Many traditional industries get disrupted by players that breathe agility, innovation, and a strong pursuit to get things done. To compete and survive in these fast-moving times requires the openness to listen and learn from each other, be bold and experiment — not only for individuals, but also for leaders and entire organisations. One way to influence these elements is by fostering an organisational culture that encourages curiosity, development, and continuous learning — in short, a learning culture.
Although every organisation has a learning culture in place — the way employees learn, develop new ideas and handle failure — it is not always the right one to support the strategy and ambitions of the organisation. As many industries get disrupted by players that are known to be innovative, fast, bold, and experimental, organisations need to review their learning culture and ask the right questions. Does the existing learning culture support ongoing development and openness to grow in fast-changing times? Does it help or hinder us to compete in the market and achieve our strategic goals? And to what extent do our leaders, talent processes and organisational infrastructure support a learning culture to make learning a day-to-day experience for everyone?
Enabling elements of your learning culture — how to use them wisely or fail lively
A successful business requires an aligned interaction of a clear business strategy, established organisational processes and technology, and a culture that drives results. As the pace of technology change accelerates, organisations face the need to reassess their strategy and culture more frequently to adapt and pivot their direction accordingly. Building a learning culture positions your organisation to identify, design and respond to changes in your industry because every member of your team will be empowered to make creative suggestions on how to tackle the next challenge.
Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight. It requires alignment at the top and change management along the way. It starts with articulating the north star and defining what priorities and behaviors a learning culture includes in your case (e.g., giving feedback or focusing more on cross-functional collaboration) and aligning the top leadership team before the actual movement of the organisation can happen. Although culture is a group phenomenon, we know that cultural change occurs at the individual level. At some point, every person in your organisation must be made aware of the change, have an individual desire to take part in it, be knowledgeable enough and able to behave differently, and be incentivised to continue the new behavior.
Ask yourself:
- In my organisation, we have a healthy balance of innovation and achieving results: Yes/No
- In my organisation, everyone feels safe to speak up with their ideas: Yes/No
- In my organisation, we give each other candid feedback regardless of rank or position: Yes/No
- In my organisation, risk-managed failure and the resulting learnings are celebrated as much as wins: Yes/No
- In my organisation, the workforce is trained and ready for the challenges of the future: Yes/No
We suggest focusing on the following three culture levers in order to foster a learning culture in your organisation — leadership, talent and infrastructure. Checking those elements can successfully enable CHROs to build a learning culture that fits their strategy and position the organisation for success. Let’s discuss each of these enabling elements one by one.
- Leadership: Do the leaders in your company know what is expected from them and have you enabled them to be true role models?
- Employee experience: Does you employee experience consistently translate into the desired learning behaviours, such as failing fast, teamwork and experimentation?
- Processes & structures: Do your HR processes and strucure enable your people to learn and collaborate in the most effective way?
Leadership makes it or breaks it
Many organisational transformations use a tornado approach — trying to do it all — by reshuffling the whole organisation, changing processes, systems and structures, and sending everyone into new roles and teams. These approaches risk overwhelming the organisation and do not give people enough room to understand what is expected from them. We therefore suggest you start thinking about the role of your leaders in creating a learning culture that fits your needs. If you manage to get your leaders involved and engaged in new behaviors, they are your most important behavioral multipliers and accelerators of change. Start with them, train them and include them in cocreating their own learning journey toward leadership behaviors that foster your learning culture. Give them the chance to understand why a growth mindset and leadership style that supports learning and experimentation is necessary for your organisation and which goals they need to pursue, and work together to co-create a plan for achieving this. If your leaders buy into the change, they will model needed behaviors and spread them throughout the organisation. This will result in sustainable change, creating a climate of psychological safety and trust first to allow experimentation and failure, as learning will not be achieved through classical webinars and trainings.
Reflection questions:
- How are your leaders currently fostering a learning culture? How do they hinder it?
- Are you and your leaders clear about which leadership behaviors are expected from them to foster a learning culture?
- What is one thing that would make it easier for your leaders to change their behavior? Where are they coming from?
Learning positioned consistently throughout the employee experience
A second enabling element for establishing a learning culture that fits your strategy is to weave it throughout your employee experience consistently and intentionally. Your employee experience should embody a learning culture from the first time new applicants read about your organisation through to onboarding, further development, performance discussions, feedback sessions, rewards and promotions, right up until the day they leave. Your whole employee lifecycle should breathe “learning.” One will not change behavior organisation-wide by changing processes alone, so let us invite you on a quick thought experiment:
Let’s assume you have activated and developed your leaders to bring the new culture and respective leadership behaviors into the organisation. They promote teamwork, take time to collaborate on ideas, implement innovation without knowing the outcomes and spend at least one hour a week to broaden their knowledge through different channels. After a while you have performance review discussions and measure people against the “old” performance criteria. According to these criteria, individual results are rewarded (instead of team results) and solely financial performance is looked at (instead of broadening to see the full range of innovative products and services that were created). This scenario implies that you as leaders and organisations are not walking the talk, which causes frustration, cynicism and confusion. Thus, your talent processes need to be aligned with the learning culture you want to advocate.
Reflection questions:
- (How) Do you ensure new joiners are clear about your learning culture from day 1?
- (How) Does your organisation’s reward system encourage what you want to achieve in fostering a learning culture?
- (How) Do you ensure that you promote the people who are advocates of your learning culture?
Breathing and living learning requires structure
Another enabling element of a learning culture is your organisation’s infrastructure. You need an infrastructure that supports learning, experimentation and innovation. How do you do that? Through organisational design (the frame), tooling (your virtual environment) and office space (your physical environment).
Firstly, your organisational structure and org chart should mirror what you want to establish. If it’s collaboration, experimentation and decision- making across the organisation, then a usual pyramid-shaped organisational design does not do it justice. Instead, think about an organisational structure that emphasises collaboration instead of power, that includes circles instead of pyramids and that empowers everyone in the organisation to make decisions if they feel knowledgeable enough to do so.
Secondly, use your tooling to democratise learning. To become a learning organisation, it is crucial to provide learning opportunities for every single employee “in the flow of work” on a daily and regular basis — workshops and trainings only for top management are no longer adequate. Creating a virtual learning environment that is always on and where employees can interact and learn together makes learning accessible to everyone in the organisation. It supports the individual learning journey in an interesting and motivating way. Further, virtual learning pathways, virtual reality and online coaching platforms offer new opportunities besides traditional learning concepts.
Thirdly, make sure your office spaces enable the learning culture by making it visible and, above all, tangible. It’s not about fancy interiors or new table tennis equipment. Rather, it is time to rethink the purpose of office spaces — away from parallel working toward active collaboration. Why not encourage employees to use the office as a collaborative space if they need interaction and joint innovation time? Utilise collaboration rooms with creative material and open coworking spaces to actively encourage the exchange of ideas? At the same time, focus time and conceptual elaboration of ideas could be done from “silent offices” or from home.
Reflection questions
- Which cultural aspects come to your mind when looking at your org chart? What would an applicant think about your organisation when looking at the org chart?
- (How) Do all your employees have access to regular and inspiring learning opportunities?
- How could your office environment foster creative exchanges even more?
Working on these enabling elements will not turn your organisation into a learning organisation in days. However, getting an understanding of where you stand on each of these will allow you to put together a holistic change strategy. Creating and maintaining small, incremental changes that, over time, lead to significant and lasting organisational culture change.
View the original article here: https://www.kincentric.com/insights/learning-culture-to-go
