Continuous learning critical in changing business climate

Change comes fast and furious in today's business world, threatening to leave companies that aren't adapting in the dust.

A big part of that adaptation is in the knowledge of the company's employees. But keeping that knowledge current with the needs of business isn't as easy as rolling out a software upgrade.

Many of the most successful companies have integrated continuous learning into their corporate culture.

“Learning is one of the cornerstones of the GE culture,” said Heather Akers, senior learning leader at GE Capital Finance in Cedar Rapids. GE Capital Finance provides business loans and leases for everything from pizza ovens to large aircraft.

Akers' education team is viewed as a partner with the local GE Capital Finance operating group in business development and employee development discussions. “There are two things we have to be able to adapt to from a learning standpoint,” Akers said, “The changing business environment and changing employee needs.”

GE Capital Finance employees are asked every year to identify their learning needs so that new opportunities can be developed to meet those needs. The needs constantly change, ranging from technology to corporate structure to marketplace needs. In 2010, the company rolled out a program to help managers learn how to manage better virtual work teams, or teams consisting of workers at scattered locations.

GE Capital Finance has a global learning center in New York and formal mentoring program that helps create networks of professionals within its organization. It also has affinity groups that help bring employees with similar interests together. Forging relationships among employees helps foster learning by helping employees know someone they can turn to when they have a question requiring specific knowledge they lack.

GE Capital Finance group programs in the Cedar Rapids office have included the African-American Forum, Asian-American Forum and GE Disability Awareness Network.

Book sparked interest

Much of the current thought in corporate learning draws from the work of Peter Senge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His 1990 book “The Fifth Discipline” popularized the concept of the “continuous learning organization.”

Ken Brown, a Henry B. Tippie Research Fellow at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, said people have a natural desire to learn, but managers who try too hard to control learning can get in the way. Brown has studied the work of Senge and others like Erwin Daneels, who expanded on Senge's teachings about organizational learning.

Brown cited GE Capital and Rockwell Collins as two Corridor companies recognized for continuous learning. He said LG, the Korean manufacturer, has received international recognition for its learning culture as well.

“The key for managers is to guide and set up conditions for the natural instincts to learn,” Brown said.

Providing learning opportunities is an obvious precondition. Many companies offer classes or tuition assistance to provide those opportunities. But other preconditions are less obvious.

As comedian John Cleese said in a popular video, “If you want your employees to be creative, give them time to play!”

Minnesota-based 3M assigns many employees “creative time,” Brown said, when they are expected to be free of tasks and meetings. “To produce new knowledge there needs to be space,” Brown said. “The real innovations that advance our society happen when people have the space to think.”

The teachings of continuous learning give a different context to the recent state budget debate over proposals to freeze the use of sabbaticals at the state's regents universities. Sabbaticals offer academics time and space they need to learn new skill sets and new ways of looking at problems, Brown said.

The current struggle among media organizations such as newspapers and television to adjust to the new norms of social media and instant communication are one example of the challenge organizations are facing, Brown said. Most media outlets produce daily products with unrelenting time schedules, but media managers remain perplexed at why they have had such a hard time innovating and adapting to new technologies.

In the current economic climate of slow or stagnant growth, Brown said, it's tempting for companies to cut budgets for learning. That can have long-term consequences for an organization. Eliminating learning opportunities within an organization can prompt employees who are most interested in learning to look at leaving, Brown said. “People who really want to learn are also likely to be the best employees. You'll be left with the people who aren't interested in learning.”