When asked to comment on the evolution of their organisation, more and more managers tend to point out the following trends: hierarchy is becoming flatter than ever, decision-making structures have become more peer-based, and information tools - long the assets of a selected few - are now widely available within the organisation, to the extent that they can be seen as commodities.
As a result, access to privileged sources of information is no longer a factor for promotion, and power will mostly be a function of competence in the coming years.
One of the key drivers behind these changes is the availability of powerful technological tools that deeply affect the way managers work and interact by giving them access to quasi-unlimited information.
The evolving issue is therefore how to effectively use this information, or, more specifically, how to process it into knowledge that is useful to individuals and to the organisation as a whole. In other words, do the amount and breadth of information available to all translate into an enhancement of the organisation's practices, resulting de facto in better skills for managers?
An increasing number of companies are becoming aware of this challenge and are focusing on how to better structure the processing of information. We observed a recent example within a major pharmaceutical multinational whose top management made the strategic decision to improve the business practices and skills of its managers.
In order to do so, the company launched a group learning initiative where the principle was to leverage the ongoing access to rich information by identifying and implementing best practices across its multi-country operations. This approach, now followed by a number of business leaders, can be summarised in three steps:
1) Group learning exercises must follow a standard process of preparation, meeting and follow-up in order to foster group performance improvement.
Attempts to promote group learning in business meetings often fail as a result of a tendency to concentrate on the data itself rather than on the knowledge to be derived from its analysis. These failures point to a clear need for thorough preparation ahead of these group learning meetings in order to ensure focus on relevant issues and to guide the learning and action agenda.
An important element is the setting of standard processes for extensive preparation and clear follow-up to the meetings themselves. Preparation is indeed critical to the sharing process as are post-session follow-ups to the storage and retrieval processes. Without this structure, the group fails to complete the reflection and action phases that result in change in action and group learning.
2) A thorough group learning experience can result from a strong focus on performance issues in all phases of the process.
Managers are sceptical as to the effectiveness of such meetings unless a clear focus and deep level of analysis is required and enforced. This highlights the need for performance-focused meetings to include a review of business metrics (namely the key performance indicators) and objective achievements.
Specific analysis of one or more performance gaps of noteworthy relevance, and finally a discussion of the course of action, follow-up and applicability to other business areas constitute other success factors.
3) Group learning requires top-down implementation in the organisation.
This allows the executive team to experience the value and challenges of the group-learning exercise, while senior managers, having access to benchmarking data, have a critical role to play in offering an objective overview of performance gap analyses and possible courses of action. Subsequent top-down implementation guarantees involvement at all relevant organisational levels.
In conclusion, one of the main traits of future organisations is that information will become a commodity, with most individuals having access to multiple sources of data, competitors' practices and such; the key challenge is therefore to optimise the use of this information.
Some companies manage to do so by transforming kilobytes of data into top business practices, which in turn positively impacts employee skills, not to mention performance results, and often organisational culture.
It is only at this price that leaders will effectively convert knowledge into skills, thereby enhancing the company's human resource assets.
If you would like to have a consultation with an expert on learning and development or would like us to send you information on our latest research in the area, please contact Magda Newman on 020 7443 8870 or mnewman@escp-eap.net
