RECENTLY, we talked about structural noise and this week’s article is a build-up.
For a company to stay competitive, it must be willing to learn fast.
You can’t stop learning and expect to be ahead of the game.
The easy way to outperform your industry competitors is being able to learn.
Organisations, as John Kotter, pointed out, need to stay agile, and adaptable to changing market situations.
Unfortunately, some organisations struggle to keep up with the speed of change as they cannot learn fast.
This article picks on some dysfunctions that companies have and how they can overcome them.
Learning disabilities can hinder organisational growth, relevance, productivity and profitability.
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This article speaks to both profit-making and non-profit-making companies.
Strategic ambiguity
Strategic ambiguity is a common problem with most companies.
Some have a strategy, but it is not simple and understood to those that should help fulfil its goal.
To some, there is no strategy and everything is built around activities that might at times help the company make money.
So, the company has no strategic clarity and it becomes hard or challenging to make decisions, allocates resources, and has key performance indicators (KPI) or clear key result areas.
This makes it hard to measure performance.
In simple terms, this leads to ambiguity/ confusion in an organisation.
Dysfunctional teams
Teams are responsible for bringing results in any company.
With some companies, teams never work synergistically, and that is a learning disability.
If teams do not work together, it might lead to duplication of activities, poor communication and missed targets.
How do we cure this problem, companies mu have team building workshops and activities.
‘Blame game’ culture
Teams that don’t take responsibility resort to blaming others.
Some leaders, who are stuck, resort to blaming others.
A “blame game” culture is a sign of learning disabilities.
Blaming leads to a toxic environment, which creates more problems such as conflicts, misunderstanding, frustration, lack of trust and accountability.
Lack of action synergy
In this instance, we have people working together, but don’t know or care how their actions affect the other.
This leads to poor communication, collaboration and team work.
Not learning from
experience
When we fail to learn from our mistakes, we are bound to repeat the same mistake.
To avoid this, we need time to reflect as boards or teams.
Also, leaders must be willing to listen, and demand feedback from employees.
When employees are not allowed to make decisions or freely say their opinion, they will be silent at the expense of an organisation.
Reactivity
Most companies are playing catch up.
They are caught flat-footed by change and that makes them react and adjust to the demands of change.
This does not make the company proactive.
Lack of learning agility
The ability and agility to learn is the greatest gift any organisation can have.
Learning agility is the ability to learn swiftly and adapt to new situations.
When a company lacks learning agility, it can;t keep up with the pace of change.
Lack of research and development
Research and development is related to learning agility.
Research makes us gather information we need to move the company towards development.
Does your company have a department for research?
When a company does not invest in research and development, it cannot innovate.
A silo mentality is when departments or teams work independently of each other.
This can lead to a lack of communication, duplication of effort, and a lack of innovation.
When employees only focus on their own department or team, they may miss opportunities to collaborate and share knowledge with others.
No talent retention
Talent density determines the success of any company.
A company that does not retain its top talent is a company that will see the best talent leave and serve others.
When a company does not invest in its workers, it cannot attract or retain the best talent in
town.
Parting point
Most of the problems above can be solved by training and development.
Also leaders must be trained to know learning disabilities, and be quick to help others overcome them.
Learning disabilities are built by company culture.
To break the cycle of learning disabilities, companies must be willing to change, break from their past, and accept and demand feedback from everyone.
