In pursuit of a Learning Organisation

Part 1 - Walking a path already well trodden

So, those of you that caught my first ever article last week, will know I've been researching the subject of Learning Organisations, if it really exists and if it even achievable. I also promised to share what I found weekly here. I hope it is valuable!

In the first part I wanted to share who has already walked here before. There many others that have already started the quest so it feels right to share this first and I'll try to find a way to upload a copy of my reading list here too just in case anyone fancy getting sucked into the black hole too.

Before I start lets be really clear, I really wanted to know the answers to 2 questions in my reading:

1: Does learning really lead to overall organisational success (I had been told it is impossible to connect the dots between learning and bottom line business revenue and I disagreed, naturally!).

2: Does the leader, in particular the executive leader, play a critical role in?creating cultures for learning, which leads to overall organisational success (I passionately believe the views of the most senior leaders and more recently the investors on learning, can impact on how a business performs, I wanted to prove it)

Naturally the learning organisation comes into play here and as it seems to be a hot topic, it made sense to start there.

I was overwhelmed by the vast amounts of research on the principles or disciplines of a Learning Organisation (Senge, 2006), its other forms; Organisational Learning, Learning Culture a Learning Company (Pedler, Boydell and Burgoyne, 1989) and a Living Company (De Geus, 1999) each discussing individual, team and organisational learning to some degree and their contributions to overall business success. I spent a lot of time reading Senge's work including the Five Disciplines Field book which came in really useful. Word of warning, some things in the field book haven't stood the test of time (learning styles is mentioned) so take care before running with some of the activities suggested in the book.

I also decided to break things down by looking at learning at these 3 levels....

1. Individual
2. Team
3. Organisation

and if organisation success through learning could be measured at each level. For me, success is measured on 3 frontiers:

1. Financial Capital (the money)
2. Human Capital (the employees)
3. Social Capital (communities, customers and consumers)

which also keeps things business like and avoids wishy washy L&D speak. It focuses the purpose of learning in an organisation on gaining competitive advantage and not just through the altruistic approach of just helping others get better.

Subjectivism Vs Objectivism

On a short note, in my reading, there were 2 clear camps when it comes to organisational learning. Subjectivism or a view that learning is naturally occurring and should be left to naturally occur or Objectivism, a view that learning can be acquired or lost and should be managed. I'm still struggling with myself and if I sit in one or the other so I'm going to sit firmly on the fence and share I think both are in play. I would love to see a world where learning can just occur as I feel I have done my best learning under these conditions but know that we are considering gaining competitive advantage here which could benefit from some form direction, framework and structure. Feel free to debate!

Lets start with a look at Individual Learning, Leadership and Organisational success.

In a modern day ‘knowledge economy’ individual learning is seen through the lens of knowledge management where knowledge that is tacit (Polanyi, 1966) needs to be shared or made explicit so it isn’t lost and so that others can benefit from the insight more established employees might hold.?Skills and competency also feature where creating learning s-curves (Adler and Clark, 1991; Nunes and Breene, 2010) not only enable a continuous improvement of performance to be realised but talent to be retained and progressed in the organisation for the endeavour of Human Capital, consistent with the objectivist view.?There is also some indication that a culture of learning, where learning is actively encouraged within the organisation, can have an impact on job satisfaction and in turn reduce turnover (Egan, Yang and Bartlett, 2004).?As turnover is one of the biggest costs to any organisation, this could indicate that learning, both enabling or disabling it, can impact on the financial success or capital of a business.

Enabling factors of individual learning that lead to individual, team and organisational success begin to widen out to the Human Resource activities of a business and how the organisation governs itself.?One area of interest with particular relation to executives, is how policies on pay and reward are designed and agreed upon.?

Taking a look at Human Capital theory (Becker, 1975) we could say that learning is a key determinator of how much executives and other employees get paid, based on the concept that the more experienced an executive is the more human capital they hold and so a larger return can be made on the investment (Gomez-Mejia, Berrone and Franco-Santos, 2010).?However, Pay Dispersion theory (Gomez-Mejia, Berrone and Franco-Santos, 2010; Wade, O’Reilly and Pollock, 2006) indicates that a vertical variation in pay created by Human Capital theory, specifically at executive level, actually causes negative behaviours in relation to inequity.?

What does that mean? Well it is possible to argue that negative feeling towards pay dispersion actually limits the learning abilities of an individual (executive) due to reduced job satisfaction and thus, creates a culture that fails to succeed or a poor learning culture.?Given that, in most organisations, the executive leaders determine how learning is enabled, it could also be suggested that pay and reward could limit the success and job satisfaction of all employees in an organisation. For me this was the first indication of how the system itself can block learning and learning cultures. No wonder it is difficult to achieve.

Leadership in general, is also associated with individual learning and success in my reading.?Authentic leadership (Gardner et al., 2005; Gardner and Carlson, 2015) where leaders bring their whole selves to work rather than having a leader persona and where leaders demonstrate high levels of self-awareness and self-regulation has been seen to provide a positive model for followers and in turn lead to sustained follower performance (Gardner et al., 2005).?

In particular, if an authentic leader models self-direction towards self-development, there is some likeliness that their followers (their team, peers, other colleagues) providing they also possess high self-awareness, will be influenced by their values and behaviours and do the same.? No shock there!

Gardner et al ?also propose that authentic leaders are more likely to seek to develop followers with low self-awareness by modelling self-discovery and providing autonomy.?It is possible that this autonomy, in turn, leads to high levels of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) which promote individual learning and greater organisational success. More to come on psychological safety later.

There are clear connections to what Senge (Senge, 2006) calls Personal Mastery.?One of Senge’s five disciplines, Personal Mastery is about “approaching one’s life as a creative work” and although Senge states that “no one will be able to make clear connections to personal mastery and the bottom line” much of the literature presents clear connections and that leaders, who make the executive decisions and directions of organisations, are heavily involved.?

It isn’t all down to the leader or the environment they create, however.?The individual themselves is equally responsible when it comes to their own development or learning.?Dweck & Leggett (1988) and Dweck’s later work (2015) pinpoint how the mindset of an individual impacts on their overall ability to learn.?If an individual develops what Dweck terms a ‘Growth Mindset’ they are more likely to challenge themselves.?Dweck & Leggett highlight that goals and how they are perceived can either hinder or help an individual to be successful.?

Dweck’s work indicates that some individuals can hold a ‘learned helplessness’ when pursuing performance goals where they are likely to be judged for their adequacy leading them to perform worse than those who pursue learning goals and are mastery-orientated.?Mastery-orientated individuals pursue goals as an opportunity to improve their skills and welcome the opportunity to develop further learning.

If a leader is involved in the development of performance goals for an individual, where employees are pitched against each other, there is a chance that this action will create helplessness and eliminate an environment for personal mastery.?

However, if a leader facilitates the autonomous development of goals led by the individual, there is more of a chance that a mastery-orientation is undertaken.?This furthers Peter Senge’s position on personal mastery where personal visions and holding ‘Creative Tension’ is the key.?The individual is in control but the level to which they are supported could impact both positively and negatively.

So what?

Even at the individual level, gaining a learning organisation is way more complex than it first seems. In my opinion, some learning media make it appear easy to achieve when the reality is quite the opposite. This is not easy, it takes great understanding of your own business, its people, its leaders and its systems. We need to focus on the systems we place in organisations and challenge ourselves to go beyond the LMS or the course as the solution.

Next time I'll share how Team and Organisation learning (if it even exists) can support organisational success.