A CEO’s guide to making learning the new working

(Published in the third issue of HRM Magazine, November 2021)

By Ashutosh Tiwari

Working as a job-holder used to be about earning. People changed jobs based on how much more they could earn. Most people still do that, of course. After all, a job that gives you both livelihood and disposable income is important. But increasingly, in most knowledge-based jobs today, higher earnings and higher corporate revenues are determined not so much by how much you have learnt in the past – which is just enough to get your foot into the door -- but how fast you can learn new skills and knowledge and apply them to address your company’s emerging challenges.

How did we get looking at work from a path to earning to a path to learning? One phrase: Rapid, mind-numbing technological changes in the last 20 years.

These changes, in turn, have triggered profound, multi-dimensional social, cultural and generational transformations, which are starting to have their influence in the workplace too. As such, a company that still tries to employ and keep people the way it used to do in 2009 is headed not for distinction, but for extinction.

In such a context, what’s a CEO to do? Simple: Lead the workplace learning as the new working.

Doing so is important for two reasons. First, in these days of Covid-19 lockdowns, work-from-home arrangements, supply chain disruptions, decision-making by Zoom, political uncertainty, competitive pressures, and a large number of young people leaving for jobs abroad, we no longer work in a stable corporate system that comes with a high degree of predictability. Such a system is of the past.

Instead, no matter what we do, we now work in an unstable and a fast-changing system, which has too many new variables to be comfortably predictable. Such a system does not respond well to our past knowledge, past expertise and past experience, all of which now have shorter half-lives. That being the case, we have no choice but to start turning our companies into learning organizations.

The aim here is to assume that problems and challenges that we have not even imagined will come up, and we will not know what they are in advance. But we need to anticipate them, invest in building up our knowledge and skills, and be ready to respond to those challenges and difficulties that we have not seen but will certainly emerge in the near future.

How does a CEO turn his or her company into a learning entity? These three approaches can help.

Open culture: People who grew up with the Internet are now in the workplace. These people enjoy posting, liking, sharing and commenting on issues of their interest – all as matters of public display. That habit easily spills over to their work-life too, where they expect greater transparency with regard to the sharing of information, discussion of mistakes, celebrating successes, and even openly questioning and revising company practices and policies.

True, confidential corporate information needs to remain confidential. But an open culture that promotes back-and-forth conversations, consistency of core behaviors and clarity of intentions is at an advantage. That is because such a culture enables everyone at all levels to use their judgment to continue to adapt to new information, changes and insights without directives from the top.

This is good for any organization because people learn on the basis of the information and knowledge they get from the company’s open channels. It is the absence of such open channels that makes the company vulnerable to gossip, rumors, internal politics and fear, all of which make the company, well, immuno-compromised in these times of rapid change.

Coaching: A company is not a collection of a few solo superstars. If it were, the ensuing ego clashes would soon tear it apart. At any growing company’s heart is effective team work, which raises the probability of overall success. Technical experts may talk to one another, and get their basic work done. But they very much need to work well with non-technical colleagues. Customers, after all, buy not only the technical excellence, but also services and products manufactured to their specifications, taste and convenience, and with after-sales efforts. To help deliver these bundle of services, even the technical experts need to learn to work on teams with colleagues who are unlike themselves.

As such, they all can benefit from the CEO’s or senior managers’ coaching them, on a regular basis – say, half-a-day every two weeks -- on skills and knowledge that make their work effective. These are skills on how to come up and champion ideas, how to persuade or convince others, how to appreciate what value others bring to the table, how to collaborate with others to please the customers, how to deal with under-performers, how to motivate their team members, what new challenges and opportunities are coming up on the horizon, and so on.

Companies often outsource these skill-building conversations to external consultants. This is fine, but this robs the senior leaders of a chance to get to know their own people, and develop their sense of belonging and being valued by their managers. This is why, unless the CEO and the senior managers see their role as growing their people’s talent by coaching them to success ahead, the company cannot call itself a learning organization.

Network-building: Every employee has his or her own personal and professional networks. Companies need to find ways to tap into those networks to discern what’s coming in the marketplace or changing with customers.

One way to do that is to let employees build up their subject-matter expert networks inside and outside the company. For example, an HR Manager’s network will consciously include all external HR associations, HR and recruitment agencies, HR professors at local colleges, HR consultants, and even his or her participation in domestic and international HR conferences.

Taking this example further: Encouraging the HR to be a part of these various networks will help them tap into the knowledge about how others do their HR work, what useful practices can be brought into the company from outside, and where the next wave of talents for the company may come from. Such intelligence, after all, is not found only inside the company. As such, a company that encourages employees to be professionally networked has access to thousands of brains outside of it – brains that bring intelligence, and help it manage and adapt to changes, no matter from what direction those changes come from.??

Previously, colleges and universities were the places of learning, and, after completing one’s studies, one went off to work to earn. These days, with overall knowledge growing at a rate that no one can keep pace with, universities have become mostly credentialing entities. What they teach is Year 1 is likely to be irrelevant by Year 5. In the meantime, workplaces have emerged as the new centers of practical, actionable learning. This is because they have realized that there is a positive correlation between employees’ new learning and higher corporate earnings.

A CEO who understands that s/he is now operating in an unstable system with many changing variables knows that the only way to make the company resilient against shocks is to put in systems, processes and culture that make everyone in the company a continuous learner. That is the new HR advantage.??????

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