IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding why a learning culture is important

Creating a learning culture

Uncovering reasons for resisting a learning culture

Sustaining a learning culture

Peter Senge hit a nerve deep within the business and education community by introducing the theory of learning organizations when he published The Fifth Discipline in 1990. Now, almost 35 years and one pandemic later, people understand why. Organizations that have a healthy learning culture weathered the pandemic with more agility, resilience, and success than those that didn’t.

During the pandemic, employees continued to learn. Innovation kicked into high gear. Most organizations that boasted a learning culture rocketed ahead of their competition.

There are many ways to build a learning organization, and they all require management to lead. If you build a culture that gives people time to reflect, create new ideas, develop and share expertise, stay close to customers, and learn from their mistakes, you will outdistance your competition and thrive.

Seven of the most dangerous words in business are “We have always done it that way.” Now, with innovation as the key driver in today’s organizations, you can see why.

One of your expanded roles as a talent development (TD) professional is to help your organization become a learning organization — just as Peter Senge imagined. Helping an organization become a learning organization requires that you build a learning culture, and this chapter points the way to doing that.

Defining a Learning Culture

What is a learning culture? The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) defines a learning culture as “a community of employees instilled with a growth mindset … that operates from a shared set of organizational values, assumptions, beliefs, processes, and practices that encourage individuals — and the organization as a whole — to increase knowledge, competence, and performance” (Grossman, 2015).

The reason that an organization should focus on becoming a learning culture is that it increases efficiency, productivity, and profit. Learning cultures improve employee attitude, which in turn increases employee satisfaction and decreases turnover. Employees develop a sense of ownership and accountability. Organizations with a learning culture are more successful when implementing change, and they understand how employees adapt to change — which was a key to success during the pandemic.

Data exist to support a strong learning culture. Studies by Bersin and Associates show that when organizations have a strong learning foundation, they outperform their peers in financial, operational, and employee-satisfaction areas. High-impact learning cultures have greater employee productivity and are ten times more likely to identify and develop leaders. When you strengthen your organization’s learning culture, the organization will be able to compete more effectively and increase employee engagement.

In addition, a thriving learning culture is the start of a successful talent development effort. The learning culture concept encourages people to think about learning as an organizational value rather than an individual development process. This idea is critical given what TD professionals know about how people learn at work.

The Rationale for a Learning Culture

ATD’s research paper, “Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization” (found at https://research.td.org/research-reports/building-a-culture-of-learning-the-foundation-of-a-successful-organization), provides data that demonstrates why a learning culture is the foundation of successful organizations. ATD found that fewer than a third of the organizations studied have extensive learning cultures. However, the research revealed that top-performing companies

• Are more likely to have a learning culture — by 500 percent
• Have employees who are more aligned with the organization’s goals and understand the role their jobs play to produce results — by 300 percent
• Are more likely to have implemented numerous strategies to develop and expand their learning culture

In addition, data from Bersin Associates studies, including “High-Impact Talent Management: The New Talent Management Maturity Model” and “Rewriting the Rules for the Digital Age” (Garr and Atamanik, 2015; Mallon, 2017) furthers the compelling case for creating a learning culture. The research found that learning organizations are

• 58 percent more likely to have the skills available to meet changing marketplace needs
• 32 percent more likely to be the first to market with an innovative solution
• 26 percent more likely to have a better track record of producing quality products, delivering stellar services, or both
• 34 percent more likely to respond faster to and satisfactorily address customer needs

In addition, employees are 37 percent more productive than their peers at organizations that don’t value workplace learning.

Top-performing organizations are more likely to have highly engaged and motivated employees; a highly skilled workforce; increased innovation; higher productivity; and the delivery of higher quality and better service. Organizations embrace a learning culture as an essential requirement to gain a competitive advantage. Organizations gain a competitive advantage by embedding a learning culture into their way of doing business.

Learning Organizations and Learning Culture

Peter Senge introduced people to the “learning organization” in the Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of a Learning Organization (Doubleday), defining it as “an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.” He further defines the five disciplines of a learning organization like this:

• Systems Thinking: Is concerned with the whole
• Personal Mastery: Is continually clarifying and developing proficiency
• Mental Models: Work with assumptions, generalizations, or images that influence how people view the world
• Building Shared Vision: Creates a mutual picture of the future that fosters genuine commitment.
• Team Learning: Uses dialogue to suspend assumptions and “think together” to ensure that the organization learns

If you haven’t read The Fifth Discipline since it came out in 1990, go back and read it again. It will take on a new meaning for you today. Senge was ahead of his time in his thinking. If you have never read this book, do it now for your organization. The second edition was published in 2006.

This chapter continues to define your role as a TD professional and how a learning organization supports a solid talent development effort. A learning culture is one of the underpinnings of success as you design your organization’s talent development program. Because, as Peter Senge puts it, “real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.” Those are powerful words. Learning is as fundamental to human beings as are many of our other survival drives.

Cultivating Your Organization’s Learning Culture

Where do you start to create a learning culture? Most important, make time for learning and create accountability from the top down. Tie learning to the organization’s goals and encourage individual development plans (IDPs). For example, the ATD research report “Building a Culture of Learning” found that making IDPs a part of a culture of learning requires

• Regularly updated IDPs for every employee
• Employee accountability for the learning specific in their IDPs
• Nonfinancial rewards and recognition for employee learning

Making time doesn’t mean the amount invested in attending training. It means that organizations allow employees time on the job to learn, such as by allotting time to

• Learn from a coach or a mentor
• Learn by serving on a team, shadowing another employee, or creating a solution with an employee from another division or location
• Discuss projects and updates with supervisors on a daily basis
• Practice and reflect on what happened and what might be done differently in the future

A true learning culture tolerates mistakes and celebrates creativity. It encourages risks and understands failure. Employees are allowed to try and learn and fail until successful. Finally, a learning culture has a process that employees can use to share what was learned for team and organizational learning. A learning culture is a hallmark of a high-performing organization.

Sustaining a Learning Culture

After you initiate actions that create a learning culture, you will want to sustain it and allow it to flourish.

Holly Burkett provides some thought-provoking ideas in her book Learning for the Long Run (ATD Press, 2017). She presents a model of sustainability for learning organizations. Holly believes that your organization will experience four stages. Very simplified, Holly’s stages include:

• Stage 1, Recognition: “How do we prove value?”
• Stage 2, Resistance: “How do we deliver value?”
• Stage 3, Renewal: “How do we add value?”
• Stage 4, Refinement: “How do we create value?”

You may want to share these kinds of questions with your leaders to focus on delivering value as a TD professional. You need to lead the development efforts in your organization — not just from a TD leader’s perspective but also from an organizational perspective. Check out Holly’s book. She provides an excellent model that I have summarized for you in Table 14-1.

Maintaining the Culture with Logistics

It takes effort to launch, leverage, and lead your learning culture. But you also need to attend to the logistics necessary to ensure that your learning culture is sustained. Organizations are dynamic entities; therefore, it’s important to ensure that you’re focused on the right development efforts. A few maintenance steps can help to maintain the value of the initiative. Even if you’re a one-person department, you can create roles and relay information in a structured way, as the following sections describe.

Can Organizations Learn?

So many opportunities. So much to do. Have you ever considered how your organization got to the point of knowing all that it knows? TD professionals often talk about learning organizations as if the learning starts after the organization has been around for a while, and now we’re going to inject this magic elixir into the system that will somehow make the organization smart.

This chapter starts with a discussion about Senge and the value of learning organizations. The vision of what that might mean to an organization exists, along with the jargon. Yet the concept of a learning organization still eludes many organizations. Trusted advisors like you and your TD colleagues can help senior leaders understand what a learning organization is and what a learning culture can accomplish.

Can organizations learn? You bet. Organizations gain knowledge through experience from four sources: individuals, teams, organizationally, and from other organizations. The ultimate goal of organizational learning is to acquire the ability to successfully adapt to changing environments, to increase efficiency, and to be more competitive.

Alvin Toffler is credited with saying: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” We’re there, Alvin.