: A critical attitude for learning organizations. As Robert Greenleaf states, “The Servant leader is servant first...This conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead”. Stewardship operates on two levels: for the people they lead and for the larger purpose or mission of the enterprise.
|New Skills for Leaders (293-297)
||Leaders in learning organization must develop new skills through a lifelong commitment. These skills must be widely distributed throughout the organization.Three critical discipline areas:|
Building Shared Vision: encouraging personal vision, communicating and asking for support, visioning as an ongoing process, blending extrinsic and intrinsic visions, distinguishing positive from negative visions.
Surfacing and Challenging Mental Models: challenge existing mental models without invoking defensiveness. Characterized by seeing leaps of abstraction, balancing inquiry and advocacy, distinguishing espoused theory from theory in use, recognizing and defusing defensive routines.
Engaging in Systems Thinking: Leaders focus less on day-to-day events and more on underlying trends and forces of change. Often engage in systems thinking intuitively and cannot explain their intuitions. Key skills: seeing interrelationships, not things, and processes, not snapshots; moving beyond blame; distinguishing detail complexity from dynamic complexity; focusing on areas of high leverage; avoiding symptomatic solutions.
|Leaders of learning organizations will need to develop skills to enhance conceptual abilities and foster communication and collaborative inquiry. These include identifying system archetypes that occur repeatedly in organizations.|
Archetypes include: balancing process with delay, or knowing the time necessary to complete a project and deciding its relevance upon completion; limits to organizational growth; shifting the burden, or focusing on a short-term solution without considering the long-term negative impacts; eroding goals, or lowing standards; escalation, or employees attempted advantages; tragedy of the commons, or overusing a limited resource; and growth and underinvestment.
Chartering Strategic Dilemmas: management teams unravel when confronted with core dilemmas. Charles Hampden-Turner details a process to cope with common dilemmas.Eliciting the dilemmas, or identifying opposed values from most obvious; mapping, or locating opposing values as two axes as a visual representation; processing, or getting rid of nouns for positive conceptualization; framing/ contextualizing, or thinking in terms of each side of the structure; sequencing, or breaking hold of static thinking; waving/cycling, or knowing cycles were both values will worsen over a period; and synergizing, the ultimate goal of improving along all axes.
“Left-Hand Column”: Surfacing Mental Models: An exercise developed by Chris Argyris illustrating how people move from data to generalization without testing the validity of these generalizations.
|Developing Leaders and Learning Organizations (303)
||Marshall Sashkin and N. Warner Burke emphasize the importance of developing leaders who can also develop organizations. Management will focus on roles, skills, and tools for leadership in learning organizations.|
Additional Information to Chew on....
But wait, there's more...
|Organizational Learning vs The Learning Organization
Our class activity of identifying the similarities and differences between organizational learning and the learning organization helped differentiate the two. At first glance, Adrianna Kezar's description of the learning organization places it out of reach as she refers to it as a "fad", "a contested area", and "an idealized model." After writing down the differences, Kezar's version of the learning organization is clearer. She holds the title to a very high standard and set of activiites; well beyond those seen in organizational learning. After reading Morgan as well, however, we see a different set of standards for the learning organization. Morgan eludes to double-loop learning as moving toward "learning to learn," while