When employees are learning, the company will grow.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Harvard Business Review” (ID: Hbrchinese), author HBR-China.
Erik Bursch is doing a great job and his team is doing his part, but he is ready to learn something new. He runs a cloud platform in the technical department of Gannett. He believes that if he can put himself in a new environment, the company can learn to grow with him.
Bolsheben can seek new opportunities outside the Gannett group—many do it—but he likes Gannett, has worked with them for more than a decade, and has a relationship throughout the company. He decided to contact Jason Jedlinski, senior vice president of the Consumer Products Division, and proposed to merge their engineering team.
Yedlinski is willing to accept the offer and help to make Bolshe’s transformation into a new role and become his direct subordinate. Bulsch is able to bring its deep domain expertise to the entire software development cycle and learn how to apply new applications in the product department. As Burrish said: “I am actually looking for challenges and supporting product vision by coordinating technological advances. The ability to have greater impact on the business has enabled me and my team to gain without losing momentum and expertise. The excitement and excitement brought about by the new work.”
The company also benefits from it. As Yedlinski said to me: “The skills and innovative thinking that Eric brings to our product team gives developers better architecture, cost management, operational procedures, incident response, quality control and career paths.
Bulsch’s experience demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between employees and the company in learning. High-growth individuals who accept new learning make the company smarter and drive growth, but they can’t do it alone. They need managers to in turn interest in personal growth and create a learning ecosystem to promote personal growth.
Like a biological ecosystem, companies are either growing or are heading for death. When employees are learning, the company will grow. So if you want your business to grow at a high rate, you need to create a learning ecosystem to support fast-growing individuals – getting new and challenging opportunities before their roles get old.
People may stay in one place indefinitely, but in most cases, they can’t grow there forever. When they are no longer motivated and attracted by their work, the benefits they bring to the business will diminish. By that time, employees mayOnly the original indulge or forced to leave the job. Their accumulated professional knowledge and collective memory disappeared in the process. To make matters worse, they may bring their knowledge to the competition – this is likely to be an exponential loss.
Companies need to see that high-growth employees who love learning are valuable assets. Redeploying them to the new learning curve in the company can leave their expertise within the company and allow them to share expertise and build on it – which is likely to be exponential.
The concept of carrying capacity in biological ecosystems refers to the number of populations, other organisms and/or crops that a region can support without causing environmental degradation. Growth will continue until resources reach their limits.
People can also grow up in the workplace until their new knowledge resources reach their limits. At the beginning, or at the bottom of what I call the S-shaped learning curve, there is a lot of room for growth; but as we mastered our role and eventually reached the top of the learning curve, we began to level off. When we reach the bearing capacity of that curve, our brain is even more lacking in “food and water.” We grow slower and then stop, we are bored. If this situation is common in the company, the curve will start to become flat.
This does not mean that every employee must stay. Of course, not everyone will stay. But retaining promising, curious people is worth a try, allowing them to change to a new role as they begin to become absent-minded – just as Bourges did when his instigation sought new opportunities.
Managers can also carefully arrange new learning by pushing employees—even reluctant employees—to new curves. During his tenure at Rovi, a 2,500-employee digital media software company, Eileen Schloss, human resources director, realized that her two human resources teams were in conflict. “Human resources business partners often complain that account managers can’t quickly find a job candidate,” Schloss said. “Talent people feel that HR business partners don’t fully communicate what the conditions are for entry.”
She asked the heads of the two teams to swap positions. “The forced change in this perspective has had a huge impact. The two people did not initially have the experience of doing new jobs, but they generally have a good understanding of the business, and they have people who know the specific situation,” she said. “This purposeful reorganization has deepened mutual understanding within each functional department and improved capabilities.”
Deliberately interfere with employees who have mastered their roles but have little knowledge of their responsibilities, giving them a better understanding of the overall operation of human resources and how to improve them.
Exchange jobs are just putting employees in a new learning curve, helping to get rid of barriers, and maximizingOne of the strategies for sharing learning within the enterprise. Continued training and education opportunities, work sharing, career guidance and proactive help programs are other examples. You can creatively integrate, mobilize, and provide new opportunities for employees.
By creating an ecosystem that promotes continued learning, companies can build capabilities beyond their competitors. Studies have shown that companies that can survive are those that develop capabilities before they are needed—new technology skills, domain expertise, greater resilience, and a way to make the most of collective memory. This ability is diminished when too many good people leave for more lush pastures.
A dynamic ecosystem – where different ingredients interact – helping people grow, generate abilities, and keep the ecosystem alive. Thomas Troward, a scholar of the early 20th century, once wrote: “Life ultimately constitutes a cycle, both within the body of the individual or at the scale of the entire solar system; circulation means continuous flow, and the spirit of wealth is no different. … If we block the water outlet, the water flow must slow down, and only keep open to ensure full and free flow.”
If the individual is not studying, the company will not. This is like a pool of stagnant water blocked by the water outlet: still, algae, full of duckweed. It is the opposite of the tidal forces of a flowing river or sea. When we help people learn and even ask for personal learning, we create new capacity for growth in the entire enterprise ecosystem. If we don’t… well, our lives and deaths are determined by the growth of our employees.
Author introduction
Whitney Johnson | Text
Whitney Johnson is an executive supervisor, speaker and innovative thinker and has recently been ranked among the most influential management thinkers by the Thinkers50 rankings. She is the author of the Build an A-Team published by Harvard Business Press and the highly acclaimed Disrupt Yourself.
Shi Qingjing | Edit