Transforming the Learning Culture

What is a Learning Culture for Business?

We live in an age of information and learning. Despite all the problems we face, information and the growing ways to access it, display it and use it strategically is becoming essential for the continued growth of businesses, who as of late, have become more and more entrenched in the online environment. How entrenched was dramatically illustrated in Canada on July, 8,2022 when the Rogers Telecom service went down across Canada. A article by the Financial Post on that day, titled "Rogers Network Outage Across Canada Hits Banks, Businesses, and Consumers" detailed how business losses mounted. Although this article touches on a number of issues, it still points to the fact that more and more we are going to be doing business in a global context on the web and how we learn, will determine whether we survive. Lesson #1 for this is for businesses to come to the realization that their greatest assets are the employees and what they contribute is dependent upon on their ongoing, learning and skill development within the organization but also outside it. Learning culture is not something to be taken lightly.

In the last post, the idea of the need for transformational leadership was pointed to as the key to such benefits as ongoing innovation, an adaptive but flexible company mission, and learning from top to the bottom entry levels of the business organization so that learning becomes as a natural way of doing things as any other important process within the organization.

Obviously, it is important to either develop a learning culture for business if you don't have one or transform the one you have if it is not producing the results you seek. The following video gives direction on accomplishing this mission critical task.

Learning from Effective Learning Culture Models

Within the global corporate food chain, there are reasons why certain companies are at the top of that chain and why others are languishing in obscurity. It has been a corporate learning mantra that if you want to rise in this competitive "food chain", the first order of business is to learn from the best.

Mark Cuban gives us a hint as to what is really important in an age where knowledge and innovation is expanding at an exponential rate.

Credit: www.entrepreneur.com

When you look at the top of the food chain, it is unavoidable to consider the success of Apple, Microsoft, and Google as corporate entities. One of the traits that connects them all, is that they consider the corporate learning culture a high priority.

Consider Google for example:

Credit: www.blog.Kissmetrics.com

In describing their learning culture, the following gives food for thought:

Credit: Manpreet Kaur

Credit: Manpreet Kaur

Even the late founder of Apple, Mr. Steve Jobs, considered it important to foster an effective learning culture within the business organization, suggesting that sometimes management needs to step back and empower employees to be mentors to each other.

Transformational Leadership-- Transforming Roles in the Learning Culture

In order for an organization to transform their learning culture, it is important to look at the leadership roles that are an important part in the process of organizational learning and ask the question:

" Do the roles of those who have leadership in training our employees, fit the reality of what is needed to succeed in the globally connected world economy or are we in a holding pattern despite the great changes in the world?"

Transformation of the traditional roles of CLO, ID, SME as examples need to come about to reflect things that have changed. For example, consider the "Metaverse". What effects will this have on how we do business? An in-depth look at these roles now and in the future will be the focus of the next segment.