Collective learning implies sharing what we learn that is relevant to our mission or to immediate challenges. Some of us like to hide what we know. Indeed a company’s reward system may perversely encourage this by overemphasizing individual performance.
Thus behavior for learning digs into the worm cans of organizational culture, the composite of “how we do things around here.” Culture is influenced by everything, but notably history, reward systems, and leadership behavior. Changing it may be like restructuring noodles, but it can be done.
So what behavior encourages collective learning? Just developing people for teamwork, for starters. Many people have been through forming, storming, norming, and so on. Beyond that, three factors seem to help:
1. Encouraging the reporting of negative outcomes. Before people will do this, they have to actually experience that doing so is not a career impediment. They are still valued.
2. Set up a code of behavior. Better yet have employees from all areas devise one. That may take time, but the outcome is thought out from many angles, and it is theirs. Even better, have some form of organizational recognition that people actually commit to abiding by the code; like they put their John Hancock on a big thing on a wall that everybody else can see.
3. Devise a code used in meetings to straighten up someone straying off, especially if discussion is degenerating to personal attacks, or a hidden agenda is sensed. It could be a code phrase like “Are we going below the belt here?”
For most of us, behavior for learning – collective learning – is not normal. Neither Mother nor schooling fully prepared us. Instinct is to revert to form because conflict may be more fun. So once a code of behavior is in place, leaders need to be exemplars of it, and little “ceremonies” should regularly reinforce it, sort of like standing for the national anthem every time you go to a ball game.