Five Tips For Growing A Learning Organization

A while ago I posted a question “Your Top Five Tips For Growing A Learning Organization” to Learning Organization Practitioners’ Network – LinkedIn Group. Eight people were willing to share their tips. Now I have combined them to a one list of five tips.

1. Integrity – Quote from John Fleming:
   

   “Ensure that as a leader one lives the truth in their efforts to help the organization to be successful. There will be times when tough decisions have to be made and the team(s) need to trust that they are being made with the best interest of the whole and each of the pieces in mind. One has to be firm and fair with consideration for all the elements in the system of the business and the economic environment in which it operates.”

2. Senior Management Support – upper management need to understand and support the change in order you to get enough resources and power. From my own experience I can tell that you can start without it, but it is a lot easier if you have this.
3. Persistence – Quote from Calvin Coolidge:
   

   “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”

4. Shared Vision – a sense of mission, what do we do and why we do it.
5. Communication -open and honest communication. People must be able to talk about both negative and positive things openly.

With these in place, you can begin the learning and changing the way your organization acts.

Team Management: Avoid External Tasks

One of the most toughest things to handle in management is to protect your team from  external tasks. These requests usually come from marketing & sales guy who received them from the customers. In cases like these you must look it at from both business and management perspective: will accepting the request provide more money or prevent loss? How much will it affect to the team?

Understanding the team management perspective is usually forgotten. The case I usually come across is this: a marketing person comes with a request and asks how long will it take to do it. Now, these are usually small tasks, say 1-2 day tasks. When we tell them it takes 1-2 days they think that “that is close to nothing, let’s do it!”.

Let’s approach this with an example from ice hockey. You have a five players plus the goalkeeper, right? What happens if one of the players is away for 2 minutes due penalty? Here is a couple things that happen:

• The whole team goes in to defensive mode
• They are unable to perform a fully organized attack as one of their key players is missing
• Four of the players in the field has to now work harder
• Other side has a lot better chance to do a goal, which might lead to their victory

Now imagine one of your team members going to do some external task for two days. It will affect exactly the same way. The thing that must be understood is that when there is a team: team is constructed out of individuals, each bringing in their experience and time. When you take someone out of the team for two days recovering will take more than just the two freaking days! As in the hockey example, when you look at the big picture, you’ll have to understand that this will most likely affect to the end result. Also, for the two days other team members will suffer from this. Two days, “close to nothing”, might turn in to an effect that takes over week before the team is fully recovered.