CHAPTER 50

6 Essentials for a Thriving Learning Culture

Holly Burkett

Employees must learn continuously. The rise of automation and robotics, increased globalization, and a multigenerational and diverse workforce require 21st-century employees to learn faster, work smarter, and be more agile. According to Peter Senge, “The organizations that truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap into people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.”

What do a multinational technology and research company and a US manufacturer and distributor of automotive oil products have in common? Both have adapted quickly to the new realities of the workplace, where new ways of working and new demands for work have accelerated the need for continuous learning. And both have earned awards for exemplary and innovative learning solutions geared to support high performance in an age of disruption.

For example, the talent development team at IBM designed a dashboard that provides “Fitbit-like” nudges to managers for leadership behaviors they can apply immediately. The nudges encourage managers to consider questions like, “Who hasn’t been taking vacation and is in danger of burning out?” or “Who’s due for a coaching session?” Results to date show increased retention rates and high approval rates by participating teams (Castellan 2020). At Valvoline, the learning team developed an enterprise video portal, where managers produce high-quality videos with their cell phones to show technicians the surest routes around pesky assignments (Harris 2020).

Automation, robotics, increased globalization, and a diverse workforce make it clear that employees need solutions like these to learn faster and be more agile to survive and thrive in the world of 21st-century work. Organizations that emphasize continuous learning are better able to:

•  Attract and retain top talent.

•  Develop leaders at all levels, which is essential in succession planning.

•  Foster employee engagement.

•  Accelerate change readiness.

•  Enhance employee well-being.

In addition, organizations with strong learning cultures have been shown to consistently outperform their peers in terms of revenue growth, profitability, market share, product quality, and customer satisfaction (ATD 2016). In short, a learning culture is the best way for organizations to reset and refresh for the next normal.

What Is a Learning Culture?

A learning culture isn’t about training; it’s about learning. In a learning culture, employees across all levels are encouraged to continuously seek, share, and apply new knowledge and skills for the benefit of themselves, the company, and the clients and communities they serve (ATD 2016).

A learning culture focuses on organizational learning and performance for the purpose of growing collective learning and performance capabilities. The focus is less about isolated training events and more about building meaningful learning experiences. Here, continuous learning opportunities are systemically built into the flow of work with short, frequent, pull versus push bursts of information that are readily accessible and available to all employees at the time and place of need.

Providing learning opportunities that sync with job performance recognizes that:

•  Learning is always occurring—both formally and informally.

•  Performance and productivity gains most often occur in informal moments.

•  Employees prefer to learn at work, at their own pace, and at the point of need (Figure 50-1).

6 Essentials for a Thriving Learning Culture

Now that we’ve explored the what and why of a learning culture, how can you build one that ensures your organization can successfully future-proof its workforce and thrive in an increasingly chaotic and uncertain world? Focusing on the six essentials outlined in Figure 50-2 can help pave the way.

Engaged Leadership

The sustained success of a learning culture depends on the support of the leaders who own the business need, have the authority to put learning on the agenda, and make decisions about how learning resources will be allocated (Dearborn 2015). Executive decisions about learning investments tend to be based upon the value they place on learning and the business’s perceived value of the learning function.

Make Learning a Core Value

Leaders set the tone for a learning culture by the values and behaviors they model, reward, and reinforce. Meaningful values, as a management practice, were a core differentiator of companies that maintained a healthy culture during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hancock, Schaninger, and Weddle 2021). Organizational values are important to learning cultures—90 percent of mature learning organizations have corporate values that specifically address learning and development (ATD 2016). For instance, Garry Ridge, WD40 CEO and one of the “World’s Top Ten CEOs,” says, “My job is to create a company of learners” (Taylor 2016).

The drive to support learning as a core value comes from a growth mindset, which asserts that basic abilities can be developed through practice, input from others, and continuous learning. With this perspective, individuals are more likely to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, view effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, and find inspiration from others’ success (Dweck 2007). Inspired by Carol Dweck’s research on a growth mindset, Satya Nadella made lifelong learning a priority at Microsoft when he took over the helm in 2014—it’s even highlighted on the badges of more than 131,000 employees worldwide. The company’s focus has shifted from “know it all to learn it all,” and Nadella reinforces this cultural value by putting out a video every month on what he’s learned (Vander Ark 2018).

Activate Buy-In

While many executives may buy-in to values that support learning and a growth mindset, a persistent challenge is getting executives to put those values into action. Findings from LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report suggest that only 27 percent of L&D professionals view their CEOs as active champions of learning (LinkedIn Learning 2020).

Based on these findings, LinkedIn’s L&D team decided to host a LinkedIn Learning Challenge, a week-long, company-wide competition where each executive’s organization competed to be the team who learned the most. This executive championship proved a powerful way of driving learner engagement and inspiring employees to spend more time learning.

In another example of creating buy-in at the top, Rose Sheldon, head of enterprise L&D at Allstate, reportedly spent a year doing road-show meetings with senior leaders to help transform a culture of tenure and longevity to one where investments in a continuous learning culture were seen as opportunity versus sunk costs (Sheldon 2021).

Reimagine Leadership Development

While most CEOs clearly recognize that developing leaders is vital to their organization’s ability to survive and thrive, many lack confidence in their leadership development processes and believe that learning professionals are not doing enough to build talent and leadership bench strength (Korn Ferry Institute 2015). In addition, reimagining a hybrid workplace has placed new demands on leaders as they move toward a post-pandemic future. To that end, thriving learning cultures continually enhance and reinvent their leadership development efforts so they remain relevant to changing business needs and evolving skill demands.

For instance, when Thor Flosason joined Kellogg as senior director of learning and development, he sought to evolve the traditional “classroom heavy, resource heavy, and events-driven” learning culture he inherited (Linkedin n.d.). To shift Kellogg’s learning culture from its one-size-fits-all approach, Flosason used a multiprong method to secure support. Key tactics included getting leaders to advocate for learning, creating an internal marketing campaign called #IGotThis, and kicking off a friendly competition that included prizes and recognition.

Consider these examples of how other organizations have reimagined leadership development:

•  Verizon, Cisco, ServiceNow, and DBS Singapore have all embedded empathy in employee interactions and relaxed their expectations for employees. For instance, managers are being trained to identify situations where employees can benefit from time off to recharge and re-energize themselves (Bersin 2020).

•  Microsoft wanted to promote the value of a growth mindset, so the talent team created conversation guides for managers to explore what a growth mindset might look with their teams. Leaders were encouraged to share success stories, and various incentives—games, quizzes, and a mobile empathy museum—were used to reinforce desired behaviors.

In general, TD professionals can reimagine leadership development practices by:

•  Expecting leaders to examine their own mindsets, assumptions, and biases

•  Ensuring the proper blend of formal learning, learning from others, and experiential learning

•  Designing powerful learning journeys rather than traditional learning events

•  Integrating social networking tools so leaders can share knowledge

•  Matching specific skills and scenarios to real-world challenges for each leadership level (frontline, midlevel, senior level)

•  Putting a stronger emphasis on programs that foster creativity, innovation, intellectual curiosity, inclusion, and empathy

•  Enabling leaders to share what they know as leader-teachers, coaches, or mentors

Distribute Leadership

As Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” To prime the pump with middle and frontline managers, thriving learning cultures focus on collective leadership versus hero leadership. This creates a pool of talented people who can assume any leadership role when the need arises.

For example, at Valvoline Instant Oil Change (VIOC), 100 percent of the company’s service center and area managers have been promoted from within its ranks, where they started in hourly positions. Jamie Hinely, director of global learning solutions, builds collective leadership skills through a carefully structured blend of instructor-led and virtual training, including a popular customer-facing initiative and a new inward-facing initiative designed to build relationships within crews at Valvoline locations. Technicians are also given a wide array of e-learning courses, hands-on training, practice and certification checklists, check-in meetings with trainers, and reading and comprehension exercises (Harris 2020).

Coaching is another effective way to build collective leadership capability. Telus, a Canadian telecommunications company and 10-time ATD BEST Award winner, restructured its corporate coaching program to involve all employees in providing coaching and feedback, not just leaders. Since implementation, the employee ratings for executives and directors have gone up and the program has achieved a 92 percent satisfaction rating from employees (Castellan 2020).

Many TD professionals—like those at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center—use group coaching to revamp leadership development. Here, a skilled professional coach is brought together with a small group to maximize members’ combined experience and provide a safe space for the group to work on goals and deepen learning. Leaders who use a coaching style of leadership are also more likely to develop emerging leaders who can fill a leadership pipeline (Cavanaugh, Deveau, and Holladay 2021).

Rethink Performance Management

High-functioning performance management processes strengthen the links between strategic business objectives and day-to-day job behaviors (McCormick 2016). Many companies, from global giants to small startups, have slowly moved away from traditional performance management to give their processes a complete makeover. This includes building metrics into performance reviews that measure whether supervisors are developing and coaching employees.

Valvoline, for example, eliminated performance ratings for hourly store team members, following a pattern launched for office employees the prior year. The new process focuses on quarterly guided career discussions and features individual manager-employee discussions about triumphs and challenges regarding customer service and internal relationships. In addition, managers have increased discretion over merit pay, rather than basing compensation decisions solely on individual performance (Harris 2020).

At AB InBev and Atlassian, the performance management process has become more continuous. Both companies created new financial and operating metrics, along with employee rewards and recognitions for supporting COVID-related changes, innovation, and team collaboration. Leaner and more agile processes have put more focus on employee centricity (Bersin 2020).

Amplify Management Support

Managers can make or break a learning culture. While learning cultures start at the top with leadership, they are driven most by middle managers (ATD 2016). In fact, an employee’s experience of company culture will be largely dependent on their manager. Consider the following:

•  Managers account for at least 70 percent of employee engagement scores—they can actually negate the positives of executive support.

•  Employees look to their managers for learning recommendations 22 percent more often than their official learning systems, and 73 percent more often than their organization’s L&D team (Palmer 2020).

•  More than 50 percent of employees say that they would spend more time learning if their manager directed them (LinkedIn Learning 2020).

Because employees frequently complain that managers do not allow enough time for learning, Allstate supplements managers’ performance measures to include “time to learn” (Sheldon 2021).

TD professionals can help managers prioritize time for learning and provide strategies for helping them manage time wisely by encouraging them to:

•  Make a to-learn list.

•  Set aside dedicated learning time on their calendar that employees can see.

•  Join an online workplace learning channel.

•  Share skill-building efforts during check-ins with their teams.

•  Make development part of their daily work.

Figure 50-3 presents some other common ways to enhance management support for continuous learning. Of course, the best approach is to continue cultivating relationships across all organizational levels and show how learning helps solve real performance issues.

Collaboration and Connection

Thriving learning cultures share knowledge across boundaries to build collaboration, connection, and shared purpose. High levels of connection create greater employee engagement, tighter strategic alignment, better decision making, higher rates of innovation, and greater agility and adaptability (Stallard 2021). From a business perspective, jobs simply require more collaboration than they did in the past. Leadership is becoming more horizontal, structures are getting flatter, and organizations need solid networks to enable fast and free information flow (Morgan 2015).

However, the prolonged stress of COVID-19 and its accompanying loss of normal emotional and social support systems have led employees to feel more disconnected, more isolated, and more lonely. Remote workers are especially vulnerable. The impact of disconnection and its associated emotions upon engagement and performance is significant and includes:

•  Reduced cognitive performance (brain fog)

•  Impaired self-control

•  Narrowed perspectives

•  Increased lethargy

•  Emotional distance from work (Stallard 2021)

To combat these issues, there are a few practices you could consider. Let’s look at each more closely.

Be Intentional About Inclusion

Organizations that prioritize inclusion strategies are eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes (Bourke 2018). With the hybrid workforce here to stay, more planning is needed to foster inclusion among the remote, dispersed workforce population (Hancock, Schaninger, and Weddle 2021). TD professionals can help by encouraging managers to put processes in place to help remote workers feel included. For example:

•  Making sure everyone in the conference room is on their own individual video screen

•  Updating messaging app channels to reflect office conversations

•  Reaching out by phone, email, or periodic pulse surveys to see how remote workers are doing and what performance support is needed

•  Establishing weekly Fri-YAY meetings for informal Slack time and socialization

Showing efforts for inclusion and respect reduces workplace stress and conflict, improves teamwork, and increases productivity and knowledge-sharing (Stallard 2021). In general, TD professionals can enable inclusion by helping leaders address and overcome unconscious biases and showing managers how to create open, safe discussion forums where respect and positive recognition of differences are cultivated. Keep in mind, however, that true collaboration and inclusion must be tied into overall talent management processes, as well as the social fabric of an organization and the commitment of its leaders to be trustworthy, inclusive, and equitable (Kelly and Schaefer 2015).

Teach Collaboration

Many organizations expect employees to work well together without properly teaching them how or defining what collaboration looks like in terms of daily practice and behavior. TD professionals play a critical role in terms of building collaborative capabilities and creating mechanisms for employees to connect and share information (Burkett 2017). Some places to start include:

•  Identifying what a collaborative environment looks like

•  Leveraging technologies that break down silos and enable knowledge sharing

•  Teaching leaders and teams new processes for working together, resolving conflicts, providing constructive feedback, and making decisions

•  Creating mechanisms for employees to recognize the collaborative efforts of their co-workers

•  Ensuring that talent management processes recognize and reward collaboration, inclusion, and diversity

Remember, true collaboration is more than just an activity in which team members are working on a project together. It represents the way that individuals collectively explore ideas, address biases, learn from others, and include multiple perspectives to generate solutions. Collaboration is founded upon a climate of trust and safety (Delizonna 2017). In a truly collaborative environment everyone has a voice, and as a result they feel more included, are more able to contribute, and are more likely to engage with the group or organization (Stallard 2015).

Build Peer Networks and Communities

Another way thriving learning cultures enable collaboration and connection is through peer-learning networks that drive high performance, engagement, and innovation. Here, learning is managed with an eye toward social learning experiences that enable employees to work with others to solve problems, stretch their comfort zones, and steer their own career path (Biech 2018).

Consider the example of UL, a safety consulting and certification company. Its global leadership program builds a global network of leaders through conversation and facilitation. During program sessions, cohorts work together on important company issues and present their recommendations to senior leadership. The program is designed to provide a powerful, collaborative experience as a learning tool with a focus on how learners can succeed working across cultures and time zones (Graber 2016).

Results Orientation

In mature learning cultures, it’s less about the output of training programs and more about outcomes that show how learning is adding business value. With today’s data revolution, high-performing learning cultures are increasingly relying on advanced measures and analytic tools to communicate their value and apply a data-driven lens to strategic decisions about attracting, retaining, and growing talent. While cheaper, faster technologies are more available and more affordable for collecting and analyzing talent data, many TD functions still operate in a reactive, ad hoc mode when fielding requests for data. This often hampers their ability to connect talent initiatives to higher-level business results like revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction (Robinson et al. 2015). To show business value, the basics still apply.

Focus on Alignment

One of the most common reasons learning cultures fail to add value is that they are not effectively aligned or integrated with all phases of talent acquisition, talent management, and talent development processes (Oaks and Galagan 2011).

To align talent strategies, Valvoline integrates its entire gamut of talent-related functions, including acquisition, succession planning, and performance management. Beginning with a blended learning plan for the company’s 5,000 new hires each year, Valvoline’s promote-from-within strategy is touted and just-in-time learning resources are provided. The result is a turnover rate that is half the industry average and a core employee population primed for success (Harris 2020).

Link Learning and Performance

Many learning cultures fail to gain traction because TD professionals become more focused on the training than the performance that results from the training. A thriving learning culture is distinguished by its focus on driving better outcomes and stronger business results (Oaks and Galagan 2011).

For example, thriving learning cultures are nearly three times more likely to measure either or both employee behavior change and business impact and to use results to identify improvement opportunities. Consider the case of the award-winning learning function of OhioHealth. This not-for-profit system of hospitals and healthcare providers located in Columbus, Ohio, launched a Return on Learning (ROL) initiative in 2016 to begin demonstrating its business value in more cost-efficient terms. A key component of the initiative was the adoption of the ROI Methodology as a disciplined, evidence-based process for helping associates summarize and report on the impact of their L&D programs to key stakeholders. Goals also included growing the number of evaluation experts. Since the ROL implementation, the learning team has successfully grown its evaluation capabilities, expanded its access and credibility (both inside and outside the organization), and effectively demonstrated how learning has contributed to business outcomes like employee engagement, process improvement, and quality improvement. In addition, the learning team was recognized in 2018 and 2020 for its Excellence in Learning by Brandon Hall Group (Nguyen et al. 2021).

Develop a Reskilling and Upskilling Agenda

More than 87 percent of executives report skills gaps in their organization and more than 25 percent of organizations increased their spending on reskilling in response to COVID-19. Yet as the shelf life of skills shrinks, many business leaders worry that talent developers are too focused on training for today’s skills, at the expense of preventing tomorrow’s skills gaps.

Here’s how some TD professionals are developing a broader skill set in their employees to prepare for future role disruption:

•  IBM created a custom mobile app called YL Boost, which contains learning pathways for acquiring popular roles and skills. Employees can use the app to track their progress toward qualifying for those roles, and the app also sends nudges to complete daily and weekly goals.

•  Amazon developed Career Choice, which is an innovative reskilling and outskilling program serving 40,000 employees in 14 countries and eight languages. Employees are eligible for the program after a year. The company prepays for textbooks and fees, but funds training or education only for in-demand skills—as validated by education partners who provide the training and business partners who make hiring decisions. Trainees may also choose to leverage their new skills in positions outside Amazon (Sheldon 2021).

Finally, don’t neglect your own need to continually reskill and upskill so you can be a more effective business partner. For example, people analytics has been consistently cited as one of the biggest capability gaps among TD and HR practitioners (Bersin 2015). While developing talent analytic skills and capability to use supporting technologies may take time (up to several years) and continuing investment, it’s important for TD professionals to embrace measurement for what it is and what it can do to revolutionize the value of learning (Canlas 2015). Keep in mind, however, that the real value isn’t so much in the metrics themselves, but rather how they are presented to stakeholders and used to inform strategic decisions.

Sound Execution

Execution is where the rubber meets the road. Even when learning and business strategies are well aligned, executing them can be difficult. In many organizations, translating learning strategy into execution is an exercise characterized by stalled initiatives, politically charged turf battles, opportunities that have fallen by the wayside, and important work that remains undone. In addition, many organizations struggle to disinvest from initiatives that continually drain resources and fall substantially short of their intended impact (Sull et al. 2015). Knowing when to hold and when to fold is a big factor in effective execution.

While there are a host of approaches for closing the gap between strategy and execution, proven best practices include:

•  Consistency of purpose

•  Disciplined use of data-driven approaches (including change management, risk management, instructional design, measurement and evaluation, project management, design thinking, Six Sigma, Agile, HPT)

•  Role clarity and accountability

•  Defined success indicators

•  Timely and accessible performance support

•  Structured governance processes

•  Regular reflection and review

Conducting after-action or lessons-learned reviews is perhaps the easiest way to support a learning culture. However, a common problem with lessons-learned reviews is that the insights they generate remain within a particular silo of an organization. Sharing is essential so that different parts of the organization can gain insights from the challenges and lessons learned in other areas.

Thriving learning cultures that use consistent, systemic practices—like regular reflection and review—outperform those with no systems. Finally, making exceptional execution part of your daily TD work will build your credibility for doing what you say and saying what you do, and will help brand your learning function as a pocket of excellence.

Organizational Resilience

Resiliency is the process of not only bouncing back from adversity, setbacks, uncertainty, or stress, but also bouncing forward to grow and thrive during challenging experiences. Organizations with high resiliency levels are more agile, innovative, engaging, and productive as well as more responsive to customers (Nauck et al. 2021). Resilient leaders are not only more effective in responding and recovering from business disruptions; they are better able to create the kind of positive disruption that drives innovation and growth. Individuals and teams with high resiliency levels are more positive and satisfied with their jobs, as well as more open to organizational change.

Resiliency not only makes good business sense; it pays off. For example, a 2014 study published by PwC found that practices promoting a resilient workplace returned $2.30 for every dollar spent—with the return coming in the form of higher productivity, lower absenteeism, lower healthcare costs, and decreased turnover (meQuilibrium 2017).

Let’s look at a few ways organizations can build resilience.

Build Change Capability

Change is at the center of every learning and performance improvement strategy, talent development efforts are designed to drive organizational change, and today’s learning leader plays a vital role as change agent. Thriving learning cultures continuously improve the way that change capabilities are grown, recognized, and rewarded (Burkett 2015). They adapt development approaches to fit the capabilities required of specific change roles and responsibilities, including:

•  Change sponsors (those who lead change strategy)

•  Change managers (those who manage the change plan)

•  Change agents (those who build commitment and advocate for change efforts)

They also recognize that growing change capability is about more than stand-alone leadership development programs. For example, developing a network of change-ready teams across the entire organization not only helps nurture change responsiveness and innovation; it also accelerates business performance. To build enterprise-wide change capability, an organization needs to:

•  Routinely assess the talent pool for change capability needs and gaps.

•  Continuously improve leadership development to grow strategic change capability.

•  Use disciplined, planned change processes for initiating and implementing change.

•  Provide real-time performance support immediately after changes are introduced and during the change management process.

•  Help leaders anticipate and manage the risks of change implementation, including the risk of change fatigue.

•  Regularly monitor and measure the impact of change initiatives.

•  Promote personal energy, rest, and recovery as strategic imperatives.

Monitor Burnout and Change Fatigue

“A resilient workforce is created when high-activity or high-intensity times are navigated by managing personal energy and balanced with periods of recovery” (CCL 2020). In today’s organizations, individuals and teams experience daily brain drain and stress as they constantly grapple with issues like Zoom fatigue, change fatigue, information overload, the accelerated pace of work, health and safety concerns, and lingering uncertainties about the future of their work and workplace (Alexander et al. 2021). The overall impact of chronic workplace stress is so problematic that burnout has been officially recognized as a disease by the World Health Organization (Borysenko 2019). Burnout is characterized by:

•  Reduced professional efficacy

•  Increased mental distance from one’s job

•  Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion

Change fatigue can contribute to burnout when people feel pressured to make too many transitions at once or when change initiatives have been poorly thought through, rolled out too fast, or put in place without adequate preparation. TD professionals should recognize the impact that being burnt-out, fatigued, and hyper-connected has upon an employee’s ability to learn, perform and stay engaged. After all, the message of a perfectly aligned, designed, and delivered learning initiative will be lost if employees are too exhausted to hear it (Burkett 2017).

Make Time for Well-Being

To foster the kind of employee-centric work environment that reduces burnout and increases well-being, TD professionals must partner with business and HR leaders to replace the “more is more” culture with one focused on resilience. Employees across roles and levels must be encouraged—even expected—to rest, recharge, and recover as a matter of personal effectiveness and well-being and to maintain and sustain peak performance (Nauck et al. 2021). LinkedIn, Cisco, and SAP have all established weekly mental health days for global teams to recharge. Investments in employee health and well-being pay off with a direct impact on such business outcomes as greater productivity, stronger staff morale and motivation, and greater retention and loyalty (Economist Intelligence Unit 2021).

Take, for example, Autodesk’s commitment to well-being. The global software company with 11,000 employees operating in 38 countries and 105 cities has many employees based in China. As COVID-19 began to spread, Autodesk leaders realized that they were on the brink of a potential crisis that would require global coordination for a wide range of situations, people, and geographies. To meet the challenge, the HR team refocused its training initiatives to cover employee resilience, physical and emotional well-being, and social connections. They also provided resources for managers focused on how to lead under stress, how to share authentically, how to take care of yourself and others, how to create inclusive work practices, and how to create a culture of belonging. As one of the world’s leading users of Slack, Autodesk’s culture of sharing helps employees communicate with peers around personal, professional, and family issues and topics. The company also relies heavily on Zoom, Mural, Slack, and Autodesk technology for remote working (Bersin 2020).

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, there are several things you can do to help your organization shift away from the old “work-harder” belief:

•  Educate people about resiliency. Teach specific practices and habits that focus on resilient skill sets and mindsets. Connect resiliency to overall health and well-being and to improved job performance.

•  Show how to set boundaries with email. Adopt a daily out-of-office email reply for after-work hours to let teams know that emails won’t be answered during this time.

•  Emphasize the role of gratitude. A key aspect of resilience is cultivating gratitude practices. Encourage leaders, teams, and individuals to routinely express gratitude.

•  Provide resiliency-building opportunities at work. Financial incentives or reimbursements for fitness classes can encourage employees to replenish their energy levels.

•  Consider contemplative practices. Many large organizations have launched mindfulness programs to help people learn how to rest and recover properly.

Keep in mind that improving resiliency at an individual level is necessary but not enough to create a resilient organization. Research shows that it takes a wide range of cultural levers to influence and embed resilient capabilities at the organizational level (Lucy and Shepard 2017).

Foster Learning Agility

In a New York Times interview, Laszlo Bock, former SVP of people operations at Google, said: “For every job, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly” (Zoe 2019).

In unpredictable business environments buffeted by constant change, organizations need employees who have resilience and agile learning abilities to move forward. Learning agility is the ability and willingness to learn, unlearn, and relearn. It consists of nine dimensions, with flexibility and speed being the two main drivers. Flexibility refers to the ability to give up old habits or behaviors for new behaviors that better meet the needs of the future. Speed has more to do with how quickly an individual can read a situation and change their behaviors to adapt and respond with a plan of action.

Learning agility has been shown to be an excellent predictor of leadership success. While it may not always come naturally, learning agility can be honed and developed. TD professionals can help grow learning agility by:

•  Immersing employees in parts of the job or company that they haven’t experienced before

•  Providing job shadowing, job rotation, and temporary assignments

•  Teaching problem-solving approaches

•  Using validated learning agility assessments in recruitment, selection, and talent development

Innovation

What sets thriving learning cultures apart is their commitment to continual innovation and their ability to renew or reinvent themselves and their organizations as new conditions and demands emerge (Burkett 2017). In fact, research suggests that companies with strong learning cultures are a staggering 92 percent more likely to be innovators in product development and sustainable value and growth (Bersin 2015). Yet many learning functions lack strategies or systems that foster innovation and many others are not up to speed with innovative technologies. Talent development professionals cannot expect to help drive innovation within the business if their own practices are stagnant and out of touch.

Figure 50-4 shows how to move the dial and get out of “business as usual” approaches. Let’s look closer at one of the suggestions outlined in the figure.

Leverage Technology

Talent developers are depending more on digital learning solutions than ever before—not only to deliver content but also to measure learning success. While technology has the potential to strengthen a learning culture, many organizations report concerns about limitations with their technology infrastructure, including reduced investments and difficult access.

For example, the team of progressive learning leaders at DuPont Sustainable Solutions rose to the challenge of leveraging technology during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company’s L&D team partnered with Arist, a global leader in text messaging learning, to develop safety courses delivered through text messages. The approach, which was designed to get adaptable coursework to global employees quickly, continues to be an important delivery alternative for internal and external compliance training. It allows the team to “break down complex subjects—which tend to show low engagement levels with traditional learning methods—into short bursts of simple and engaging learning.” It also makes it easier to track learner data for compliance purposes (Arist 2021).

In addition, when technology becomes well integrated with a learning culture, organizations see a positive business impact (Figure 50-5).

Tips for leveraging technology:

•  Develop and follow a change management plan for any new technology. Without such plans in place, adoption of the latest technology drops by 51 percent and the overall employee experience decreases by 32 percent.

•  Don’t assume employees will easily adopt new technology. Even those who trend toward very open acceptance may resist if it disrupts their flow of work.

•  Use nudge versus nag reminders to help learners overcome obstacles and apply new knowledge (O.C. Tanner Institute 2021).

Make It Safe to Fail

Findings from Google’s two-year study on team performance revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, which is the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Thriving learning cultures create space for people to learn from failures and successes—they encourage individuals, teams, and the whole organization to embrace experimentation, risk, and surprise.

Paul Santagata, head of industry at Google, periodically asks his team members how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics; for example, the survey might ask, “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?” (Delizonna 2017).

Meet the Needs of the Modern Learner

Easily accessible and user-driven learning opportunities that meet the needs of the modern learner are hallmarks of innovative learning cultures (Hart 2019). Modern learners expect learning to be:

•  On-demand (as needed) and continuous, rather than just an intermittent activity

•  In short bursts (minutes) rather than long periods (hours or days)

•  Easily accessible on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) and able to pull learning modules at the time and place of need as opposed to only reacting to required push courses

•  Social, with tools, technologies, and resources (including coaches, mentors, wikis, smartphones, and tablets) for creating and sharing learning content

•  Personalized to allow individuals to organize and manage their own continuous self-improvement and self-development rather than adhere to a one-size-fits-all experience

•  Largely experiential to involve learning by doing rather than just theorizing

Final Thoughts

As the future rushes toward us at dizzying speed, mature learning cultures are more important than ever before. As Bill Schaninger of McKinsey says, “This is an unbelievable opportunity to remake culture. It’s rare in a leader’s lifetime to have such a clean drop for reshaping how you run the place.”

The need for transformation is here; the time for action is now. In a call to action, thought leader and multiple-award-winning learning advocate Kimo Kippen of Aloha Learning Advisors urged chief learning officers to seize existing opportunities for transformation: “Now is learning and development’s time in the sun.”

Keep in mind, however, that a learning culture doesn’t change overnight; rather, it evolves over time. Building a thriving learning culture—one that is fully embedded in an organization’s DNA—is a development process that may take several years to achieve. As shown in Figure 50-6, this evolution follows the common stages of maturity, where processes gradually transform from being more ad hoc and undisciplined to being more consistent, disciplined, and value-added. This maturity model will be a helpful road map to your future.

Thriving is not about doing one of the six essentials really well; it’s about integrating all six essentials to create a sustainable learning culture that stands the test of time (Burkett 2017). You will find two tools—a reminder of the six essentials and a self-assessment to rate your learning culture—on the handbook website (ATDHandbook3.org). Use these tools to help create a thriving learning culture in your organization.

While the effort might seem daunting, the key is to focus on manageable, achievable actions that keep you moving. After all, culture is shaped by daily behaviors, interactions, and practices. Use the tips, self-assessment tool, and examples from this chapter to prepare the soil and plant the seeds for learning transformation to take root in your organization. Seize your day in the sun and make it happen!

About the Author

Holly Burkett, PhD, SPHR, SCC, is an accomplished talent builder, change leader, and workplace learning professional with more than 20 years’ experience as a trusted business advisor for diverse global organizations. She is passionate about developing resilient leadership capabilities that enable high engagement and performance. Formerly with Apple, Holly’s clients include the State Bar of California, the National Park Service, Chevron, and the National Security Agency. As a Prosci certified change practitioner, a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach, and a select member of the Forbes Coaches Council, Holly is a sought-after speaker, coach, and facilitator. Her publications include the award-winning book Learning for the Long Run and contributions to ATD’s Foundations of Talent Development, ATD’s Action Guide to Talent Development, and the Talent Development Body of Knowledge. Her doctorate is in human capital development. Holly can be reached at [email protected].

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Recommended Resources

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