Tuesday, May 19, 2015

LEARNING ORGANIZATION.


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.