Learning Challenge

The Top 3 Ways to Support and Challenge Your Learning in Meaningful Ways:

1-     Believe in yourself and your ability: "Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy" Norman Vincent Peale. That trust will reflect in your work with colleagues, and make you want to learn and give more.  Make sure to set realistic goals. Setting realistic goals will help you to believe in yourself and your ability to accomplish

things.

 

 

 

 

2-     Be open to share information, thoughts and experience: All of these thing will help to learn. I’m trying to learn from other experience, being open to new ideas and encouraging robust-- open dialogue.  

3-     Self-reflection is an important component of self-improvement and learning. It helps me to take stock of what I’m doing well and what I still need to work on. Sometimes, I need to take a few moments at the end of day to reflect on my experiences. If I did not achieved as much as I hoped I would try to learn what I can from the situation to avoid repeating any mistakes I might have made.

Top 5 List - “Best in Class” Learning Organizations

Top 5 List -“Best in Class” Learning Organizations

1-     Organizational learning is “informal” and HR doesn’t own it: Many leaders agree that people learn from their job. That is really true, a lot of customer service people learn by solving problems. Therefore, organizations must create a good environment that supports rapid on-the-job learning and informal learning.

2-     Learning from past experience and allow people to make mistakes: Organizations that review their successes and failures, help their employees and save time. Moreover, organizations’ culture should give people time to reflect, develop and share expertise, stay close to customers, and learn from mistakes.

“Organizational learning is a process of detecting and correcting error.” —Chris Argyris, “Double Loop Learning in Organizations,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1977.

3-     Learning from others: Origination should look outside and learn from others’ successes.   

4-     Give experts the opportunity to share their information and make them available to others. "Experts are everywhere in originations, so let people share what they’ve learned easily".

5-     Finally, leaders have a role to building a learning organization, “Leaders try to enhance subordinates goal attainment by providing information or rewards in the work environment” (Northouse, 2013, p. 137). Leaders try to satisfy followers whether morally and materially. In the future, they will see great feedback and a good productivity which can satisfy both leaders and subordinates.

 

 

1-Northouse, P. G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and practice (6th ed.).

 

2-http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/18/5-keys-to-building-a-learning-organization/

 

 

Learning checklist for fostering meaningful conversations in teams

One of the most effective ways to learn in the workplace is conversations in teams. Conversation will help employees to share their ideas and thoughts, and accept others’ thoughts. Moreover, conversation can be meaningful if any leader helps her/his team members experience progress at meaningful work. To achieve that, leaders must understand what drives each member, help build connections between each person’s work and the organization’s mission and strategic objectives, and help each person learn and grow. Having conversations is essential to understand our objectives and organizations’ objectives.

In my opinion, there are skills that lead to meaningful conversation, such as listening and understanding others’ point, so we can respond correctly.  In fact, most people do not have these skills to have a good dialogue because of technology. People text or email during corporate board meetings. I remember I watched a talk on TED and it was about the impact of technology on our conversations. In that talk, it said in our real life people do not feel comfortable making conversation, so they would rather text than talk. Most people think that conversations will take place in real time and they can't control what they are going to say. So, here is the main key as the speaker (Sherry Turkle) mentioned “Texting, emailing, posting: all of these things let us present the self we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete”. So, sometimes technology effect in negative way!

 

 

 

 

Therefore, we need to learn how to make any conversation strong and meaningful. Group members should share their thoughts, ideas, and feeling for successful group work. The first thing is listening to each other, and that will help to come up with good questions to clarify others’ ideas and emotions and develop the conversation to the next level. Finally, as I said in the beginning the main point which is organizations and leaders should open the opportunity, build trust and create a supportive environment allowing participants to share and solve problems without barriers.

Reference:

https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together/transcript?language=en

 

 

Why organizations are approaching learning all wrong!

Why organizations are approaching learning all wrong!

Learning in the workplace is very important, and learning is the main key and required factors of any organization that wants to improve and be in a competitive environment. Therefore, organizations must have the right approach of learning and prepare employees through constantly learning. That will help them to deal with changes and to have the ability to adapt with conditional changes. Approaching learning right not only will help organizations to improve performance in the long run, but also will increase employees’ productivity and confidence.

 A large number of companies spend a lot of money to train employees in the skills they need to improve corporate performance. In fact, these companies do not have the good strategy to get the benefits from training employees. Few companies see sustained benefits from training employees because they know the best way to improve their employees and when! We could not say formal learning will not help because employees often need new skills to deal with changes in an organization’s strategy or performance, and that could happen by both “formal and informal” learning. Moreover, we need to know the right time to use either formal or informal learning. Organizations can decide that by asking the learner, who is “the employee”. 

 

  

I remember in the company that I used to work in, the company field was a contractor for construction materials and specialized equipment, and we got new construction equipment from the corporate company in Turkey. The company decided to give all the engineers in the company a training about dealing with the new equipment. After the training was done, most of the employees were so upset because they did not get any benefit from the trainer because he was speaking Turkish instead of Arabic or English. Most of the employees said we did not need this course because we already knew how to use the equipment; it just has minor differences. In this case the company lost money and the employees wasted time! 

 Before training begins, organizations must have a strategy to train employees, and after that, measuring the impact.

 

Mashael Aljahdali

Why learning in the workplace is important to me:

I’m learning new things everyday not just from college or work but also from people around me. They make me ask myself questions, and these questions lead me to search for answers. The best and the fastest place for searching is google! I love to ask google to get the first answer, then I try to find documentaries about the subject. However, learning in the workplace is important, but knowing how you learn is more important. Some people are better suited to learn from a textbook or by problem solving.  I like to learn from experiencing the process and watching others. My five reasons why learning in the workplace is important are:

1-     Learning in the workplace is important because it improves confidence. I feel good about myself when I have a new knowledge about my work and enough to make me feel comfortable.

2-     Learning in the workplace opens many doors and provides opportunities: Enhancing my skills and gaining new knowledge in the workplace will give me the opportunity to advance my career. 

3-     Learning in the workplace keeps my mind refreshed: Learning new information and improving skills will help me to keep up with all the organizational change.

4-     Learning in the workplace allows me to communicate intelligently: Learning from my mistakes and gaining new knowledge allows me to put forth my ideas more eloquently in the future.

5-     Learning in the workplace allows for personal development: There is no limit with learning. We need to seek knowledge to improve ourselves and keep up with all the new changes in our work environment.    

Mashael Aljahdali