Forward Thinking: Planned Opportunities

One important development has been the growth of interest in the idea of the learning organization. Organizations are recognizing that investment in people is a vital aspect of competitive advantage. The problem is that there is much rhetoric around the subject but often little real action. My experience, in working with organizations that espouse the idea of a learning organization, is that unless they focus on how to assist people in the everyday work environment to learn from one another, they will not get past first base.

Visionary dreams will remain dreams if there is no practical action. Such action has to focus right down to the level of individual action. For example, are managers and team leaders devoting the largest part of their time to developing the people around them? If not, all the fine words in the boss' annual report will mean nothing. Essentially, today's business and organizations need to be more strategic in developing a learning organization.

We know that in practice much learning occurs informally at work and that other people can be an important source of help. For example, there is ready acknowledgment of the significance of contacts between senior or experienced and junior or novice staff in the context of apprenticeships, and role-modeling in the development of job-related abilities. An individual's manager can be crucial, not least by exerting legitimate pressure on the individual to achieve relevant learning goals.

With moves toward teamwork in organization, there are demands and opportunities for increasing the effective provision of mutual assistance among peers. For these reasons, the role of the manager is changing, both in terms of coaching individuals in the development of their job-related abilities, and in relation to encouraging and enabling peer coaching.

Current changes in organizations mean that there has to be a greater degree of self-management in them, and that individuals must be helped to take on greater responsibility for their own development and growth. Organizations should stimulate and support responsibility by every employee for their own development.

Effective learners manager their own learning and development. This does not mean that they attend more courses than others, not that their learning derives only from their experience on the job, or solely within their own organizations. Managing their own learning means that the person uses a wide range of options inside and outside the organization.

Self-managing learners will use a range to suit themselves. However, random or ad hoc learning is very inefficient. Similarly, being exhorted to take responsibility for your own continuing development or to get more strategic in the midst of organizational change is meaningless to the individual without the real means to do these things.

The chief requirement is to create a situation in which learning is structured and planned, but in such a way that the process of learning matches the desired outcomes. The coaching process provides the context and structure (i.e. through the coach and learner working according to mutually agreed roles, and times and frequencies of meetings), but without predetermining the direction of the individual's learning.

Although the recognition that the changes noted above place a premium on continuing learning, they also require fewer people to achieve greater results, which in turn reduces the time and resources available for learning. However, these barriers can be overcome through effective coaching.

Lack of time can be seen as one of the major barriers to continuing learning. There may be a genuine concern in the organization that pressure toward greater productivity is pushing learning onto the sidelines. However, individuals do have the means, through coaching, to address this issue by clarifying and agreeing on learning goals to tackle the problem of shortages of time for learning and other purposes. Also, if the coaching relationship is longer term, and learners' goals are placed within the context of their wider career and other personal aspirations, then they can work on gaining a better balance between the various facets of life and work.

Where coaching becomes a way of life in the organization, the culture will be, at the very least, one in which individuals will find that their learning is not pushed completely onto the sidelines. At best, it is one in which the management of any kind of change is accompanied by planned opportunities and resources for continuing learning. The fact that the latter is (unfortunately) seldom the case accounts for the apparent lack of success of so many fashionable initiatives in organizations in areas such as total quality or business process re-engineering.

One potential danger of emphasizing informal learning is that it gives organizations the pretext to reduce funds for formal learning. However, this is likely to be the case only if the notions of the formal and informal are seen as an either/or choice. In principle, there is no reason at all for organizations not to provide formal support for informal learning through coaching. Coaching is proven to be a highly cost-effective way of providing support for learning. 

Where specific materials designed for learning are required, these can be more closely targeted to meet individuals' real learning goals. Also, the constraints on the availability of potential learning resources can be determined as much by the limits of human imagination as by how much they cost. There is much that can be resourced with minimal additional costs. For example, what might be gained by an individual in an organization from a short course on, say, finance for the non-financial specialist, could be gained from one or a short series of coaching sessions with a  member of the finance department. This form of resourcing has the added benefit of contributing to the continuing learning of the specialists involved and, in the light of increasing moves toward flexibility, cross-functional initiatives and team working, the added benefit of increasing networking in the organization.

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