Workplace needs to foster learning

To The Editor:
Kate Nguyen's comment this past week (the issue of Jan 1824) in Richard A. D'Errico's article "ETEC Loses Chance For Enron Deal" communicates an important universal idea. There is a strong message for employees, employers and a region that stakes a large part of its future on the need to attract and retain superior people and organizations.

In the expansion of Tech Valley, our community must create learning organizations whose cultures are built around creating a safe place for people to grow. Kate shared, "A lot of people are looking to upgrade themselves and don't want their employer to know" because they may be looking for a new job.

Unfortunately, Kate has hit the mark on how many corporate leaders have created environments where it is not okay to grow and advance oneself. The reasons are varied. Unfortunately extensive research evidences those ideas that Laurence Johnston Peter (19191990) first introduced in the Peter Principle in a humoristic book of the same title describing the pitfalls of bureaucratic organization. The original principle states that in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence."

The principle is based on the observation that in such an organization, new employees typically start in the lower ranks, but when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher rank. This process of climbing up the hierarchical ladder can go on indefinitely, until the employee reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent.

At that moment the process typically stops, since the established rules of bureaucracies make it is very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank.

The net result is that most of the higher levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people who got there because they were quite good at doing a different (and usually, but not always, easier) task than the one they are expected to do. This factor is compounded by the shocking evidence that when a manager becomes a manager it is in large part because they were friendly or related to the boss, were good at a technical skill, or were the next choice after having worked in a department for 15 years when the supervisor retires.

If you were to ask a management expert if being related to the boss, being there the longest, or even being the best performer qualified you to be a manager... the answer is NO! You see it is clear that many companies have no idea of the skills that could be implemented in their organizations to get greater results.

People are an organization's natural resource and they must be invested in. We do not have to look to the extreme violations of psychological employment contracts in the matter of Enron--there are plenty of our own local firms that say they care about their people but make no investment in growing their knowledge of important skills. Just like farming mushrooms, they keep people in the dark and feed them manure. These are the organizations that hire people, make no investment to grow their people and dismiss them to optimize shareholder value in the final pinch for earning performance. Executives must create safe places for learning systems to occur that provide measured development on a constant basis for all of their people.

This learning needs to be directed by the top management and leadership of the organization using exceptional curriculum, measured development, spaced repetition, and coaching. In the absence of management commitment to creating learning environments, the visionary American workers are relegated to jobs they become stuck in for a lifetime. Why should an employee conceal their endeavor to upgrade themselves?

Jim Ullery
President
Center for Organizational Energy LLC.
Albany

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