentives, rewarding individuals if they share knowledge with others.
- Evaluate and compensate employees on their contributions to company-wide databases and other knowledge repositories.
- Employ knowledge-sharing process, i.e., bringing together employees of relevant field to solve difficult problems.
- Compilation of best practices to overcome the one-way flow that so often impedes effective knowledge sharing.
C. Leading Discussion
Once the leaders have created the desired climate, learning can begin in earnest. For real progress to occur, considerable shaping and direction are required. Someone has to lead the process. Skilled executives recognize that this is one of their primary responsibilities. To succeed at this process, executives need skills in three broad areas: questioning, listening and responding:
- Questioning – Questions are powerful tools for leading learning. Executives can use them to get to the heart of the matter, and force deep thinking and reflection. Questions formulated with care and applied with deft, sensitive touch can be used to: (1) frame issues; (2) offer instructions, (3) solicit information (4) probe for analysis (5) draw connections (6) seek opinions (7) ratify decisions.
- Listening – If learning is to occur, there must also be active listening. Questions generates the needed raw material, while listening ensures that it is put to good use.
- Leaders should be patient in listening.
- Leaders should be able to listen at multiple levels—paying attention to what is being said and how it is stated.
- Remain for lookout for non-participants—voices not heard and must find ways of bringing them into the dialogue.
- Responding – Executives must be able to respond on the spot and real time. In the process, executives must avoid dumping cold water on anyone else’s comments and responding to simple queries with prolonged, mind-numbing lectures. To avoid this, executives need to broaden their repertoire of skills.
From Organizational to Individual Learning
If senior executives are committed to personal improvement and growth, their employees are likely to feel much the same way. For these executives, the first step in building a learning organization is a personal one. There are four main requirements: (1) openness to new perspectives, (2) an awareness of personal biases, (3) immersion in unfiltered data and, (4) growing sense of humility.
- Openness to New Perspective – requires that leaders accept the provisional nature of knowledge. It suggests the importance of repeatedly revisiting underlying assumptions and explains why executives need to be curious, open-minded learners. To remain current they must continuously seek out competing concepts and evidence and wrestle with surprising and unfamiliar ideas.
- Awareness of Personal Biases – These biases may appear as distinctive cognitive styles or as pervasive learning disabilities. At a minimum leaders need to be aware or their preferred styles and should ensure that they fit well with the tasks at hand. Otherwise, their learning is likely to be extremely inefficient.
- Exposure to Unfiltered Idea – Many executives rely on information that is pre-packaged and highly compressed making it difficult to interpret. Managers need to take charge of this process by finding ways of confronting, directly and experientially the realities of organizational life. They need to tour factories, drop in on service centers, meet with disgruntled employees and talk with customers. Learning often improves when executives return to the front lines and confront data in tangible, concrete forms.
- A Sense of Humility – If there are progress as learners, leaders need to develop a sense of humility. They must recognize that they do not have all the answers. They must acknowledge that superior insights lie elsewhere – outside their offices and at times outside their organizations. They must become skilled at defining the limits of their own knowledge. Learning after all is a profession is a profession of faith in the future.
A good indicator of openness is ones attitude toward challenging questions: Do executives encourage subordinates to air dissenting views? Do they readily accept unsolicited suggestions? Do they carefully consider opposing positions?
