Ways Executives Can Improve Learning Within Companies

How leadership and technology can be of great help

Peter Drucker believes that in an emerging economy, knowledge is a strategic resource for the economy overall. This portrays the importance of organizational learning today, where companies see themselves in the common challenges such as meeting customers’ needs, staying in the forefront of competition, distinguishing the industry trends to adapt with the changes, enhancing profitability in the existing market, and targeting new markets.

Organizational learning can largely help companies to create value for customers by synthesizing and analyzing the current data which facilitate relationship development with customers and providing higher quality services and products for them. In this situation, when learning has been highlighted as a critical factor for creating value, it can be argued that companies need to improve their capabilities in developing organizational learning to effectively identify and meet customers’ needs in today’s business environment, where competitors have been trying to attract more customers.

In here, leadership is the most important enabler for developing organizational learning. However, reading all the books on leadership today will cover the gamut of Shakespeare to Geronimo. Not to say that these authors, leaders, and thinkers do not have anything good to say about leadership. It is just that the plethora of leadership literature has sent mixed signals to corporate leaders. In this article, I place a new emphasis on leadership to provide a more humanistic and applicable approach to effectively developing learning within companies.

Investors recognize how important leadership is for developing organizational learning when they say that a good leader can make a success of a weak business plan, but that a poor leader can ruin even the best plan. For example, Rich Teerlink, who dramatically changed Harley-Davidson in the 1980s, and fundamentally built a different organization that still prospers today.

Harley-Davidson’s leadership created a more effective organization built upon challenging current norms and developing learning around the company. At Harley, every employee can take part in organizational learning. Another example of leaders is Steve Jobs, former leader of Apple, who built a highly effective company through taking a change-oriented leadership approach, which highly manifested itself in developing organizational learning.

In fact, leaders can enable learning within companies, thereby stimulating intellectual capital. They can effectively develop relationships to enhance knowledge transference among business partners. They also adopt information technology to facilitate knowledge and learning around the company. Leaders can also inspire employees to networking with more successful companies to acquire external sources and use benchmarking.

Case studies indicate that top managers in various companies are not leaders. These reports also illustrate the weaknesses in these mangers, such as failing to effectively use information technology in their organizations. These reports also illustrate that top managers particularly in the manufacturing sector scored the least in the very important organizational behavior tenet of people management when compared to two other areas of operations management and performance management. The investigators, therefore, recommend that managers must improve organizational learning with a target of attracting, retaining, and promoting their human capital.

In conclusion, I suggest that executives can focus on implementing a strategic vision for developing organizational learning. By accepting the challenge of learning development, top management executives may be capable to overcome their deficiencies and lead better in our hypercompetitive environment of today. The question posited for top management executives in any and all organizations is to accept the challenge of learning development in order to address the current gaps in performance and improve their competitiveness in global markets.

Author Bio

Mostafa Sayyadi Ghasabeh, CAHRI, AFAIM, CPMgr is a senior corporate trainer at NIGC. In recognition of his work with Australian Institute of Management and Australian Human Resources Institute, he has been awarded the titles, “Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management” (AFAIM), “Certified Professional Manager” (CPMgr) and “Certified Professional in Human Resources” (CAHRI). Connect Mostafa Sayyadi Ghasabeh Follow @mo_sayyadi