Winning at Business with Culture Design!!!

It’s not about what we say we do, a culture is about what we prioritize, and what actions we reward or penalize. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” notes Peter Drucker. In other words, what comes to fruition is based on the culture you create, not the strategy you plan.

One of the most engaging and empower cultures for workplace performance is the “Learning Organization” which was introduced in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (a great read). Per D. Garvin (1993) defines the Learning Culture as “an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. Today, we see these concepts in our “Lean” culture, our “Agile” culture, and our “High Performing” culture – in other words, today it is just a relevant, or even more so with our high-tech, global, intellectual economy. The Learning Organization culture improves motivation, teamwork and problem-solving.

According to Garvin et al. (2008), there are three foundational building blocks of a learning organization:

1. Supportive learning environment: Psychological safety; appreciation of differences, openness to new ideas, time for reflection.

2. Concrete learning processes and practices: Concrete steps and continual activities, systematic information sharing, implementation of experiments for new services and new product design, data analytics used to create education/training solutions.

3. Leadership reinforces learning: Promote dialogue, debate, questioning, and listening; require ongoing process improvement within teams, root cause analysis; create safe setting for employees to offer new ideas and options.

To see how well your organization fares and to plan activities to enhance your learning ability, check out the free survey. Have your execs take this individually and discuss the areas to focus for incremental changes that lead to significance differences in organizational results. https://bit.ly/37xtgHA

Garvin, D. (1993). Building a Learning Organization. https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization

Garvin, D.A., Edmondson, A.C., & Gino, F. (March 2008). Is yours a learning organization? Harvard Business Review.

Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline : the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York :Doubleday/Currency.

Dr. Patti Sullivan is a leadership coach, working with executives in diverse organizations. For over 15 years, she has assisted leaders in challenging their limited beliefs, cultivating key relationships, finding ease in leading high performing teams, and delivering exceptional results.