Does your organization have a learning disability?
As we go through life, we are required to learn new skills to advance to the next level. Even when we enter the world of work, we must learn new skills. We stop growing and moving forward as soon as we think we have learned everything we need to know. At that time we began to vegetate.
The same can be said of organizations. Every organization grows with enthusiasm to a certain point and then slows down and even stops. An organization needs to learn to grow. When an organization thinks it knows everything it needs to know, it will stop growing. The problem, in the case of an organization, is that it needs to learn just to stay in one place, let alone move forward.
Think of how computers have changed the face of business. By refusing to learn about computers, a company today could not hope to compete. Without computers, there are very few businesses that can survive and prosper.
In 1983, a Royal Dutch/Shell survey found that a third of the Fortune 500 companies in 1970 had disappeared. Not only were they smaller but they ceased to exist. The survey estimated that the average life of a large industrial company is less than forty years. Not much considering all the effort that goes into building a business.
Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline” identifies 7 learning problems found in organizations. Over the next 6 ezines I will cover each of these disabilities. If you can see any of these disabilities in your company, we suggest that you make an effort to solve the problem. We addressed a disability “The Management Team Myth” in a previous ezine. Follow this link to read about that disability http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?arcturusadvisor.
The best way we have found to create a learning organization is through Best Year Yet. http://www.arcturusadvisors.com/partners.htm. Everything that is needed in a transformation is addressed within the program.
Learning disability 1 – “I am my position”
We are so loyal to our jobs that they have begun to define who we are and how we think. Many people can’t see themselves doing anything else and when asked what they do for a living, they reply “I’m an accountant” or something equivalent. They often don’t see the purpose of the organization they work for or how they contribute to the whole. Most see themselves within an organization over which they have little influence.
A job is seen as just that, a job defined by limits and tasks. Something we try to cope with and do our time, according to the job description. Jobs and roles do not overlap. We don’t see how our work has any impact on another function within the organization.
The problem with “I am my position” is that we see the organization as a bunch of silos, none interacting with the others. An accountant only does accounting work and a marketing manager only does marketing work. Accountants are not concerned with how their decisions impact other positions or functions within the company. They make accounting decisions based on accounting impact and not organizational impact.
The other problem associated with this learning difficulty is that people have little sense of responsibility for the results obtained when the different silos interact. They only see their responsibility for their silo and nothing else. As a result, when problems occur, ‘someone else’ can always be blamed. Problems are lost and nothing is learned from unexpected results.
A learning organization, on the other hand, warrants systems thinking: the process of seeing the organization as an interacting whole organization. Where each decision is evaluated on how it impacts the whole. Holistic management in Best Year Yet terms.
Do your people interact? Do they understand how their decisions affect the entire organization?