• Your management and staff need to be aware of, and keep up with rapid marketplace change.
• Your company needs to learn to become the best in your chosen niche; otherwise customers and employees will see your business as nothing special or unique, and thus you won’t be able to attract and retain them.
• It's dangerous out there in the marketplace; competitors are out to eat your lunch and you need to keep a step ahead of them.
• As your organization grows, it needs to learn to assess and build its capacities continuously.
• Organization members also want to feel useful and most effective in their work by improving their individual capabilities and marketable skills.

More and more, companies recognize the need to emphasize organization learning as an approach to generating and maintaining competitive advantage for their business, both with customers and employees.

Here are some tips for what you can do, every single day, to promote organizational learning:

1. Commit to Learning at the Top. A company’s management and staff won't effectively learn if they don't see leadership continually model it and live it. Business conferences, regular executive retreats, and executive coaching approaches are very useful ways for company leaders to learn.
2. Use the Language of Learning. Constantly ask managers and employees, "What are you learning from this?" or "How can you learn more so you can improve?" By keeping learning "top of mind," it will more likely happen.
3. Inject New Ideas into the Organization. Organizations often get too insular and die from a lack of new thinking. People need constant exposure to new ways of seeing and doing things. Bringing in competent outside experts can bring fresh ideas and new approaches to an organization that would have otherwise taken a lot longer to develop those insights internally.
4. Use Education Resources Effectively. Regularly ask, "What internal and external resources do we have available that can promote organizational learning? How can we make better use of those resources?" Look for seldom-used knowledge and talents of employees, customers and vendors that can be brought to bear in solving new and existing company problems.
5. See Learning as a Process, Not an Event. "Learning" is not a one-time "fixing" of people or situations, but an ongoing process of upgrading people's thinking and abilities, as well as generating effective organization actions. Also, what is done before and after any specific learning event (conference, retreat, course, and so forth) to stimulate thinking and reinforce desired behavior is just as important as what happens during that event.
6. Make Learning "Just in Time." Don't just cram learning into people, but make it selectively and effectively available when most needed. Break up long management retreats and education or training programs into shorter modules that can be easily digested and put quickly into practice.
7. Follow a Sound Adult-Learning Process. Don’t lecture to people. People learn best through a process that involves collectively experiencing and understanding problem situations, then collectively thinking and acting on them. When designing learning events or conferences, consider how people need to think (change their mental viewpoints), behave (gain new skills) and act (work together) differently from their current ways. Employ all these methods if you want learning to be effectively generated, retained and used.
8. Make Learning Challenging - Understand that learning through overcoming challenges (with an opportunity to gather insights from those experiences) is deeper and more profound than any teaching or coaching method that provides only knowledge transfer. This is why demanding outdoor training programs (like Outward Bound) are so successful in teaching basic life and survival skills.

There is no time like the present to commit to and promote organizational learning. Focusing on "learning" and not just "doing" can help your company more effectively build its capacity and its position in the marketplace, both with customers and employees.

What to Consider as You Improve Training

In creating any educational event, three aspects of learning need to be considered for that event to be most effective. You need to consider how you want to change or augment people’s:

• Thinking: How do you want people to think differently from the way they have thought in the past? What new mental models/approaches do you want them to hold that will guide their behavior and actions in the future?
• Behavior: What abilities do you want people to have, or skills you want them to build that are needed for business success? How will they become proficient at those new skills?
• Actions: How you want or need people to work together to develop and follow sound practices, and effectively resolve real problems for customers?

Once you have considered these questions, work to design your learning event so that it blends the right amount of these three approaches into that event.


Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President of Business Wisdom, works with owner managed companies to help them grow, prosper and continue on by offering innovative approaches to business development, company management, organization leadership and learning, and management education. He can be reached at 781-862-3983 or .