Chapter 14
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 requires that you determine what you have to work with. You can diagnose your organizational culture, and you can make changes that affect the learning culture. Even if you don’t work on the culture, there are things that you can influence: beliefs, processes, practices, and encouraging individuals and the organization to increase knowledge, competence, and performance. As you can imagine, there are many opinions about what is needed to build a learning culture; there is no “best” way. There are, however, some things to set you on your way.
An article published by Oracle, “Seven Steps to Building a High-Impact Learning Culture” (found at https://www.oracle.com
), describes the steps you can take to implement a high-impact learning culture:
Some of these aren’t new to you, and I address some of them in this chapter and the rest in Chapter 15. A stellar talent development program can help organizations reach their strategic imperatives. A learning culture helps move it to success faster.
With all the proof that exists about the value of a learning culture, wouldn’t you think organizations would be clamoring to sign up? Well, that’s not the case. Many things that seem to be just common sense don’t take root in organizations, and building a learning culture is one of them. Many obstacles stand in the way of a learning culture, and here are four that I’ve experienced:
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
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
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.
Sometimes leaders simply don’t know the advantages of a learning culture, or they don’t want to know. As mentioned previously, sometimes the lack of a learning culture is a part of the culture that’s hard to change, especially if your organization resists change.
Remember that talent development programs exist to ensure that employees gain knowledge and skills to improve their performance so that organizations can achieve their strategic goals. People can say those words and mean them. Yet organizations continue to struggle with seeing a real impact on the business. Unfortunately, without a strategy, organizations lack the guidance necessary to design and deliver effective learning that boosts both individual and organizational performance. Therefore, leaders never see the proof.
A learning culture can have a grass-roots start, but it’s highly likely to die on the vine. That’s why you need to link learning to business in order to initiate a successful learning culture promoted by leaders who are involved.
A mature organization demonstrates a learning strategy that is aligned to organizational requirements. The learning strategy exists to drive business value rather than to provide training. Sometimes a business case can help you to create a learning culture. At other times, a talent development department may want to examine itself first. Is the department aligned with the organization? To align with your organization’s business objectives, you might consider the questions in the “TD business alignment” sidebar.
Talent managers generally appreciate the importance of alignment but may not have objective ways of assessing performance capabilities. Unfortunately, many don’t know whether their T&D efforts have achieved quantitative performance targets. Mature learning cultures are more likely to have clear strategies that are well matched with business metrics. Mature learning cultures not only plan and prioritize around important business measures but also monitor the impact of learning to determine whether processes are adding value.
Business moves rapidly and strategies change quickly, so you need to deliver knowledge and skills for any new direction. Of course, doing so isn’t easy, but it is critical. One final thought concerning linking learning to business: You need to determine what you will not do in order to make time for what you will do for your organization.
But what can you do to cultivate a learning culture in an organization? That’s the question I usually ask myself when learning about a new concept. In this section, I provide you with a checklist of some proactive steps you can take to get started. Use the list in the sidebar “Your action guide to building a learning culture” as a starting point.
In the following sections, I examine the four categories and identify several specific actions you can take.
Underlying the learning culture is the organizational climate required for learning to occur. The ultimate goal isn’t just “to learn” but also to transfer the learning to be more productive, make fewer mistakes, make better decisions, know how to utilize data, satisfy customers, increase sales, develop innovative solutions, and a hundred other ways to ensure that your organization has a competitive advantage. These actions can get you started to develop your learning climate:
The learning culture must start at the top. Involve leaders to advise your talent development efforts, to nominate employees for learning programs, and to participate in learning events that your department offers. Involving leaders gets the message across that learning is everyone’s responsibility.
Even though I say that learning is everyone’s responsibility, talent development professionals must take more responsibility for integrating learning with work and creating what employee development looks like. We need to find ways to present this mindset throughout the organization, and here are some ways to do that:
Create a communication plan to keep employees informed about the multiple opportunities to learn. Identify what works best for your organization and employees.
Review content about ecosystems and identify how you can ensure that alignment occurs between your learning culture and a framework for evolving workplace learning practices. Determine talent development’s role to implement a cohesive plan. Need more information about ecosystems? Read anything by the expert, JD Dillon.
Teach your talent development team about systems thinking. Start by having everyone read Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday).
Create a governance structure that incorporates a board to help your TD department lead your organization’s learning culture.
The learning culture isn’t owned by the TD department. It’s owned by the entire organization. It starts at the top, but the learners are the employees, the teams, and the organization. Everyone must be accountable for their own learning. (See the next chapter for more information about individual accountability for learning.) Build learning into every job — meaning, put learning where the work is. Make learning a part of what employees do and help them feel that the organization values them. Here are some specific ways to create an opportunity so that everyone has a role in learning:
https://www.td.org/research-reports/leaders-as-teachers
) provides a number of practical actions you can take to start a leaders-as-teachers program.This fourth category of building a learning culture is a challenge. TD professionals have been content driven in the past. We have always been able to create learning for any subject that arises. Today, change is occurring so rapidly that it’s nearly impossible for employees to keep up with what they need to know — and even harder for TD professionals. There are better ways to deliver content than what we’ve used in the past. This list provides you with ideas for how to improve your content delivery:
After you initiate actions that create a learning culture, you will want to sustain it and allow it to flourish.
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.
TABLE 14-1 Sustainability Stages Checklist
Key Actions for Each Stage | How To Address This Stage |
---|---|
Stage 1: Recognition: “How do we prove value?” | |
Align learning and business strategies |
|
Engage leadership support |
|
Link learning to performance |
|
Establish a measurement framework |
|
Stage 2: Resistance: “How do we deliver value?” | |
Educate and advocate |
|
Build capabilities |
|
Deploy well |
|
Develop partnerships |
|
Show how learning and performance solutions solve real problems |
|
Stage 3: Renewal: “How do we add value?” | |
Communicate relentlessly |
|
Stabilize infrastructure |
|
Strengthen alliances |
|
Measure what matters |
|
Incorporate continuous improvement mechanisms |
|
Stage 4: Refinement: “How do we create value?” | |
Foster change resilience and agility |
|
Embrace innovation mindsets and practices |
|
Continually reflect, review, and refine |
|
Based on Learning for the Long Run, by Holly Burkett
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.
You can create a talent development board or learning culture advisory council to help you make decisions about content, learning experiences, evaluation, budget, and other topics. The board can be made up of senior level employees from other departments across the organization. The board serves as a sounding board, marketing advisor, and connection to the strategy. The board can recommend improvements to the talent development program and keep the lines of communication open to the business departments.
Keeping your senior leaders involved is essential to maintaining a learning culture. To be successful, leaders must be involved in organizational efforts. The rest of the organization will be watching and will take the leaders’ involvement as a stamp of approval. Send email written by the senior leadership team, have them introduce new events, and ask them to speak about the TD program. They can serve as mentors and coaches, support cross-department development activities, and lead the way for developing direct reports. They will be viewed as the models for the rest of the organization.
At least annually, dedicate time to review the learning culture efforts and how the TD efforts support them. Expect your governing body or senior leaders to make decisions about the future. The agenda should consist of changes to strategies, evaluation results, changes to learning experiences, budget updates, new efforts, operational discussions, goals, trends in learning, and other learning topics that are important to your organization. The annual update is a perfect time to review what you accomplished and recount your successes, as well as a time to look ahead to make improvements.
Until the learning culture can hold its own, find ways to keep your efforts toward developing it in front of all employees. Keep communications flowing and the program visible throughout the organization. Tap into your leadership to be a part of the communication efforts.
Ensure that the TD programs support your learning culture in every way. Ensure that the organization’s strategic documents reflect the initiative and its importance to the organization. Do what you say you will do. Keep promises. Admit mistakes. Improve continuously. Listen to your customers. Budget wisely. Stay focused on what’s best for the organization and employees.
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.
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