If you are able to identify within the next few minutes, an area of your life that hasn’t changed in the last 12 months, then you don’t need to read on.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen new and advanced innovation in the form of electric cars, electronic devices for all levels of technology, capability and demographics, improved healthcare and better information at our fingertips on everything from parenting and food choices to replacing the wiring system in your house. It would be difficult not to be impacted by these new influences, gadgets and ways of living.
All of this has happened because individuals and groups have applied their intellectual curiosity and maintained their ambition to grow. They have learnt that nothing changes if nothing changes and that they need to take control of their environment, future and opportunities.
This closely echoes the way in which an organisation can benefit from creating the right culture to allow their people can shine. A learning culture isn’t just about delivering a few workshops, making Lynda.com available to your techies, creating a Wiki or stating that your strategic goals include people development and innovation.
The hard facts are that businesses don’t grow without ongoing investment in the growth of individuals. Once your people are given the right structure, tools, leadership, autonomy, direction and feedback, your business will benefit from:
- Greater efficiency
- Increased productivity
- Increased profit
- Decreased turnover of talent, customers and vendors
- Increased market share
- Greater adaption to change; amongst many other benefits
If these outcomes don’t feature in your strategic goals then, again, don’t read on. However, if you want to know how to achieve these gains, here are some pragmatic starters for ten:
Understand your starting point
- Create a benchmark of your current situation so that you can establish a goal for change. This is critical to enable you to identify the success derived from any change of approach. The benchmarking can be as much quantitative as it is qualitative and can be measured against return on expectations[1] as well as return on investment.
Identify preferred behaviours and accepted norms
- Organisational culturerelates to an organisation’s values, visions, norms, working language, systems, symbols, beliefs and habits. It is also the pattern of collective behaviours and assumptions that are taught to new employees to help progress organisational strategy. Importantly, organisational culture affects the way in which employees and team members interact with one another and with clients, customers and other stakeholders.
- Communicate effectively, regularly and with purpose to your team in a variety of ways that is transparent and supportive of the behaviours and norms you wish to observe in your culture
- Identify what feels right and make sure your teams have a sense of:
- Autonomy within boundaries
- Access to ‘just in time’ resources
- The ability to make decisions locally
- Feedback
- Personal ownership/accountability
- Reward for preferred behaviours
- Fun, freedom and trust
Engage your team
- Without them it won’t work, so get them to help you work it out. What do they need, how do they want to engage with the learning, what support can you give them, and what access do they need to the right people and things. Their contribution may only serve to confirm what you already know, but even the act of engaging them will increase the opportunity for buy-in and advocacy
- Like you might think of a new product by putting yourself in your customers; shoes, put yourself in your learning audience’s shoes.
Lead by example
- Make learning and development something that everyone does – and make it highly visible and transparent
- Believe that even I, as the CEO or Head of Department, can learn something new from content that I’ve heard many times
- Ensure your values and leadership behaviours are aligned to creating learning opportunities and reward for doing new things
Create the opportunity for your staff to own their learning
- Don’t expect this, drive it. The new generation want to own their own data and take it with them. They want to have it represent their whole life, not just their work life. They want to develop as a whole person, so help them by giving them tools to do just that. And for the older generations, create ways that they can make choices about their own development and have useful conversations about it
- Make learning a habitual behaviour – evaluate work completed and create regular learning opportunities with your teams
- Create time for staff to take time out to learn in different ways – learning occurs more often outside the classroom, but is seldom known about or seen as productive time
Create a culture of feedback
- We can’t learn if we don’t know what needs improving, or how our actions support or hinder another person or piece of work. The new generations coming through are thirsty for feedback as it’s something they have operated with successfully throughout their academic career. Leverage this and make it the ‘new normal’ way of working. Make it something you hire for - that you support people and role model exceptionally well from the top
- Build opportunities for continuous learning into BAU – sharing knowledge and skills, coaching, mentoring, feedback, evaluation of activity and celebration of successful learning
Be a facilitator of learning rather than worrying about curating the content; and focus your energy on developing content that is organisation-specific or aligned directly to the work required to achieve strategic goals
While everyone has the capacity to learn, the organisation and structure in which they function is often not conducive to reflection, experimentation, engagement and reward for learning. People may lack the tools and guiding ideas to make sense of the situations they face or to encourage them to explore the new. Organisations that continually expand their capacity to create their future require a fundamental shift in mind-set among their teams and this only comes when you make learning part of your DNA.
If you’re not sure of where to start, ask your audience!
