How culture affects your organization’s leadership strategy?

by Leadership Accelerators | Jun 23, 2021 | Uncategorized

Magda Wells

Organizational culture can make or break a company’s overall success. Having a strong mission and culture is business-critical when it comes to attracting top talent, with the wider employer value proposition becoming increasingly valuable in today’s competitive jobs market.

Glassdoor’s Mission & Culture Survey 2019, conducted online by The Harris Poll in June 2019, found that over 77 percent of adults across four countries (the U.S., UK, France, Germany) would consider a company’s culture before applying for a job there, and 79 percent would consider a company’s mission and purpose before applying. 
In my career I have worked for organizations that had a strong mission and culture to the point that I still talk about them with a warm heart. I have also experienced working for organizations who were on the opposite end of the spectrum. 
How can you create a workplace environment considered by your team as one of the best places to work? Here are a few ways:

1. Communication

Communication plays a very important role in ensuring that employees are fully aware of what is happening in the organization, from basic policy updates, to management changes and mergers. Also, employees are hungry for feedback. We all want to know how we are performing and “once a year performance reviews” are now outdated. Employees require monthly, or even weekly, feedback on their performance for smaller teams.

2. Growth opportunities

To stay motivated and inspired, employees want opportunities to grow in their careers with professional development. Employees want to expand their expertise. One of the best ways I have experienced this firsthand is by ensuring that the organization has Leadership Development Programs available for their employees and that they will foster a learning culture in the organization.

3. Managers effectiveness

The famous quote “People don’t leave their job, they leave their manager.” speaks for itself.

A Gallup survey of 7,200 adults found that about half had left a job at some point “to get away from their manager.”

Organizations should look into their managers’ people skills development, including Emotional Intelligence and coaching skills to avoid losing talented employees.

Based on the few suggestions mentioned above, why not start by creating a culture of learning within your organization?

With thetechnological advancements of this day and ages, and the use of smartphones, each and every employee has access to unlimited knowledge.

A culture of learning is needed more than ever when you combine vision, business objectives and the need for new capabilities when solutions are unknown and conditions are ever-changing.

Start now, educate and empower your workforce.

They are your power.

They are your success story.

What is learning agility?

by Leadership Accelerators | May 19, 2021 | Uncategorized

Vince Székely, Phd, coaching psychologist

How we adjust ourselves to changes was always an important key success factor in business for individuals, teams and organizations. We have seen and lived through changes in the past but these became much more volatile and unpredictable and nowadays there is much less control over them. We live in times of uncertainty and the visibility in the fog of changes is getting shorter and shorter.

One of the biggest questions of experts in organizational development and in the world of HR and L&D is how they could support their internal and external customers in a professional and effective way. As Ruth DeFries (2020) shares with us in her recently published book, we do not have to do anything else than raise the question: What would nature do? What are the strategies that would help nature to react to these crucial survival situations. She is naming four solutions: investing in diversity and variety; making redundancy as a priority instead of efficiency; choosing a bottom up decision making process and the ability to correct ourselves based on external feedback.

Everyone is able to autocorrect himself. but there are differences regarding how fast and to what extent we are able to switch to a new behavior when a given situation requires it. In a simplified way this flexibility and speed is what we call learning agility (LA). Lombardo and Eichinger (2000) are stating that learning agility is our determination and ability to learn new competencies in order to succeed in new, tough situations that are different from what we have experienced before. 
There are a lot of different interpretations of LA. Today every expert in this area agrees that no one can become a successful leader who has a low level of learning agility.

But what is new regarding this topic? When you read articles that are examining deeper and more complex levels of learning agility, one can have the impression that you are „seeing old wine in a new bottle”. The central component of learning agility is learning from our own experiences. A large number of studies prove that most people are week in learning from their own experiences. Those people who are good in learning agility are very determined, goal- oriented and learn continuously from their successes and failures in a pro-active way. They are hungry for corrective feedback coming from their environment and have the regular habit to self-reflect. They are ready to adjust their behavior, their approach and even their thinking about the world and their self-concept. This is based on the insights they are gaining from the received feedback and their self-reflection. 
The X-factor of learning agility is the intention and the inner drive. The random, incidental learning has to be replaced by intentional and motivated learning. This is especially true for organizations that have a negative learning environment, where psychological safety is at a low level, where fixed mindset is dominant, where mistakes are not seen as a learning opportunity and where people are looking for someone to be blamed for and where shame is part of daily work life.

Earlier experts wanted to learn more about learning agility because companies were aiming for a more efficient process for finding and hiring managers. More and more lists were filled with observable and measurable characteristics showing high level of agility. One of the best works was put together by Burke and his colleagues (2019) who described learning agility by naming 9 traits: flexibility, speed, experimenting, performance risk taking, interpersonal risk taking, collaborating, information gathering, feedback seeking and reflecting. Based on these 9 characteristics they created a questionnaire (Burke LAI) that helps to measure the learning agility potential of a potential leader.

The first two decades of learning agility were focused on hiring. Now it is time to develop the learning agility in organizations. That is why we created the Leadership Potential Accelerator program which is combining the development and assessment of learning agility.

Learning how to be more agile in learning does not necessarily require a formal development or coaching even though it can accelerate the process to a big extent. Let me share with you some questions that can be helpful:

• What are my 3 habits in my work as a leader that are not bringing me to a higher level, that helped me in the past but are not supporting my recent and mainly my future success?
• How motivated do I feel to learn continuously? What could be the advantages and disadvantages for myself and for the team if I pay more attention to learning from experiences? What risks am I willing to take including interpersonal conflicts?
• How can I learn from my experiences including success and failure stories in an efficient way? What could help me to learn even faster and in a more flexible way? What hinders me and how can I compensate my internal and external barriers by using my strengths?
• What strategies do I have in order to receive feedback? How could I get more feedback that helps me to gain more insights? How could I be more efficient in receiving and interpreting feedback coming from my environment?
• What works and what does not work when I am self-reflecting? What could I do tomorrow in order to have a more regular self-reflection that includes my feelings, my way of thinking and a deeper analysis of the role of my values as a leader and a human being? How could I translate the learnings coming from self-reflection?
• How can I work together with others in the field of learning? How can I run real conversations with my colleagues that helps us all to grow? What kind of learning environment am I creating for others around me including psychological safety, inspiration and giving constructive feedback? How could I accelerate the learning of my team members?

References:

• Burke, W. W., Smith, D. E. (2019). Technical report v3.5: A guide for learning about learning agility. easi.egnyte.com/dl/qzSLVOm9Ap/
• DeFries, R. (2020). What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times. Columbia University Press.
• Lombardo, M. M., Eichinger, R. W. (2000). High potentials as high learners. Human Resources Management, 39(4), 321-329.