Organizational Learning

Let’s Voyage with the Marriott

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Marriott International is the world’s largest hotel chain and in 2017 it broke into the top 500 of Forbes Global 2000 list.

Click here to view Forbes’ list.

Yes, mergers and acquisitions have added to its global size, but it is Marriott’s quality systems that keep their growth going and their customers coming back. The Marriott has the highest customer loyalty of any hotel chain, according the 2017, J.D. Power report.

One of Marriott’s successes factors is its unique employee onboarding, leadership, and development program, which is called “Voyage”.

Here is a case study on the Voyage training program.

Marriott has transformed its very traditional and dated training systems to utilize the latest technology and has integrated aspects of Web 3.0 learning theory into all aspects of this unique training .

Click here to learn more about Web 3.0.

Marriott’s Voyage program is a holistic training program that includes:

  • a sophisticated learning platform
  • Integrated approached
  • Webinars
  • Blended learning
  • Virtual learning and collaboration
  • Hotel simulator and gamification

This program has expanded and is now a global leadership development program run by the Marriott University. Its chief goal is to develop post-secondary graduates into leaders in the Hotel Industry.

Click here to learn more about the Marriott University.

Marriott has done what so few organizations do; it understands the quality equation, which is that the quality of its services is based on the quality of its employees, which is in turn based on the quality of its training and development. The Voyage program, from on-boarding to global leadership development, was a major contributor to Marriott’s stock price rise of 64% in 2017.  Many other organizations may want to model this training concept in their own contexts.

 

Discussion Questions:

  • Research and identify the differences between Web 2.0 learning and Web 3.0 learning?
  • Give examples of two other organizations that are using Web 3.0 principles of learning and explain how they have been successful with their training programs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn or Die with Learning Science

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There is a technology tidal wave on its way and it is going to hit organizations with massive disruptive force. If organizations want to survive, they need to use learning science.

Author and professor Edward D. Hess has stated that organizations of the future will either “learn or die.”

This dramatic statement is the title of his new research-based book on organizational learning. He believes that close to 70% of all American jobs will be displaced by technology in the next 20 years. If technology is going to replace that many workers what can/should HR do to address this issue?

HR needs to help employees develop new skills that technology will not be able to replicate or render obsolete. Dr. Hess believes the following skill sets will stand the test of time:

  • High level critical thinking
  • Innovation
  • Creativity
  • High emotional engagement with others

The problem is our current learning strategies may not be sufficient to truly develop or enhance these skills.

Humans are naturally defensive learners and organizations tend to embody the characteristics of the individuals that comprise them. Organizations are their own worst enemies when it comes to learning; they need to develop new learning strategies. Dr. Hess claims that learning better and faster than the competition is the only truly sustainable competitive advantage.

Click here to watch a short video clip introducing Dr. Hess’ ideas.

So, what will be the purpose of HR in the future, when 70% of the jobs we know today don’t exist? Perhaps it will be to make humans better learners and thinkers.

Discussion Questions:

After watching the video clip, what role do you see HR playing in training the workplace of the future?

Once you determine the future direction of HR, create a 3-minute presentation to convince your VP of HR that this new direction is the way to go if your HR department and organization are to survive.

The Direction of Organizational Learning

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In the 1990s, Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practice of the Learning was ground breaking, and was instrumental in changing the world of organizational behaviour and development.

However, there is a new concept on the block that is taking organizational learning theory to new heights. It is called Deliberate Developmental Organization (DDO). This has been created by a team of authors and researchers who comprise an organization called Way to Grow Inc.* This team, which includes faculty members from Harvard and a doctoral student from Stanford-PGSP, has produced a book called, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization.

According to the research behind the book, the organizations that do well are ones that are deeply aligned with an individual’s greatest motivation, which is to develop within an organizational culture that supports growth. This concept expands on Dan Pink’s motivational theory that an individual’s greatest motivator is to develop.

The authors of An Everyone Culture posit that most employees devote a significant amount of energy to a second, unpaid, job – i.e., the work of covering their weaknesses and managing others’ impressions of them. They believe this is the biggest cause of wasted resources in most companies.

Their solution is the creation of an organizational culture that doesn’t waste energy, but focuses it on developing people. According to the DDO concept, employee weakness is a strength, and errors represent opportunities to develop.

Click here to read an extended whitepaper on this approach by Robert Kegan et al.

Imagine working for an organization where you could truly be your authentic self and continuously improve on your weakness. Would that be a dream job or a nightmare? Something to think about!

Discussion Questions:

— Having reviewed the extended whitepaper by Kegan et al., do you think you would like to work in a company with a well-developed DDO culture? Explain why/why not.

— Have you had an experience where you feel you had a weakness at school or work? What was the weakness? Were you allowed to expose it? Did you have support in overcoming it? If yes, what was the outcome? If no, what was the outcome?

* To learn more about Way to Grow Inc, visit www.waytogrowinc.com.

 

Learning to Unlearn

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Business Man with Ball and Chain
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Nothing kills a moment of corporate creativity more than this phrase:  “That’s not the way we do things around here.” Once it is issued, it ensures that the status quo, no matter how bad that may be, will remain untouched and, most importantly, unchanged. It is a phrase that is usually uttered by those working within a specific power-brokering segment of an organization.

How is this a power play?

When one part of an organization refuses to move, it ensures that the rest of the organization remains anchored in the past, is resistant to change, and presents no opportunity for creativity or new learning.

How can true learning organizations respond to this type of resistance?

They need to unlearn and let go of that which is holding them back.

According to Vijay Govindarajan, the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and a Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, organizations must divest themselves of old ideas and methodologies even though these may be the very things that made the organization great in the first place. In order to move forward, Govindarajan states that organizations must let go of what has been learned in the past.

Click Here to Read the Article

From a Human Resources perspective, Govindarajan’s concept can create great organizational learning opportunities if the Human Resources function has a leadership role.  Human Resources must lead with powerful impact, in order to push the change agenda both forward and throughout the entire organization.

Click Here to Read the Article

Not only must the Human Resources professional be able to provide incentives that pull people forward into change, we must also be vigilant in stopping what is sometimes a cultural and entrenched longing for both the past and not so recent past by helping people to let go of that huge anchor which is represented by the status quo.  We can do well to observe the past, but we must leave it behind and let it go in order to move forward and learn what is new and uncomfortable and create a future that does not yet exist.

To do this, the Human Resources professional needs to be brave.

The brave Human Resources professional will be the leader who will help to break the chain of the status quo, discard the anchor to the past, and set forward, freely, into an uncharted future full of greatness and new learning.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is the difference between ‘unlearning’ and forgetting in the context of employee training and development?
  2. Do you agree with Vijay Govindarajan’s perspective that creativity comes by having to unlearn what was learned in the past? Why or why not?
  3. What do you perceive as the biggest barriers to bringing new learning, creativity, and fresh ideas into an organization from a Human Resources perspective?
  4. Have you worked with someone who was resistant to learning something new? What was that experience like for you? How did it influence your own work and learning experiences?

Why Aren’t We Sharing What We Learn?

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In our Human Resource studies related to Training and Development, we read and hear about collaborative learning and systems thinking as key concepts and drivers for the learning organization.  Systems thinking, in particular, brings forward the need for understanding organizational and management issues in context with each other. Research and analysis are all part of systems thinking which allow for organizations to learn and to grow using evidence based methodologies. It seems, however, that there is a continuing divide between the learning that business organizations achieve based on management research and the learning that is produced in post-secondary communities, based on purely academic research.

This divide is explored in an interesting article, by Fiona McQuarrie.

  Click here to read the article

Isn’t it time for research that results in management learning and research that results in academic learning to come together and be shared in order to be truly collaborative?  Ms. McQuarrie’s article speaks very clearly to the need for all of us to start communicating about what we have learned, so that we move out of a silo-based mentality that hoards information and into a collaborative, shared learning community that benefits all members of our respective academic, management, and Human Resources related constituencies.

Discussion Questions:

  1. How will you apply what you have learned through research in your HR studies into practical application as an HR professional?
  2. What benefit does academic research bring to the Human Resources profession?
  3. How should organizations share research based learning inside and outside their respective communities?
  4. Where can you access current Human Resources related research that provides leading edge learning?