How we get it wrong with learning to adapt
We all know about the importance of adaptation in the current environment – in fact I’m tired of talking about it, especially as I really object to stating the bleeding obvious.
Instead I’d like to unpack the “learning” aspect.
The only point to workplace learning is change. It’s quite unbelievable how many leaders think that change happens because they say it will.
We want our team to behave in ways consistent with our values. We make a powerpoint with all our values and key messages around each of them, then do a roadshow or a town hall or toolbox meeting and keep explaining it.
I used to say that about the time you’re sick of saying something, people are starting to get it.
Except I was wrong (yes, I said wrong). People don’t learn through having things repeated at them until they are familiar. All they’ve learned is the words. People don’t learn through having everything explained to them, being spoon-fed. It doesn’t work to tell people “here’s what these behaviours look like, this is what you do in these situations.” And it doesn’t work to make it too easy. If it’s so obvious that people get it easily, they haven’t learned anything. That’s what I call a “transmit” model of learning where you have some content, you push send and broadcast it out there in the expectation (hope) that people will absorb the message.
People learn through applying the ideas for themselves, and that requires effort. Real learning is a form of “mental doing”.
As a manager, you have to prime people for this kind of learning because they might not be expecting to struggle to work things out. You need to be comfortable with people making mistakes because mistakes are a prime source of reflective learning. They have to say “why didn’t that work?”. You need to get comfortable talking to people about how they performed rather than what they achieved or the technical problems that arose. You’ve got to get good at providing fear-free feedback.
Interesting.
While learning at work requires mental effort on the part of the learner, it also requires mindful effort from the organisation. I’m not talking about saying the same beautifully crafted message over and over.