During the two weeks I’ve been quiet on this blog I’ve had a
chance to take stock of where those of us in the Working Smarter and social learning
space are positioned. There have been some superb conversations, especially
last week’s #realwplearn on the subject of online communities and how they can
be supported. The discussion lasting a
whole hour had not one mention of courses, structure or measurement! The folks in the #chat really got stuck into
understanding what communities are, their role in the workplace and what is
needed for them to succeed.
"Community" is becoming a buzz word and we need to be careful
that, like so many other terms, it is not corrupted to acquire a compromised
understanding that is at variance with the real meaning of the word. Vested
interests have a track record of hi-jacking words, often blocking the way to
insight and change.
Vlatka Hlupic writing in “Leadership”
(http://bit.ly/rf27Jz)
says “The need for a new mindset and leadership skills has
never been more urgent, but translating it into action remains a challenge for
many…… I see evidence pointing to a community-based,
collaborative approach where leaders eschew formal power, delegate
responsibilities rather than tasks, relax their control and empower employees
to make decisions on the basis of their knowledge, skills and experience rather
than on their formal position in the organisational hierarchy.”
In
response to a thread in the Social Learning Community I wrote:
“L&D in most organisations faces a huge task to regain
its rightful place at the table as a key resource towards performance
improvement. To do so it must be characterised by a sensitive supportive
culture, offering assistance based in understanding of the organisation and its
people needs. Anything prescriptive will not work and will be washed away in
the tsunami that is the social media revolution - which L&D does not own
and in which it needs to recognise it has to fight for its own survival.”
(http://bit.ly/oNlqsn)
The point is that the operational side of our organisations
is waking up to the need for change, driven by economics and in some cases by
dawning of the power of the wirearchy and collaborative connection to create business
improvement. In some places L&D has
woken up to the same thing and is working hard to establish for itself a place
to stand in support of those new ways of working. What L&D has to be careful of is sliding
back into its all too frequent mindset of trying to tell the business what is
good for it. L&D’s insight is great, but any insight is frequently more
powerful to the one who has it than to those to whom it is subsequently
exposed!
L&D
has to have a genuine change of culture, and mindset, something that is far
removed from anything associated with tell, structure or direct. Memories are long and people are adept at
detecting a wolf in sheep’s clothing! Vlata again, in the same post “……. it is
important that organisations change their culture on a sustainable basis. To do
that, they must change their mindset and distribute authority and decision
making on the basis of knowledge and skills rather than on formal position in
the organisational hierarchy.
They also need to
support self-organisation in informal networks and communities of interests,
encourage collaboration, knowledge sharing and experimentation with ideas. Last
but not least, developing a caring culture based on trust and transparency is
also an important part of this strategy, which can make a significant impact on
staff engagement, productivity and overall performance of an organisation.”
How well put! I referred earlier to the tsunami that is the
Social Media revolution. Embracing the
tools, seeing their potential for helping people learn, being able to devise
new super-smart, sophisticated learning aids such as the emergent “Virtual
Experiential Manipulations” talked about by Steve Wheeler, are all great. Becoming Learning Champions who take the time
and trouble to lock the office door and get out into the business and
understand it in order to be able, and earn the right, to suggest ways of solving
problems that come from the L&D environment is all very well.
If our behaviour and the language we use is
not in keeping with the new world that Vlata describes and which others like
the Internet Time Alliance are trying to interpret for us, then L&D will
indeed be swept away, identified as non value-adding and irrelevant to a modern
world.
Our new world has choices about how organisations and
individuals learn – and the L&D function is only one of them!
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