Learning-friendly workplaces have many benefits, so why do so many mangers fail to create them, asks Peter Honey
I spoke at the recent CIPD Learning and Development do. You might have missed me; I was in a corner of the exhibition hall in an area called (appropriately) The Learning Zone. My slot was sponsored by Pearson and I ran a session called ‘Creating a learning-friendly workplace is simple – there is no excuse!’
Naturally I started with the usual propaganda about the benefits of learning-friendly workplaces. I confined myself to just three; keeping ahead of the rate of change, fewer mistakes and more successes. I then described what a learning-friendly workplace would look like and gave my favourite definition which is; a learning-friendly workplace has managers who create an environment where learning behaviours and practices are actively encouraged. I hovered over this definition long enough to draw my audience’s attention to four key aspects
‘Managers’
‘Create an environment’
‘Learning behaviours and practices’
‘Actively encouraged’
I explained that managers were written into the definition because they were supposed to create work environments where people achieved and flourished. I showed a list of learning behaviours and said how important it was, not just to create an environment that triggered the behaviours, but also the utmost importance of managers actively encouraging the behaviours when they occurred. I finished the session by giving examples of every-day things that managers could do to role-model learning, to be generous providers of learning opportunities and to build learning into the system so that it becomes a way of life.
So far so good. But then someone asked me the obvious question; if it’s all so simple, why don’t more managers do it?
When asked a question like this it is tempting to launch an attack on the inadequacy of most managers. They are an easy target. On the very day I ran my session there was a piece in the newspaper I read on the underground saying that more than half of employees do not hear their manager say thank you often enough (perhaps they are mumbling their thanks!). If managers can’t even say thank you when it is deserved what hope is there when it comes to creating learning-friendly environments where, simple as it is, there is a bit more to it than saying thank you.
So, undaunted, I proceeded to heap scorn on managers saying that too many of them have learning blind spots, that too many managers are frantically busy doing the wrong things, that too many managers feel that admitting to learning is tantamount to admitting a weakness (as a manager once told me, learning isn’t ‘respectable’), that the benefits of creating learning-friendly workplaces haven’t dawned on most managers, etc.
But undoubtedly the best answer to the question is that creating learning-friendly workplaces isn’t in the job description and isn’t written into most managers’ performance objectives. Quite simply, learning doesn’t get a mention and for a manger’s remuneration to be based on anything to do with creating a learning-friendly environment is on a par with thinking the unthinkable.
As Upton Sinclair, the American author, so wisely observed, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it’.