My philosophy about learning organization
comprises the notion of creating effective learning processes which will allow
for continuous improvement of the policies, strategies, and structures of
organization to strive for better. Learning organizations will help
organization in creating and design possible ways of improving skills and
knowledge in these competitive rapidly growth world. Over the years, a clear
definition of learning organization has not found. David A. Garvin constructed
a fairly general definition: “A learning organization is an organization
skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying
its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.’’7.
There are different ways how to promote learning
organization in an institutional. There are building blocks which support
learning organization; a supportive learning environment is one of them where
by the leaders are responsible to create learning environment, where the
employees will be very comfortable to open up with their contractive ideas,
taking risks and explore the unknown and these can be done if the employees
they are not overwhelming with busy schedule which give them the room to think
analytically and put that idea to work for improvement and innovation.
Leaders should allow the mistake as challenge
and these give employee to look for a better ways how to fix the situation so
that will never happen again in future. The concrete learning process and
practice is another block for building learning organization; these involve
collection and interpretation of information’s in an organization. Employees
should be given chance develop experiment for the new products, to identify and
solve problems, seminars that will give them awareness of competitive,
customers and technology trends and have a better system to share all the
knowledge throughout the organization . Leadership reinforcement is another
block for building learning organization; leader will play role as a teacher
and mentor which means they are actively listen and ask question to employees.
Leaders who spending time to identify problems and share they are
concerns and challenges with employees actually give people power to
finds new ideas, alternatives and other options to solve and share among
themselves. Also, when you give the employees the opportunity to develop their
skills is more likely to assure them with their expertise and facilitate their
commitment to the organization. It’s give the employees the ability to be self
direct and more responsibility and eager to learn more skills at work.
Johnson (2002) considers visioning, empowerment
and leader’s role in learning as crucial skills for leaders of learning of
learning organization. Building a learning organization needs to be flexible,
adaptive to a changing environment. The leadership plays a very big role in the
process; Senge (1990) which identified leaders as teacher and mentor, designer
and stewards. They must initiate all the three the learning building blocks to
develop learning organization. The successful of this will require a mix of
different people, with different positions and who lead in different ways and
have different experiences in different expertise to make a best learning
organization.
In conclusion I would like to suggest that,
organization must be kept on their agenda openness of learning, in order to
maintain adaptability and flexibility in an ever changing world, the importance
of organizational learning as a strategy for adaptation is impossible to
overstate. As I have stated above in creating a learning environment it
is important to replace confrontational attitudes with an open culture that
promotes inquiry and trust. The most successful visions build on the individual
visions of the employees at all levels of the organization, thus the creation
of a shared vision can be hindered by traditional structures where the company
vision is imposed from above. The benefit of team or shared learning is that staffs
grow more quickly and the problem solving capacity of the organization is
improved through better access to knowledge and expertise. Learning
organizations have structures that facilitate team learning with features such
as boundary crossing and openness.
References
Gavin,
D. A. (1993). Building a learning
organization. Harvard Business Review, 71(4), 78-91.
Johnson,
J.R. 2002. Leading the learning organization: portrait of four leaders. Leadership and Organization Development Journal, 23(5):141-150
Senge,
P. M. (1990). The leader's new work: Building learning organizations. MITSloan Management Review, Magazine: Fall 1990.
