How Leaders Create Learning Organizations

Here’s How Leaders Create Learning Organizations:

Lead by example by focusing yourself upon learning.

Become a lifelong learner and encourage employees to do so as well.

Learn how to learn and teach that to employees.

Learn how to accelerate our own learning and also teach that to employees.

Be highly supportive of a learning environment.

Focus on individual leadership development, learning, training and development to attain organizational growth.

Drive employees to learn by doing.

Incorporate learning into your organizational processes.

Have regular review meetings to determine what went well and what could have gone better.

Provide your employees different learning resources such as books, social media, online videos, etc.

Utilize technology to accelerate employee learning and to ensure accessibility of employee knowledge.

Engage employees in significant change initiatives.

Ensure that employees learn about managing change.

Offer employees diversity training to learn more about working with diverse sets of people.

Have employees share lessons, tell stories, take actions, make mistakes and strive to improve constantly.

Incorporate learning into all your processes.

Use free blogs, wikis and forums for employee learning.

Promote the creative abilities of employees to generate alternative ideas and open up to different viewpoints.

Allow employees to make mistakes and to learn from them.

Reward employees for continuous learning.

Provide regular, meaningful, constructive feedback.

Hire intellectually curious people.  

Move beyond metrics.

Realize that learning is a long-term thing that cannot be measured in numbers and that employee learning is visible only through results delivered by employees.

Help each employee develop his or her own unique leadership habits and skills

Develop an adaptive and innovative learning environment in your workplace.

Focus on teaching your employees how to learn and how to accelerate their process of learning.

Continually develop new training and development programs and activities that will attract new hires and retain existing ones.

Create a workplace environment that will inspire employees to go beyond what has already been thought of in order to delight customers and yet remain a proper learning organization.”

Make sure your leadership development is democratized.

Make sure every employee feels empowered to lead – whether that’s themselves, their team, or the organization itself.

Whenever any new learning is introduced into your organization, your executives need to demonstrate the behaviors they expect of employees.

Make employee development your top priority.

Have everyone read something really interesting

Attend something educational together.

Have employees teach each other.

Read together by forming a book club at work.

Have everyone attend trainings, workshops, seminars, conventions and conferences.

Provide alternative sources for learning such as CDs, webinars, and other online learning.

Debrief every project and initiative.

Build individual development plans quarterly.

Schedule field trips to other organizations.

Meet regularly across departments.

Bring the whole company together, at least quarterly.

Create cross-functional task forces to solve problems and look for new opportunities.

Cross-fertilize your departments with new ideas.

Pay for education for all employees.

Coach all employees for improved performance.

Form study groups.

Take time to read, to think, to talk about new ideas and work.

Create break and discussion and conference areas that foster people communicating.

Hold brainstorming (idea generation) sessions on specific topics.

Bring "experts" in to help you.

Foster an environment of collegiality.

Use your performance management system effectively.

Offer employees feedback from peers, reporting staff members, and bosses.

Drive people to learn by doing.

Your employees shall learn the most when they implement their newly-acquired knowledge to generate meaningful business results.

Understand that training is just a tool to impart knowledge.

Encourage employees to share lessons, tell stories, take actions, make mistakes and improve constantly.

Strive to create a learning culture.

Focus on your managers and supervisors, for they are the ones that drive learning, not just your HR team.

Incorporate learning into your processes. Establish rituals like periodic review meetings and retrospectives to track what went well / what could have gone well.

Provide your employees with different learning resources.

Give them books, online videos, and so forth,

Harness social media as an employee learning tool. A lot of useful online tools such as blogs, wikis and forums are free.

Have employees work with cross cultural teams and geographies.

Engage employees in significant change initiatives.

Ensure that employees learn about managing change.

Encourage employees to generate alternative ideas.

Be open to different viewpoints and diverse opinions.

Go beyond metrics.

Recognize that employee learning requires a long-term investment which cannot be measured in numbers.

Allow people to make mistakes (and learn from them).

Formalize training and development plans.

Make learning mandatory for all individuals in the organization.

Give recognition to learning.

Employees who have successfully learned new skills and abilities should be recognized to encourage others to follow suit.

Regularly measure the benefits of training and development, as well as determine whether your investment in employee learning is well spent.

Promote employees from within.

Develop knowledge and information sharing into a formal process.

Practice positive reinforcement and inclusiveness/feedback in all activities.

Hire a leadership coach to advise, guide and inspire you.

P.S. Anything else that YOU would add?

The author, Dr. John B. Charnay, CEO of Charnay and Associates in Greater Los Angeles, is a leading leadership coach. He has groomed some of the top leaders in key industries. He has extensive experience teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels at leading universities throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including USC, UCLA, CSUN, FIDM, Woodbury and Pepperdine. Additionally, he is a top fundraising advisor and an award-winning public relations professional who has been a strategic PR and philanthropy advisor to many famous celebrities and Fortune 1000 CEOs. To meet him and ask for his support, invite him to be LinkedIn (email in profile) and contact him today!