July/August 2001

Knowledge Rules!

Leadership isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the demanding managers who quacked directives at employees. Today’s leaders are more flexible and less hierarchical; they trust employees to come up with solutions on their own.

One reason for the change in leadership style is the vast change in workers. Today’s “knowledge” workers want more responsibility, increased challenges, and continuous learning. These workers have a lot of intellectual capital to offer and astute managers know how to make the most of it. In this issue of Duck Tales ™ we’ll focus on what it takes to lead knowledge workers, how to encourage learning in your organization, and what pitfalls to avoid along the way.

Leading Knowledge Workers
Knowledge workers need a new type of leadership - leaders who can transform all that brainpower into real value that can boost the bottom line. In order to do that, the top Ducks® need to develop these traits, which inspire confidence and make knowledge workers want to rally around them:

Enthusiasm. The new leaders are far beyond complacent - they are intensely passionate about goals and the purpose of an organization and its workers. Their visions and objectives are based in reality, not lofty words.
Trustworthiness. In the past 15 years, over a quarter of U.S. employees have lost jobs through downsizing, rightsizing, and the like. Today’s leaders must be highly skilled in rebuilding trust in this transitional workforce. They do that by being competent, caring, and honest.
Optimism. The new leader expects to be successful now and a decade from now. Regardless of the challenges and obstacles these leaders may face, they lead by hope and optimism.
Focus. Although situations may not always be ideal for success, the new leaders turn their visions into reality. While they may dream lofty dreams, they act pragmatically.

A Transfer of Knowledge
Much emphasis has been placed on the “learning” aspect of smart organizations. But in order to have learning organizations, you also must have teaching, not just mentoring and modeling by example, but “explicit teaching,” according to business author Steven Covey. He explains: “Explicit teaching is where you mentor and lift people from unconscious competence to conscious competence, so they become aware of why people and things succeed or fail and what principles are operating.”

Transferring this type of knowledge so you have an organization of consciously competent people is critical in today’s marketplace. When an employee leaves the organization, for example, all the person’s experience, intelligence, and competence are gone. To avoid this loss, Covey recommends creating “a culture where every learner becomes a teacher and every teacher becomes a learner.” The goal is to build individual knowledge as well as organizational knowledge. When a person leaves, the knowledge remains, since it has already been passed on to others.

Granted, much of a person’s knowledge and experience cannot be transferred through teaching; it must become institutionalized by being embodied in the structure, system, and processes. If this does not happen, warns Covey, authority remains only with those at the top, and the level of trust is low. Cultures in which people have the opportunity to learn, grow, and develop not only foster smarter organizations, but organizations that are better equipped to handle change.

Think Tanks
Talking about knowledge is one thing - implementing concrete practices that promote learning is quite another. Consider these ideas from some high-flying companies:

Same old, same old. Thinking organizations avoid doing everything the same way for long periods of time. Instead, they encourage employees to rethink the framework in which they complete projects.
Make the connection. Employees must think of themselves as the internal link with the external world and use that as their motivation. Organizations focused on intelligence encourage employees to measure their success by the success of the whole, and particularly, the customer’s happiness.
Use self-appraisals. Rather than external reward systems, thinking organizations help employees focus on self-reflection and appraisal. Personal reflection is a more powerful and demanding form of motivation, but its rewards exceed the traditional appraisal method.
Keep on quacking. In the intelligent organization, employees across all levels are encouraged to talk to each other and share ideas, thereby making smarter connections.

A Classroom Without Borders
Managers who cast a critical eye at those water cooler conversations may be in for a surprise. Those informal conversations result in some of the best workplace learning. Granted, formal training programs have their place and do their job, but informal learning shares the credit for enhancing workers’ performance and knowledge.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 70 percent of workplace learning takes place outside the classroom. In addition, researchers have found that employees learn three-fourths of what they know about their jobs informally. Stop and chat with an employee in the hallway, have a phone conversation with a client, or stroll around your local duck pond with a colleague, and you’ll be amazed at what you learn. Some of that informal learning is packed with technical knowledge, but even more importantly, say industry experts, are the less tangible pieces of information you learn. Your client’s culture, language, and way of thinking are immersed in those informal learning moments. Those elements are just as essential, if not more so, than the technical training employees undergo.

Although businesses acknowledge the importance of informal learning, many fall back on formal training, with corporate America spending over $54 billion annually on traditional training programs. Some companies have found the most success comes from blending formal and informal learning. IBM and Boeing, for example, say their sales reps perform best when new staff is paired with veteran salespeople in mentoring programs. Honeywell Data uses some formal training programs, but then gives employees free reign to reshape processes in ways that they feel work best.

Teaching Them to Learn
So how exactly does an organization become a learning organization? More and more companies are attempting to shift into the “learning” mode, but not all succeed. Judy Rosenblum, executive vice president of Duke Corporate Education Inc., offers this advice to organizations that want to become learning companies:

Make it a choice. While learning happens in all organizations, management must strategically choose to make their company a “learning” organization. Every employee should be aware that learning is not just for the individual, but for the team.
Slow down to a waddle. So many things in business are judged by how fast the organization moves or responds. To become a learning organization, you must be willing to slow down and think. There won’t be any immediate tangible rewards, but the long-term successes will be many.
Clarify your perceived outcome. Businesses that become learning organizations to keep their key players have achieved just partial success. Their primary objective should be to use learning as a strategic tool. Learning should be a business objective, not just a people objective.
Ask “why?” While goals and visions have their place, they seldom can answer an all-important question, “Why doesn’t our organization have what we want now?” Companies that answer that question will find a host of new learning opportunities at their fingertips. Every organization should ask, “Have we achieved success, and if not, why?”

Promoting Intellectual Growth
Perhaps never before has the hunger for knowledge been so pervasive in the workforce. Today’s knowledge workers find the greatest job satisfaction in continued learning. This thirst for intellectual stimulation brings new demands to organizations. Not only must businesses provide top-notch monetary benefits, they must be able to offer exceptional mental and emotional challenges to attract and retain workers. Here’s a look at some of the most critical issues regarding intellectual growth:

(1) The new competition. Organizations that best learn to reward creativity and intellectual growth will become the successful competitors.
(2) Management goes contemporary. While hierarchical management is rarely the norm today, leaders must continue to focus on “coaching” and project-driven collaboration. Managers will shift from being “experts” to “facilitators” who promote the free flow of ideas and knowledge among all groups of workers.
(3) Leaders embrace risk. An organization’s leaders will openly embrace and promote risk-taking and will continue supporting the worker who experiments with new ideas.
(4) The task becomes the boss. The “task-is-boss” philosophy will gain momentum as the role of “commander” becomes less important than the project - specifically, how a project is executed and how it affects the customer. Workers will feel more comfortable working together to create solutions, with far less fear of making mistakes. Intellectual pride will replace territorial disputes.