The Managers Pocket Guide to Organizational Learning (Managers Pocket Guide Series)

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A level of autonomy is necessary for people to do their best work. Second, self-directed learners must believe that it is a stretch to get from the problem to the solution. They live for the challenge that makes them draw upon as many parts of their brain as they can to pull the rabbit out of the hat.


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Straining their resources as they reach for the solution to a problem is energizing, and provides a sense of mastery over the subject. The third element is finding a sense of purpose in what they are doing. Working in the service of a larger mission or goal completes the trifecta for a self-directed learner. Pink uses the example of programmers providing open source code for no pay because they were motivated by the idea of providing free software for the world.

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose enable and empower the self-directed learner. They need to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Manager's Pocket Guides

They need to learn how to learn independently and get over years of learning in an educational system that spoon-fed them what they were supposed to learn. They will need help identifying their learning needs, finding and using resources including computer technology , practicing and reinforcing learning, and evaluating results.

What if the people working for you are not yet self-directed? In this case, your responsibility is to help them learn how to learn. Every manager has a key role to play in making it possible for their direct reports to develop the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in their work. Managers need to set the expectation for self-directed learning and then create the conditions for people to learn independently. The complementary roles of managers and employees [are contrasted in the following table: The relationship between managers and their employees needs to start with a growth mindset.

This belief needs to be shared by managers and employees. You want people who make learning part of the way they work, who are constantly assessing their strengths and weaknesses and seeking out the knowledge and skills that will position them to be more successful. You want opportunities for people to learn, and apply newly acquired knowledge and skills to important work on the job. People can arrange some opportunities for themselves, but this requires managers to give permission, make time, and provide the resources to apply what they learn. You want people to hear and understand that feedback and make use of it to learn and improve their performance.

This must be more than an annual performance review. Performance feedback, positive and negative, should be given at every opportunity throughout the year. Managers should have high but realistic expectations for the people with whom they work. People should be clear about these expectations and how they are linked to performance. Managers should recognize and reward the impact of what people learn on achieving the goals of the organization.

The key is to publicly acknowledge the way learners individuals and teams have adopted and adapted knowledge to make the company smarter. Push training is a siloed, top-down, management-driven approach that sends people to formal training events where they receive nice-to-know information—as in, it will be nice to know someday. People are not connected to one another during or after the training event, and do not collaborate. The focus is on showing up attendance , participating raising your hand , and passing or failing testing. It is a static system created to control and manage hands.

In contrast, pull learning is a learner-driven, bottom-up approach that enables people to access the information they need when and where it is needed. People are able to collaborate and make the best use of the supporting technology that links them to one another and sources of information.

Imagine people facing a new situation in which they require more instruction. Using the push model, no one is sure where to go to get the information they need. They attended a training program, but it did not cover all the possible situations they would encounter, and they have already forgotten most of the content. They can call a co-worker who has already learned what is needed, talk to an expert, or search an interactive site for the latest ideas from other people. The pull model of learning is performance-based.

The focus is on what you can do when you need to get it done. Replacing push training with pull learning is a transformative step toward supporting and sustaining a company. It is managing minds and placing a mission-critical value on learning. This includes technical, operational, and managerial knowledge and skills.

Their employees can quickly access the technology and support to find what they need to know, when and where it is needed. The command-and-control model for organizations was developed to maintain order in large marching armies with the mission to destroy other large marching armies. This style of management dates back to the Roman Empire, if not earlier.

Modern corporations codified this structure to control the numerous hands that needed to be managed. As the Industrial Revolution gained steam, command and control became the accepted approach to building corporations—it was ingrained in the processes and procedures and codified into articles of incorporation used today for old and most new corporations. A command-and-control manager says:. Guilds and apprenticeships, in which control was more democratic and decentralized, only worked in relatively small organizations of artisans and craftspeople.

Most workers today find themselves in command-and-control organizations run by command-and-control managers. Command and control starts with the decision-making process. When work and workers were still connected to an actual space, leaders felt a need to control distributed decision making. When there are many decisions to be made and many hands to manage, command and control gives leaders a sense that they are in charge of decisions, which will not be made without their input and final say.

This approach allows them to justify their importance and remind others of their value to the corporation. But the truth is that the people at the top cannot control everything that goes on in a complex organization. A command-and-control style of management is often the main barrier to corporate learning. This style of management prohibits the more open, transparent, and fearless approach that the newer communicate-and-collaborate model facilitates and supports.

Decisions and options often feel predetermined by people at the top and are not open to discussion. Any call for review is too often viewed as unwillingness to be part of the team—a challenge that should be punished. Using training as a reward is the flip side and also symptomatic of this approach.

Fortunately, there is evidence that this does not have to happen. Consider the software development company Nearsoft. Founded in by Matt Perez and Roberto Martinez, the company has more than employees and has enjoyed rapid growth and increased profits. It also has a highly unusual culture that includes lots of freedom, no managers, and very few rules. Instead, Nearsoft employees rely on a set of five core values: We have clear processes in place for many things we do.

Once the company decides to try an idea, they commit to it for at least a full year, to give it time to work. And if an experiment fails? All lessons learned and new information are viewed positively. The future of how we learn in our organizations is a popular topic. But unless you are responsible for developing, delivering, managing, and measuring training and learning, keeping up with the latest learning technologies can be overwhelming. The training and learning technology discussions miss the point.

Our approach is to suggest new ways of facilitating learning that fit into managing minds. The three keys to successfully managing minds are essentially the competencies needed to move forward and succeed in the knowledge economy. These three competencies are how people learn in a company that is successfully managing minds. They differ dramatically from the ways people learned when they were in organizations that managed hands. This last distinction is not unsupported. The eye-opening discovery in his book, The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity, co-authored with Mats Alvesson, was that when people with impressive educational credentials go to work for the most well-known companies in the world, they are asked to turn off their brains.

Many of the companies surveyed in the book should be managing minds. Yet the predominant environment supports—promotes, even—the traits listed on the left side of the list. This is perhaps a result of short-term thinking, in which following the rules, adding regulations without reason, not asking for justification for decisions especially from self-appointed leaders , not asking questions, and essentially, not thinking for yourself. These managing hands traits can be found in an organization that is obedient, nice, agreeable, harmonious, and seemingly successful in the short term.

The problem is the long term. Asking people not to use their minds is simply asking them to ignore personal growth and satisfaction; not pay attention to long-term organizational competitiveness, innovation, and success; and not participate in the improvement and development of society. Following is an excerpt from our new book, Minds at Work: As the economic paradigms change, a corporate Darwinism takes over and the companies that fail to change and evolve disappear.

The new environment is increasingly aggressive, incessantly competitive, and constantly driven by surprise innovation and technological changes, all happening at an unprecedented pace. Yet we are still trying to use 20th-century management practices and principles to coordinate and manage people in the 21st century. We need to change the basic way we manage people so that managers can create the best environment for everyone to develop the competencies necessary to be successful in this new environment. None of this, we suspect, is news.

What may be new is that you are, as a manager, in charge of this change. Your primary responsibility is to lead people into a 21st-century knowledge economy that supports and sustains learning over everything else. Learning is the critical differentiator in the knowledge economy. How you manage that learning is the new competitive advantage. We describe the 21st-century corporation as an organization that is global and virtual.

People all over the world will form the intersecting nodes for a constantly humming web of communication. They will be able to continuously and seamlessly communicate and collaborate. From the individual to the group, their actions will be quick, decisive, and informed, and the results relevant, smart, and proactive. To create this corporation, how we share information must change. There is no alternative future.

Manager's Pocket Guides

Examples abound of companies that were once household names that became extinct because they did not successfully shift from a static managing hands model to a more agile and dynamic managing minds approach: Of the many factors that contributed to their demise, their slowness or inability to change the way they managed people played a major role. If you have your doubts, look at the companies that are managing minds who filled the empty spot in the marketplace.

The older companies were so invested in a hands-on approach to buying and selling stocks that they missed the big new idea. Individuals no longer wanted to listen. Instead, they wanted to use a faster, cheaper, and more do-it-yourself technology that provided information to help them purchase and sell stocks without brokers. They failed to heed their own engineers, who told them that instant film was an idea whose time had come and gone. Decisions in this managing hands company were top-down and final. Kodak was so invested in manufacturing film that they ignored customers who were rapidly switching to filmless cameras.

The lesson is clear: Corporations must learn to listen to their customers and employees or face the consequences. It is the reality that corporations face whether they want to admit it or not. Fortunately, examples of success are everywhere. The new style of managing minds is the antidote to the problems created by trying to force-fit the 20th-century analog model into the 21st-century digital reality.

Hands are replaceable, literally: Human hands are being replaced by robotic hands every day. And managing robots is no longer a job that requires hands-on managers. This trend toward automation will not stop while technology keeps getting better and more sophisticated.

The Manager's Pocket Guide to Organizational Learning (eBook)

This is likely to change the nature of work across industries and occupations. If you think threading a needle is not that big a deal, here is another example. In a kitchen in Silicon Valley, the team at Zume Pizza is hard at work. Pepe and Giorgio squirt on the sauce, and Marta spreads it in concentric circles, just like they do in Italy. Then Bruno puts the pizza in the oven to bake to perfection. And they do not even stop for a moment to catch their breaths. Made-to-order, ready-to-go, fully automated pizza in as little as seven minutes: We once used machines to build things, and we managed hands.

Now we build machines to build machines. When there are no hands left, what still needs to be managed? Their work is the product of their thinking, creativity, and problem solving. The workplace is changing and the way organizations manage and develop people is changing in response. In the last century Industrial Economy, people were hired basically to work with their hands and do what they were told to do. In the new Knowledge Economy, enlightened companies hire people to work with their minds, to think for themselves, to be creative and collaborative, and to add to the collective wisdom of the organization.

We can no longer rely on formal training programs.

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People need to learn continuously and in the flow of their work which requires the support of the entire organization. The following infographic, designed by ATD, presents the essential elements of the managing-minds approach. The Performance Improvement Blog Helping managers create and sustain a learning culture in organizations. Home Archives Profile Subscribe. Subscribe to this blog's feed.

Blog powered by Typepad. Managing for Success in the Knowledge Economy. Online Workshop on Developing a Learning Culture. This is a 45 minute Webinar with several audience polls and responses to chat room questions from audience. Introduction to 5As Framework for Increasing Business Results from Training A brief presentation of the key factors for leveraging training in organizations to achieve important business results.

Sean Murray and Stephen Gill explain what to do before, during, and after training to maximize learning and impact. See how we're connected. The Purpose of Business is Learning Yes, the purpose of business is to make a profit, retain customers, be sustainable, satisfy shareholders, and, for some, make a difference in the community. Training Is Not Learning Training is not and never has been enough. Imagining Workplaces of Tomorrow: Imagine a company in which: Continuous learning, and learning fast, is key, even in the face of unprecedented change: Employees are hired because they are excited about learning and improving themselves.

They have a history of taking responsibility for their own learning. The message from the CEO to new employees is that learning and self-development are highly valued. Continuous learning is expected from everyone in the organization, from senior leadership down. Incentives and public recognition reward those employees who seek out opportunities to enhance their competencies and increase their capability to contribute to the success of the organization.

Critical information is easily accessible on the go. Equipment operators can view safety information on their smartphones when and where they need it. Managers can download coaching advice prior to meeting with a direct report. Leaders can see a video on open-book management just before discussing it with their teams. Managers meet every few weeks with their direct reports to discuss performance and learning goals. Managers give employees constructive feedback, and together they decide how to achieve goals.

Every manager should have a copy! Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions People who bought this also bought. Thinking in Systems Donella Meadows. Health Communication Renata Schiavo. Beyond the Checklist Patrick Mendenhall. Managing Transitions, 25th anniversary edition Susan Bridges. Billion Dollar Whale Tom Wright. The Intelligent Investor Benjamin Graham. Deep Work Cal Newport. Zero to One Peter Thiel. The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday. The Checklist Manifesto Atul Gawande.

3 editions of this work

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