Wake Your Sleeping Learning and Performance Giants
There is a complex web of subtle and often hidden learning and
performance challenges that affects everyone’s workday. Regardless of title or
tenure, no one is immune to the barriers it puts up between you and your
coworkers and between you and your goals. And there are no shortcuts to
navigating your way safely through it. However, your capacity to recognize
these challenges and take deliberate steps to manage them can create a distinctive
competitive advantage.
I call
these challenges the hidden
curriculum of work because it is this unspoken, unwritten
work that doesn’t show up in your job description, yet determines your ability
to stand out. Learning to navigate it is a business imperative with significant
untapped human-capital potential. And just like any other form of capital —
social, political, financial — a leader can either squander it or leverage it.
Leaders should think of these challenges as
sleeping giants because they represent big opportunities to learn and
grow, but are hidden in plain sight. Indeed, these sleeping giants make up a
large part of your company’s untapped learning and performance capital. If you
want your people to get smarter and faster and elevate bottom-line results, you
need to wake these giants and face them head-on.
For example, as a leader
you rely on accurate, real-time updates and you don’t like surprises,
especially when the news is not good. However, it is precisely when the news is
bad that effective communication often declines. If your corporate culture is
such that leaders unconsciously “blame the messenger,” people become reluctant
to deliver bad news. This Mum effect — a term coined by
psychologists Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser — means that people distance
themselves from bad news out of fear they will be blamed by
association. When this happens, critical issues get buried and
disingenuous interactions overtake transparent exchanges. The sleeping giant
here is the chance to examine how your corporate culture treats transparency.
Although truth-telling may be an expected norm for your team, it’s probably not
happening as often as you’d like.
Once you’ve recognized a sleeping giant, how can you make it work
for you? You must simultaneously remove the performance barriers and leverage
the learning and performance potential within it. In the above case, the
barrier is a reluctance to be completely transparent and the potential is the
freedom to express ideas and be truthful without fear of punishment, which
leads to better collaboration and decision making.
To
simplify this process I’ve created a practical
system to identify and transform everyday
barriers using a tool I call a navigation map. Navigation maps
offer a visual representation of how core barriers to learning and performance
affect your current state — and how a leader must alter them to create the
desired reality. What follows is an introduction to the process of producing a
navigation map that resolves the barriers keeping you and your
people from doing your best work.
Let’s consider Sara, the vice president of human resources for a
mid-size professional-services firm. Sara held a series of meetings in which
the feedback from managers on new-joiner readiness was negative. She
commissioned a full review of on-boarding and discovered that the majority of
the examples and scenarios instructors were using during orientation were
derived from a limited set of success stories that had occurred before market
conditions shifted dramatically. As a result, instead of presenting new
employees with a current state of best practices and realistic performance
expectations, they prescribed outdated advice that was not only irrelevant, but
misleading to the point that it required managers to invest additional time in
retraining.
For Sara, the sleeping giant was the opportunity for an honest
assessment of how her team was overrelying on past success, including the
subtle ways they’d insulated themselves from changes they needed to make. To
arrive at this conclusion and eliminate the unwanted behaviors, she and her
team held a two-hour discussion in which they produced a navigation map using
these two steps:
1. Create a constellation
of a core and related barriers.
Here, a constellation is a
pattern of related behaviors or experiences held in orbit by a core barrier
that keeps the other unwanted elements in place. It is a
tool for untangling interrelated elements that may be difficult to distinguish
otherwise. To create a constellation, you and your team identify the
expected root cause and place it in the center. Then ask, “What else does this
barrier push or pull into my experience?” Place these additional barriers in
the peripheral circles, and then continue the process until the constellation
is confirmed as accurate.
2. Flip the barrier and
find the road map.
Once you have identified the
core barrier, you can determine the learning and performance elements needed to
overcome it. Often, the solution to removing the barrier lies within the
barrier itself. Simply turn it inside out and stretch it along an action
continuum. Plot the core barrier at the far left and the opposite — a learning
and performance goal — on the right. Then you can brainstorm the key actions
required to move from left to right and list them below.
Together, these two devices gave Sara and her team a more systemic
picture of what was happening and what concrete steps they could take to create
something better.
Companies that can leverage their untapped learning and
performance capital are best positioned to achieve continuous improvement and
innovation. Leaders who use systems and tools such as navigation maps that
identify performance barriers and who make deliberate investments of time for
dialogue about their root causes, permutations, and effects increase the
capacity of their people to transform sleeping giants into opportunities. When
this happens, trial and error gives way to a more flexible form of intelligent
learning where people respond to and manipulate obstacles in their environment,
exercise creativity as they interpret and resolve subtle yet important problems,
and continuously adapt their knowledge to advance self-generating cycles of
performance.
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