"How Can Your Organization Become a Home for the Continuous Transformation of Talent?"
If you are at all conscious of the world of commerce today, you know that in order to.jpg)
remain competitive your organization must have at least the same quality of talent as the leaders in your industry. You’ve also got to know that engaging in a price war for talent is a long term losing proposition. The alternative set available would then seem to include a) being willing to permanently accept your organization as less than an industry leader (a questionable long term strategy for certain), b) entering the world of competitive free agency with all the risk that involves, hoping it is a short term solution or c) focusing on making yours an attractive working environment where people can and do develop to their fullest potential. Your immediate response to option c) may be a knee jerk “Yeah, let’s do that,” followed immediately by the recognition that you have no idea how to do that! That is, if you are being honest with yourself.
The question that is the title of this post is a direct quote taken from the concluding chapter of Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (I wrote about their work a couple of weeks back in a different context). I originally read their newest book hot off the presses in 2009. As is frequently my habit, I did not finish the entire book, stopping once I felt I had a grasp on the “big idea.”
Last week as I was preparing to deliver the Immunity to Change process to a group here in my home area in the Northwest I decided to go back and finish reading the final chapter. To my joy, amazement and eventual embarrassment I learned that what I had thought was a firm grasp on their “biggest idea” was not that at all. I had settled for the “big idea.”
Through their 25+ years of work, Kegan and Lahey have become exposed to some long buried falsehoods as well as false hopes about adult education inside many organizations naming these among them;
- …we annually spend millions of dollars on training programs predicated on the notion that if we provide people with more information we will change their ability.
- …we have often confused the acquisition of more information with getting smarter.
If you are involved in education in your place of work on any level, you may find yourself becoming prickly at the assertion that we have long been looking for treasure while digging in the wrong place. But honestly, aside from high “smiley face” scores, have you seen any really permanent difference in overall ability arising from programs which…
- Typically are discreet events outside the normal flow of work.
- Often involve participants who are either total strangers or do not have any ultimate stake in each other’s improvement.
- Treat subjects that involve behavioral change as though they could be solved by the transmission of information, i.e., “read this book,” “take this class,” “go to this seminar,” etc.
In your own private moments, you must have been as disappointed as I have knowing that all the beautiful materials, lesson plans and instructional design would not make any lasting difference, except in a few cases. (If you are a technical trainer you are clearly an exception in this conversation but if you are involved in management development, these thoughts must be striking a raw nerve!) But wait, there’s more!!!
Kegan and Lahey bluntly recommend that we draw a clear distinction in our employee educational thinking between the desires for technical or adaptive change. Once we have begun to acknowledge that each type of change requires a different approach, they are equally blunt…it is time to move the learning experiences involving adaptive change out of the classroom and into the work teams needing these changes.
Their insistence that organizational environments that foster real change and development arise from the organization’s cultures being built on a developmental stance rings like someone, a voice with credibility, finally shouting that “the emperor has no clothes!”
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There is of course much more to Kegan and Lahey's story.Their seven crucial attributes of a genuinely developmental stance form the foundational sketch for the beginning of an entirely new future for anyone involved in organizational development and or change. You can read all that for yourself. But answer me this honestly like your professional future depended on it…
Would you look forward to a future in organizational/employee education where the budget items associated with these activities were considered sacred and were never part of any discussion that concerned cost reduction?
Yeah, ….that’s what I thought.
There will be no engraved invitations to this revolution.
