Appearing in today’s issue of Axiom News, Building Better Organizations:
Better to begin from positive assumptions about employees
by Michelle Strutzenberger
Jay Cross, thought leader in the field of self-directed learning in the workplace, says promoting individual strengths is at the heart of his philosophy.
“Empowering individuals to learn through discovery how to lead from their strengths is a major fulcrum for my work,” says Cross, who has written extensively on the subject of self-directed and informal learning and its increasing relevance and effectiveness — as compared to company-provided training — in today’s knowledge economy.
One of his articles, Informing Learning – the Other 80 Per Cent, Cross makes the point that training is inherently pessimistic.
“Managers often start with the mindset that learners are deficient, and the objective is to bring them up to par,” Cross writes.
He adds that the consequences of assuming the role of training is to fix what’s broken rather than make what’s already good better are “enormous and disastrous.”
Some of these consequences include unmotivated learners, reinforcement of the negative rather than maximizing the positive, unengaged workers and little authentic team building.
He refers to David Cooperrider, champion of an approach called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), who is helping inspire organizations to build on their positive aspects through illustrative stories.
Cross says he agrees that it is better to begin from positive assumptions about employees and organizational development “until proven wrong” rather than let “negativity eliminate options before they have been tested.”
As the term implies, self-directed and informal learning in the workplace refers to the learner initiating the learning and making decisions about training and development experiences.
At its core, it is about recognizing the capabilities of employees, not only to get the job done but to work towards becoming the best they can be.
One survey has shown that self-directed learning is three times more important in helping knowledge workers become proficient on the job than company-provided training.
However, organizations don’t have to leave learning entirely up to chance, according to Cross. He suggests corporations can in fact boost the results of self-directed learning.
For instance, they can streamline the informal learning process by providing time for learning on the job, building networks and knowledge bases to facilitate discovery, or providing places for workers to congregate and learn.
He also recommends helping workers learn how to improve their learning skills as well as creating a supportive organizational culture.
In the latter case, this might involve supporting innovation, which requires making failure ‘okay,’ and supporting participation in professional Communities of Practice.
To read more by Cross, visit this link for free chapters from his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance, and http://informl.com for continuing dialogue on the topic.
Follow Jay on Twitter
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This is a very informative post. We are facing this crossroads ourselves in our organization. The challenge, oddly enough, has been how to formalize informal learning. Some of the tips provided at the end of the post seem useful. My particular challenge has been how to teach learners to pursue informal learning. There are a number of tools that are now available, but there seems little interest among knowledge workers to use these tools. Often I hear that it is too much work or that there is not enough time. Some knowledge workers seem to rely on the training a less time consuming even if it is also less effective.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to build an informal learning culture in an organization? Or at the very least, how to uncover it and set it free?
John
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