 |
| Image courtesy of Davide Bonazzi/theispot.com |
Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it.
The event was running over, the car was waiting, but the keynote speaker did not seem to mind. He was enjoying fielding questions from a large auditorium packed to the rafters with executives, aspiring entrepreneurs, and management students. “Get ready for an age in which we are all in tech,” he had told them, “whether you work in the tech industry or not.” The moderator called for one last question. “What’s the best way to get ready?” a woman asked. “Be great at learning,” he said without hesitation. “The moment you stop learning is the moment you begin to die.”
Calls for learning have long been common at corporate retreats, professional conferences, and similar gatherings. But with the furious pace of change that technology has brought to business and society, they have become more urgent. Leaders in every sector seem to agree: Learning is an imperative, not a cliché. Without it, careers derail and companies fail. Talented people flock to employers that promise to invest in their development whether they will stay at the company or not. And companies spend heavily on it. By one estimate, in 2018, corporate outlays on learning and development initiatives topped $200 billion.
Despite the lofty statements and steep investments, however, learning at work remains complicated. People are ambivalent about it, if not outright resistant. We want to learn, but we worry that we might not like what we learn. Or that learning will cost us too much. Or that we will have to give up cherished ideas. There is often some shame involved in learning something new as an adult, a mentor told me at the start of my career. What if, in the process, we’re found lacking? What if we simply cannot pick up the knowledge and skills we need? I have spent two decades studying adult learning, helping companies design and deploy learning initiatives, and teaching and coaching thousands of high potentials and executives all over the world. And I have found that mentor’s words to be wise: Nothing truly novel, nothing that matters, is ever learned with ease.
This page contains a form, you can see it here
Furthermore, most organizations are not as hospitable to learning as their rhetoric suggests. In my work, I hear the same complaints over and over again:
“My manager does not care about learning.”
“Pressure to perform trumps our need to learn.”
“We are told to celebrate failure as a learning opportunity, but I never feel that I can afford to fail.”
Even though we want to learn and companies need us to, it’s hard, and we get little space for it. Part of the problem, I have found, is that we often think of learning as something that happens at work or alongside it. We seldom acknowledge that learning is work — work that, paradoxically, gets harder in successful careers and organizations, where shame is most unwelcome.
So how can employers make space for learning, and how can we as individuals tackle the work of learning, especially the sort of learning that transforms careers and organizations? Both endeavors require understanding that learning is plural. There is more than one kind, and each kind needs its own space and challenges us in different ways.
Learning Is Plural
Andrew and Sandra (names have been changed) were getting into trouble for not learning fast enough. He was a talented product manager who, after yet another performance review in which he had been told that he should learn to delegate if he aspired to move up the ranks, had come to resent his company for not helping him prepare for senior leadership. She was a respected executive who was running afoul of her boss, the company’s CEO, for not pushing a digital overhaul of her division fast enough. Despite their history of strong performance, both were saddled with a perception that they were not agile enough (management-speak for “stuck in their ways”). They both read widely, attended courses, and sought advice. But none of those efforts seemed to get them unstuck.
When I met Andrew, it did not take him long to admit that he did not really want to change. He wanted a hack. He took pride in being a problem-solver and had long been rewarded for it. As a result, when he passed a problem to his team, he felt embarrassingly useless. No wonder he could not learn to delegate. It threatened the habit — the virtue, as he saw it — of self-reliance that had been prized in all his roles thus far.
Learning threatened Sandra in a different way. Her accomplishments had taken her to the top of her company’s largest division, where she was responsible for a significant portion of the organization’s profits. Pressure to keep the ship steady came from the same boss who urged her to “rock the boat,” from her colleagues, and from the thousands of people whose livelihood depended on her division’s results. Trying something too new felt reckless in her role.
Stories like Andrew’s and Sandra’s are common. The pull of habits and the push of expectations are familiar to anyone who works hard to earn others’ trust. It is not just pride or fear that keeps us stuck. It is also the shame that comes with being exposed and letting others down. The more valuable our identities and commitments are, the less space we feel we have to question them. On the contrary, we shore them up, developing ways to keep potential shame at bay, such as focusing on performance and the organization’s demands.
Managers could be forgiven for concluding (like Andrew’s and Sandra’s bosses did) that we are not learning much when we proceed this way. But they would be wrong.
We are all, in fact, learning every day. Most of that learning, however, is incremental, improvements that build on what we already know and do. We expand our knowledge and refine our skills in ways that strengthen our identities and commitments. Hardly a day went by that Andrew and Sandra did not solve a new problem: A process got fixed, a region got reorganized. Each time, their bosses pointed them to another problem to solve, or they spotted one themselves. The process sharpened their competence, broadened their expertise, and got them attention. Each day they got better — and a little more stuck.
Learning that broadens our expertise is valuable, but it is not enough. Incremental learning does not alter the way we see others, the world, and ourselves. Therefore, we do not just miss opportunities to accelerate that learning. We often miss learning of another kind altogether, the kind that scholars call transformative because it changes our perspectives and relationships, laying the foundations for personal growth and innovative leaps. Both kinds of learning are necessary, of course. Incremental learning helps us deliver, while transformative learning helps us develop. When we make space for the former and avoid the latter, however, frustration ensues, change stalls, and investments go to waste.
Making Space
The kind of space we need for learning, and the way to make the most of that space, depends on what kind of learning we are after. For incremental learning, we need a more focused, less distracting, safer replica of our workplace — a boot camp of sorts, where we can practice the best possible way of doing things, get feedback, and try again. If we are after transformative learning, what we need is a familiar yet open frame — a playground of sorts that magnifies our habits and the culture that breeds them so that we can examine both, and imagine and try new ways of being.
A boot camp must replicate workplace constraints to help us master ways of navigating them more efficiently. Whether it’s a course on, say, reaping insights from data analytics or a training session on giving respectful feedback, the space supports practice and improvement. A playground must remove most constraints to promote experimentation. Providing some distance from day-to-day reality allows us to get real in a deeper sense. A boot camp amplifies and exploits the shame of learning, helping us learn how not to be found wanting. A playground exposes and challenges that shame, helping us realize that if we were less anxious, it might be easier to claim what we want and discover how to get it.
That’s what Andrew and Sandra needed but didn’t have. Both were insightful. Andrew understood the classic trap of talent: What got him noticed as a future leader got in the way of becoming one. Sandra feared the curse of successful executives, which is being seen as a monument to the past that stands in the way of the future. What they did not get was that to make the leap forward, they did not need to master a new way to act but rather a new way to learn. They both put emphasis on trying to find out what they needed to do better. They had plenty of resources for that. What they did not have was a space where they might be different without risking too much.
That’s often a problem in organizations. Even when they make space for learning, as in executive education programs and management retreats, they favor incremental learning. Boot camps cater to the performance mindset and focus on conformity at the office. Furthermore, the kind of learning they support works well for a broad range of skills but not for learning to lead or ignite change. To help people shift to a new way of being at work, we need more open spaces such as leadership development workshops or strategy retreats where we are purposefully disoriented — spaces where we are freed up to question the status quo within and around us and invited to try out different directions.
Source: Gianpiero Petriglieri | MIT Sloan Management Review
No comments:
Post a Comment