Bringing People Together, Reshaping the Future – The Role of Mentoring in Developing Thriving Learning Organisations

Learn or Die: Do Organisations Really Have a Different Option in Today’s High-Stakes Environment?

In 2014, the American professor of business administration, Batten Faculty Fellow, and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia Edward D. Hess published a book with a provocative title: Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization. In this book he emphasized that there are four key elements in building a thriving learning organization: learning leaders, learning people, learning processes, and a learning culture.??

How much progress have we really made since 2014 in advancing the idea that the organizations of the future are truly learning organisations?

While technology adoption made a quantum leap during the Covid pandemic, challenging our ways of working and connecting with each other, it seems that we still have companies and leaders who struggle with the idea of how to turn learning into a competitive advantage for their future. This reality is made even more dire by the perfect storm that hit Europe and the world in 2022, with supply chain troubles, massive inflation, war in Ukraine, and the energy crisis hitting people, companies, and countries at the same time.???

This is why the topic of how to develop healthy, thriving learning organizations in order to bring people together and reshape the future is one of the key areas that will be addressed during the incoming EMCC Global Mentoring Conference. The conference takes place on Friday, October 28th, 2022, virtually and is bringing together people and organisation development experts from all over the world to explore the role of mentoring in our thriving in the future.

WHAT PREVENTS MORE COMPANIES FROM BECOMING HIGH-PERFORMING LEARNING ORGANISATIONS? ?

“Learning is not easy, for individuals and organisations alike,” said Karine Mangion-Thornley, senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of the West of England, who is a guess panelist during the incoming EMCC Global Mentoring conference.

“There are three key challenges for becoming a learning organization. First, drawing on learning theories, learning is a complex process. For example, the stages of development of adults often include a period of discomfort, yet conducive of learning. This stretch zone, also called the “proximal zone of development” by Vygotsky, varies from one individual to another. Indeed, individuals approach learning with various levels of motivation, readiness, openness, and preferences. Similarly, organisations develop in various ways. Therefore, a “one-size-fits-all” approach to becoming a learning organization is not appropriate,” Mangion-Thorley said.

“Second, diversity - age, culture, ethnicity, gender, etc. is an opportunity but also a challenge for deploying a uniform, structured and centralized approach to training, upskilling, and reskilling the workforce. Organisations need to develop diversity and cultural intelligence to adapt to the specific needs of different groups in its workforce and create further engagement. Third, it takes time to reflect, define new actions and embed them in our daily life. At organisational level, it takes time to implement change. However, managers and employees perceive time as a scarce resource and consequently feel under pressure to deliver. With the rise of mental health issues in the workplace, it is vital to re-think processes, to re-design how we work, and re-focus on our organisational purpose. In sum, organisations may lack the structural agility and mindset needed to become adaptive and resilient,” Karine Mangion-Thornley emphasised.

“The learning process is, indeed, sometimes painful, it takes time and we are far from perfect at the beginning of a new practice,” said Lenka Mrázová, an executive mentor and coach, Senior Practitioner with EMCC Global , and founder of LMentio Czech Republic. “We make mistakes during the learning process and the possibility of making mistakes frightens some people. At the same time, I also notice that organisation miss a certain regeneration time offered to people, so they can digest what they learnt. It is necessary to have some days when nothing new happens and things are simply as they are. Even in sports we have to devote a certain amount of time to regeneration. I miss this intended regeneration time in the practice and performance of organisations,” she said.

“After interviewing hundreds of business owners or business executives, the biggest challenge of a learning organisation is how to retain the tacit knowledge from experienced people inside the company rather than focus too much on the explicit knowledge from outside,” said Fisher Yu , the managing director of MentoringCo China and another distinguished EMCC panel discussion guest.

“Tacit knowledge management is the core competency of a company and it’s their main pain-point, but there are very few companies in the world that know how to do it properly. According to a study, only 15% of a company’s knowledge is explicit, the rest is tacit knowledge. Many companies even have their own knowledge management officers, but their main jobs focus mainly on explicit knowledge such as documentation, digitalisation of internal documents for internal learning, etc. Sometimes they touch on tacit knowledge a little bit, but not in depth,” Yu noted. ?

“In my view, the greatest challenge of learning organizations is leadership,” said Ivan Yong , an organisational psychologist, angel investor, entrepreneur and author and founder of the Corporate Disruptors Forum. “The core of leadership today is to create, evolve and manage organisational culture to adapt to the changes in the market. Practices, norms, and rules that guided organisations in the past must evolve to meet the current challenges,” Yong said, adding: “According to Edgar Schein, culture begins with leaders imposing their belief systems, values, and assumptions to the group. Leaders need to set the precedent that would birth a new culture ready for new challenges.”??

“We cannot have thriving organisations without learning leaders. It’s as simple as that,” said Cristina Violeta Muntean , EMCC Senior Practitioner, founder of VORNICA?, a company on a mission to triple the number of women CEOs in Europe by 2030, and moderator of the EMCC panel discussion. “We cannot have a learning organisation without humble leaders who show the way by staying open to learning and talking about their own inner processes, lessons learnt and mistakes. We also cannot have a thriving organisation that is equally made of people attached to the status quo; such organisations are set to perish sooner rather than later. And we cannot thrive without having a constant focus on learning, without perceiving learning as the greatest investment into our future through well thought-through processes and a culture that elevates and glorifies open-minded people who embrace challenge and perceive it as a life-sculpting experience,” Muntean said.

As Peter Hawkins put it, the greatest challenge of organisations today is to learn faster than the change happening around them. Leaders, HR professionals, and learning & development managers have a crucial mission: to elevate people’s mindset into a place where every experience can serve as ground for innovation.

How can organisations do that? Keep an eye on this space for more insights in the third and last part of our series BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER, RESHAPING THE FUTURE – THE ROLE OF MENTORING IN DEVELOPING THRIVING LEARNING ORGANISATIONS. Or better yet – join us at the EMCC Global Mentoring Conference on 28th October 2022, for a day full of inspiration, insights, and mutual support, so we can hold each other and thrive together in the future.?