In yesterday’s Advisor, we heard from Professor Edward Hess about the importance of developing a learning culture. Today, we get the last two steps for building such a culture, plus Hess’s final thoughts on the topic.
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To recap: “To stay relevant, companies can no longer rely on traditional competitive advantages like location, capital, lack of choices for customers, and lack of market transparency; instead, they must transform themselves into ‘learning organizations,’” says Hess, author of Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization (Columbia University Press, 2014, www.EDHLTD.com).
In his new book, which is packed with research and case studies, Hess shares his detailed formula for building what he calls a High-Performance Learning Organization (HPLO). Here, he spotlights the final two key points to keep in mind when building a learning culture (Go here for the first 2 points):
3. High employee emotional engagement is a necessity. It stands to reason that if employees don’t have an emotional investment in your company and their futures in it, they won’t be motivated to learn. But how do you transform “engagement” from a meaningless buzzword to a reality? Hess says the research of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan and their Self-Determination Theory shows us it comes down to meeting employees’ needs for autonomy, effectiveness, and relatedness. And these needs are most likely to be met when individuals feel respected, trusted, and cared for, and feel that they can trust the organization and its leaders.
“These concepts are easiest to understand when you look at them in action, and UPS is one of the best examples out there for operationalizing emotional engagement,” Hess shares. “Founder Jim Casey viewed employees as partners, and maintaining his values over the decades has led to policies that are employee-centric and hold management mutually accountable to employees: an egalitarian ‘open door’ policy for employee input, an employee ‘free agent’ program that allows any UPS employee to move anywhere in the company and advance, mentorship and training programs, and more. As a result, UPS has maintained a high retention rate and built a deep bench of long-tenured, adaptive employees.”
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4. Employees need permission to TRY and FAIL. Abraham Maslow aptly stated that an individual would engage in learning only “to the extent he is not crippled by fear, [and] to the extent he feels safe enough to dare.” Building that type of environment requires many companies to adopt different mindsets about “mistakes” and about what “being smart” means. Learning is not an efficient 99 percent defect-free process (far from it), so mistakes have to be valued as learning opportunities. Employees must be given conditional permission to fail within proscribed financial tolerances, with the knowledge that they won’t be punished for their mistakes so long as they learn.
“Some companies are already on this journey,” comments Hess. “Bridgewater Associates, the biggest and one of the most successful hedge funds in the world, is passionate about the power of mistakes. Bridgewater actually encourages employees to get excited about their mistakes because each error that employees learn from will save them time, energy, and stress (and the company money) in the future. Employees are instructed not to feel bad about their mistakes or failed experiments or those of others. Acknowledging mistakes, confronting weaknesses, and testing assumptions, the company believes, are reliable strategies for long-term success.
“Another company that puts the permission-to-try-and-fail principle into action is W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc., which is known for manufacturing innovative products like GORE-TEX® fabric,” Hess adds. “All associates are encouraged to experiment using the ‘Waterline Principle.’ There’s an understanding among the associates that if they see a need, and failure isn’t going to sink the entire ship, they should just go do something about it. If it does look to be risky, however, consultation with other associates is required before taking action.”
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Final Thoughts
“One final point to keep in mind: Transforming an existing organization into a learning organization requires the change to start at the top,” Hess concludes. “If you’re a leader or manager and you want to change your organization, the best advice I can give you is to change yourself first. Good intentions are not enough. Behaviors are what count.
“So role model how to think and communicate better. Admit your ignorance and your mistakes. Be authentic. Act with caring humility. Engage people so they feel like they have some control over their destinies. Be honest, have high standards, and hold everyone, including you, to those standards. Then—and only then—will you earn the enthusiastic buy-in of your learners and set the stage to build and sustain a competitive advantage.”
Edward D. Hess is a professor of business administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the author of 11 books.