The hunt for the elusive Organizational "Learning Culture" (Part I)

My grandma always said that, in order to begin with something, you had to start from the beginning. That might sound obvious and basic, but it's probably the least thing we do and the most taken for granted when we aim to achieve everything we set out to do year after year as responsible individuals in Learning, Training, or Development departments in our companies.

The Learning Culture is the fertile ground upon which initiatives, practices, techniques, strategies, technologies—basically, our everyday tasks—are built and nourished. It's the foundation on which our performance as training and development leaders is evaluated. However, our priorities are often more focused on squeezing juicy fruits from those efforts, neglecting the substrate on which those efforts get the necessary nutrients for the harvest.

A moderately well-trained farmer would look at us with some pity, while we try to harvest with high expectations without preparing the soil for increasingly solid roots, without fertilizing it to provide all the necessary nutrients and retain the moisture that will feed the plants in periods of drought; without ensuring the health of the substrate to promote the vigorous growth of the plant that will resist pests and weeds, making it sustainable in the long run.

This analogy with agriculture wonderfully illustrates the need for ensuring a Learning Culture among our collaborators and leaders to be among our priorities.

In the following entries of this blog, I will delve into this concept with some depth: what constitutes a Learning Culture, how it is necessarily interrelated with other aspects of organizational culture, and I will formulate some specific strategies that we can implement to maintain that rich substrate, ready to facilitate our work, yielding better results with less effort.

Ready to lay the foundations?