Five Difficult Must Have Conversations on Your Learning Culture Journey
By: Box Of Crayons
Tags: Learning And Development, Psychological Safety, Leadership, Learning, Organizational Culture

By Dr. Chantal Thorn

Director, Program Development

Box of Crayons

Learning culture. Everybody’s talking about it. Does your company have one? How do you “create” one? Who’s “in charge” of it? And, like with any corporate culture goal, the “learning culture” speak comes with a lot of jargon. Unfortunately, industry-specific buzzwords (personalized, on demand, just in time, user-generated content, etc.) can have the unintended negative consequences of turning people off from the (typically) positive ethos of the words.

In general, a learning culture is one where the company’s culture (values, processes, systems, behaviours) explicitly facilitate — through encouragement and support — their employees’ learning, growth and development for the ultimate purpose of increasing employee competence and organizational performance.

There are many articles about “how” to actually cultivate this. My worry is that they land too tactical in nature than many companies might be ready for. I’m a root cause, company DNA, company foundation first learning professional. And when considering what “learning culture” might mean for your company, I recommend going deep.

“Authentic learning is not discovered in a textbook, but rather at the crossroads of contemporary societal issues and student passion.” — Aaron Duff, M.Ed.

I know, right? I love this definition of authentic learning by Aaron Duff. It may be “housed” in the context of academia, but its philosophy is equally relevant to corporate learning. The idea of learning happening at the crossroads of contemporary society issues and “student” passion is a concept I’d like us to transfer to our corporate contexts.

If we do so, we’ll notice that a truly successful learning culture can’t be found in someone else’s LinkedIn article. It can ONLY be found by examining the challenges and frustrations and learning gaps that exist within that company’s culture and context.

On a deeper level, if we follow the oft-cited (and perhaps a touch trite) example of a company’s culture being akin to a house’s foundation, we can start to create a strong company-aligned base from which to build from.

Building rooms with fancy furniture (e.g. buying an LMS, offering monthly learning sessions and telling people that it’s okay to try new things) without having the proper foundation to support it (see the five basics below) is disengagement and frustration waiting to happen.

Start by having some transparent dialogue around the following. Or, at the very least, consider these foundation-building questions while putting the walls up!

1. Consider reactions to “failures”

Learning — at its core is intrinsically connected to “failure.” The very need to learn something implies the inability to do something to begin with. And the process of learning often includes “failures” along the way. Be curious and mindful about how formal leaders in particular react to failures. You’ll never create a culture of learning if the predominant reaction to getting something wrong the first time is panic, frustration and humiliation.

2. Consider what gets talked about

Corporate storytelling is intensely telling. The stories you choose to tell (during onboarding, during town halls, doing meetings and business reviews) tell your employees something — it tells them what matters. And if the stories we tell do not include the true process of learning (which again, can’t help but be connected to “failing,” trying, iterating, needing and leveraging help, etc.), then we can’t be surprised if we don’t see a lot of that organic learning culture behaviour that we say we want.