Throughout 2014, I used this blog to illuminate important leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from the problems with performance reviews to managing temporary workers to innovation to developing a learning culture in organizations.
As a way of review, I’ve selected five blog posts from the past year that seem to have had the most interest for readers. Here are the links with a short excerpt from each post:
Eight Leader Habits of a Learning Culture
Eight leader habits are essential to a learning culture. These are behaviors ingrained in the routines and rituals of organizations that are continually learning and learning how to learn...These are good habits that you’ll want to promote and nurture in your organization.
The World is Fast...And Learning Must Be Faster
Instead of trying to anticipate the training that will be needed in companies, we need workers who can continually learn and organizations that support continual learning and change. We need workers who can utilize learning opportunities that are presented to them, whether formal or informal, self-directed or social, desktop or mobile, and we need organizational cultures that value and reward learning. And we need leaders and managers who help workers learn where and when it is needed and hold those workers accountable for learning and for making a difference in their organizations.
Cultural Barriers to Organizational Learning
All organizations have a culture. Some cultures support learning more than others. Some cultures stifle learning by marginalizing the training and development function, by discouraging risk-taking, by not rewarding learning, by not allowing opportunities for informal and social learning, and by undermining performance improvement efforts.
Why Your Organization Needs a Learning Culture
Your organization needs [a learning] culture in order to thrive and survive in the world today. There was a time when a static set of skills would last a career, when one kind of management (usually command-and-control) would be sufficient over the life of a company. Not anymore. Today, information is coming at us so fast, technology is changing so rapidly, the world is changing so dramatically, that the old methods of learning and performance improvement do not work any longer…if they ever did.
Learning to Learn Collectively
A major characteristic of a learning culture is that individuals, teams, and whole organizations are constantly learning how to learn. They are learning how to acquire the knowledge and skills that they need to help the organization be successful. The teacher-centered, classroom-focused, right-and-wrong answer, static instructional environment that was the primary modality in the schools they attended does not fit the rapidly changing, technology mediated, on-demand knowledge and skills that are needed in today’s organizations. In this environment, people need to be continually figuring out different ways to learn, whether that be individually using new technology, in teams that are trying to become more effective, or as the whole organization learns how to communicate, how to use resources more efficiently, and how to make better decisions.