Posts Tagged ‘organization’
Learning Styles and Meetings
Henry Senko
I am often asked how to apply the concepts and processes that people learn in the Leadership through Learning (LTL) program. Here’s a question from Donna Smith, an LTL practitioner from Edmonton, Alberta:
Donna’s Question:
Could you send me a summary of how your learning preference influences the triggers you might have around participating in meetings? For example, I get impatient when people start talking about details, details, details and just want to move on.
My Response:
I think that if all your participants know their learning style preference, the activity at the end of this blog might be the best way for them to individualize their reasoning for engagement and disengagement during a meeting. I believe the activity would take about 5-10 minutes. Depending on the size of the group, you would have to allow another 5 -10 minutes for a quick debrief.
Your impatience with details can be attributed to an action preference in learning style, but it is also a good example of how someone’s thinking style is having an impact on you, as seen in the thinking styles profile called the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). A focus on details comes from Quadrant B, and irritates people who come from the other three quadrants, but especially Quadrant D, which is likely where your irritation is coming from.
Overview of Learning Styles Engagement:
- For people who have an action orientation (activist and pragmatist): The meeting must be time efficient (pragmatist), and must have something to do with planning (pragmatist) that leads to action (activist) or implementation (activist).
- For people who have a reflection orientation (reflector and theorist): The meeting must have an opportunity to gather new information (reflector), and must have a strong purpose (theorist).
Quick Overview of Disengagement:
- People who have an action orientation (activist and pragmatist) are irritated if the meeting is not time efficient (pragmatist), and has nothing to do with planning (pragmatist) that leads to any type of action (activist).
- People who have a reflection orientation (reflector and theorist) are irritated if there is no opportunity to gather ideas (reflector) and the meeting has no clear purpose (theorist).
Applying the Learning Cycle during a meeting:
- Start with telling the purpose for the meeting:
- Move to gathering data about the purpose (e.g., different perspectives, etc.)
- Draw conclusions from the information gathered
- Plan on how to move forward
- Assign actions and accountability (to whom and with timeframes)
- Note: If you have several purposes to cover in the meeting, do steps 1-5 for each purpose, starting with the most urgent and important purpose first.
Activities for Participants to Determine How Meetings and Learning Styles Connect
- During or at the end of the meeting, use the Capitalizing on Your Learning Style booklet found at the back of the Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) Interpretation Guide or Revving Up Thinking and Learning: Course Design Guide.
- Ask participants to go to page 8 in the Capitalizing on Your Learning Style booklet. And find the page that refers to their strongest preferences.
- Ask participants to review the bullets under the statement If you … you will learn best from activities where, and highlight what phrases resonate for them. This forms the basis of their preferences. Ask participants to consider when they were engaged and why they might have been engaged based on what they highlighted.
- Ask participants to review the bullets under the statement As an _____ you will learn least from …, and highlight what phrases resonate for them. This forms a basis for what irritates them. Ask participants to consider when they were disengaged and why they might have been disengaged based on what they highlighted.
Corporate Culture, Organizational Change: Strategic Practice
In the last three decades of increasing change and uncertainty, leaders in organizations have been engaging in a myriad of change efforts, some of which have only marginally succeeded, and most of which have failed outright. The unfortunate result of these change efforts is a wasteland of demoralized, exhausted, and jaded employees and leaders.
The reason that most change efforts fail has less to do with what the organization and its people are doing, and more to do with the dynamic of its corporate culture. Like countries, organizations have cultures — corporate cultures — consisting of visible artifacts such as language, structures, history, and ways of working and getting things done. But a critical aspect of a corporate culture is not visible — its ability and capacity to learn. Corporate culture dictates what an organization and its people are allowed to learn, and how they are allowed to learn it. Like an ocean, a corporate culture has strong flows and dynamics that shift and move people, decisions, learning, and actions in certain ways.
Many people simply go with the flow, learning by following others. Others try to initiate change efforts, often going against the flow, challenging and questioning the way things are done around here.
We’re a leading-edge research and development company that focuses on building your organization’s capacity to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. We work with you to produce measurable results, so that you can learn at the speed of change. We research, field-test, and evaluate a variety of thinking and learning processes to identify which ones produce high performance.