Five Elements For Learning Organization

The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice for learning organization is a book by Peter Senge that focuses on problem solving using the systematic collective thinking method to transform companies into learning organization.

Peter Senge American scholar, teacher and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT Sloan School of Managemen is known as the author of The Fifth Discipline (1990) and founder of five disciplines for learning organizations. He also developed with Chris Argyris the Inference Ladder, a powerful decision-making tool.

The Five Elements of the Learning Organization:

1- Personal Mastery: It is an area of ​​continuous clarification and deepening of our personal vision, focusing our energies, developing our patience, and seeing the reality objectively.

2- Mental Models: are deep-seated hypotheses, generalizations, or even images of perceptions that affect how we understand the world and how we take action.

3- Building Shared Vision: Vision must be created through interaction with employees in the organization.

4- Team Learning: dialogue, and the ability of team members to suspend assumptions and engage in real thinking and create a learning environment instead of competition.

5- Systems Thinking: shifting the focus from individual problems, to the control of the entire system.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Netflix have become learning organizations able to keep up with and understand the changes in the external environment and to make the change required before it is too late and based on successful continuous learning and development.

Applying learning organization need strategic human resources that have specialists who lead the process of becoming a well-educated organization. Strategic HR is the central computer that obtain, analyze and process information about the internal and external organization environment, resources, talents, competencies, challenges and other strategic important field to provide decision makers with added value information to achieve organization strategy, objectives and vision, by leveraging on knowledge and continues learning.

Between Aggressive Competition And Cooperation Environment

Most organizations practice a culture of competition among employees in order to motivate them to give the best of their bid, creativity, innovation and effort to increase productivity and performance, achieve goals and increase profits.

If we consider the environment of this culture, we find that the employee as if in a battlefield with the rest of his colleagues worried, watching out, on adge and alert frim other so they do not discover his plans, programs, tools and methods to enable him to perform his best work. This environment made the communication at the minimum of work courtesy, basic greetings and congratulations on events and the relations are almost semi-rigid because of fear of leaking the secret of work and effort to competitors and lose the award of senior management, which is seen from the rest of the staff as a worker and practitioner of the psychological warfare games, it is a very negative relationship.

In contrast to the work environment that encourages cooperation culture, sharing, communication, information exchange and teamwork based on professional relationships that are full of emotional intelligence, interrelation with each other, work integration that contribute to the performance of the organization, achievement of profits, creativity and innovation and everyone learns from the other. Many may criticize that the lack of competition does not encourage the award of prizes that will motivate employees to work their best in this environment, however, the honest competition is at the level of the person's job. Everyone works, offers, gives, participates, and competes at the same time to develop the organization, with positive relations between the employees. The senior management is the leader of this culture and strategic HR responsible for the preservation, development and dissemination of this culture in the organization.

Positive relationships between employees and senior management are one of the most important and powerful capabilities that any organization can compete with in the market and it will enable achieving profits, increase performance and quality at a higher level than competitors. It encourages loyalty, creativity, innovation and quality of performance as well.

Organization Profit, Economic Crisis And Strategic HR

With the current economic and financial crisis that hit the region and affected organizations, the obsession with achieving the profitability rates of these organizations is very high to the point of concern and tries in various ways and means to make profits ..... The question arises here does strategic human resources capable and have a role to help organizations to making profits?

If we look at the Porters approach to competitiveness, we find that they fall under three elements:

Cost Leadership.

🔻 Increase profits by reducing costs.

🔻 Increase market share by charging lower prices, with reasonable profit.

2. Individuality:

Offering unique products or services that are different from your competitors' products and more attractive to customers.

3. Focus:

Focus on specific niche markets, and by understanding the dynamics of that market and the unique needs of customers within it.

If we look at the three elements that make competitive advantage for organization to make profit and get out of the economic crisis depends on the human element in the organization that are able to activate these three elements of competitiveness.

The strategic human resources help to formulate a strategy that enables organization with its current conditions and capabilities to work on any of the three elements or togather and know the gap and work to fill it through the recruitment of talent or training of employees and involve the employees and officials in the strategy within the daily work and help departments and support to achieve the strategy and plans programs to fill the gaps, study and measure the status and performance of employees and organization and adapt them to the appropriate organizational culture to push everyone to work together and achieve strategy and provide measurements and facts that ultimately lead to decisions in Senior management to achieve profits.

Therefore, there is a significant correlation between profits, metrics, objectives, corporate strategy, employee performance, organization's current status, gaps, and strategic human resources.

HR Has No Indicators For Added Value

Some ogsnization leaders still believe in this statement, even if they do not stated publicly, but their decisions and the manner in which they manage the organization shows their conviction of the saying, but is it correct? Does human resources only doing operations, policies and processes? Is it a center of heavy costs and the number of its staff should be reduced and reassign tasks on the few staff? Should the organization support only the other profit departments?

If we look at the last twenty years economic and financial transformations with the development of technology, we find that organizations suffered from crises and fluctuations in succession, some of them went bankrupt and out of the market and some suffer and some of them were able to promote and seize opportunities.

If we want to analyze this situation  acoording to Dave Ulrich book The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance we will find, seven steps in terms of achieving the strategy and adding value as shown in the picture. Therefore, the organization that adopt the above statement will suffer from the loss of their employees and talents, impact of financial and economic crises, competitors and their inability to meet stakeholders expectations. 

The seven steps model to use HR as strategic assests:

Clearly define the business strategy

Learning more about the organization’s strategic objectives and goals. The HR Department should align its objectives and goals with organization. To do this the HR staff must get to know the management team and their challenges, barriers and constraints.  HR needs to conduct an audit of the HR function to determine if it has the competencies and skills necessary to help the organization achieve its Mission, Vision, and Strategic Objectives.

Build a business case for HR as a strategic asset 

Many managers perceive HR to be an administrative function. HR must make a proative effort to educate the leadership team about the potential HR has as a strategic business partner. Return on investment (ROI) approach, KPIS, customer feedback can be used to HR activities. The idea here is to talk the same language of the leaders and provide information base on figures, finance and statics as profitable departments.

Create a strategy map 

HR needs to provide a value proposition for its activities and change the perception that HR is overhead, strictly an expense generating department. HR should take the time to map out each of their processes, such as benefits administration, to ensure that the processes are streamlined, provide a quality product or service, and are targeted to meet specific organizational objectives.

Identify HR deliverables within the strategy map 

HR preceived as intangable value, things cant be put in numbers and figures or statics like marketing and finance, therefore HR must consider changing from output concept to deliverables concept, it mean HR services must be architect to provide value added for other departments, can be quantified and easy to understand and spot for leaders the addrd value creat by HR.

Align the HR architecture with HR deliverables 

HR education and training focuses on HR role as polic policy maker, recruitment and selection and fire, or administrators keep personnel records. This concept cant help HR to make value added deliverables, therefore recruit8ng, training and practicing HR should be base in strategic HR role, deliverables and strategic partner.

Design the strategic measurement system 

Hr must study organization inside and out in order to constract the right measursesthat will capture the value added deliverables HR contribut in the organization, the measures must be as well reflicting organization need, environment, strategy and align with business units.

Implement management by measurement 

HR leadership needs to be diligent in first selecting, and then consistently measuring, the appropriate success criteria. It may be helpful to set process checkpoints at three or four times during the year to honestly discuss how HR staff is doing in relationship to their strategic objectives.

Usually organization strategy is excellent in its formulation by corporate leaders and officials but the organization and staff are not in touch with it and how it is related to them and their work and goals because the finance and investment manager, sales manager or regional manager can not do the alignment of the organization and staff.

The chart shows how human resources achieve added value by measuring profitability. The question of measuring indicators is no longer confined to other departments. Human resources have a scientific methodology and measurement indicators that prove their contribution and the value they add to the organization especially in achieving and activating the strategy. Is this convincing enough?

Strategic HR Role In Enriching Customer Experience

The difference between the customer experience and customer service, customer experience is the result of accumulations of the client's experiences with the organization and its services, products and employees. As long the experience is positive the level of customer loyalty and network marketing will be high, while the customer service is focusing on the methodology, method, style and technology offered by the service or the product and the qualification of the employee to provide them using the resources of the organization according to its culture and objectives.

Therefore, customer experience today is the most important because it is not enough to provide quality services and products to a certain number of customers or a number of times, but the most important is to maintain and sustain the level of quality of the products and services in addition to the after sale services, employees competencies, honor promises by organization standards of the same pattern.

Therefore, companies are now working through strategic human resources to achieve a distinct customer experience through distinguished customer service:

1- Support the culture of customer service in all units and departments of the organization.

2- Align HR strategy with organization strategy and departments to support customer service.

3 - Human resources support the culture and concept of customer service in all jobs and the role played by employees in the organization with internal and external customers.

4. Measuring human resources base on impact  on other departments and the organization to achieve the goals and strategy rather than outputs of operations.

5 - Preserve the reputation of the organization and its brand, employees and customers expect ation depends on the brand and they expect the organization to live to its brand reputation.

6 - Human resources architect customer service within the structure of the organization and not exclusively in a sales and marketing department or unit.

7. Encourage and support interdepartmental cooperation to share experiences, information and learning to serve customers.

8 - Reward and appreciate success stories in customer service in the organization and dissemination to the rest of the staff for inspiration.

9 - Granting employees in the front office authority, discretion and decision-making within the framework of the culture of the organization customer service, objectives and strategy.

10 - Develop the emotional intelligence of employees in the organization at all levels.

11 - Choose a role model from organization leaders and front office staff in the distinction of customer service for the rest of the staff.

12 - Incorporate the work in the front office for customer service within the staff training programs to test and consolidate the culture of the organization and its practices in enriching the customer experience.

Strategic HR helps the organization in raising the level of customer service to enrich the positive customer experience and achieve profits, objectives and senior management strategy, this how successful global organization did it.

What Makes Organization Strategic Thinking?

Today, organization leaders usually announce in various media and social media about their strategic orientation, support and adoption of the idea that their employees are the organization assets and capital and how they care about their employees and provide all the support and decelopment and training they need to achieve the goals and strategy and vision of the organization.

The role of onsultants and trainers in strategic human resources is to support this trend and root it in the organizational culture and practice by analyzing and examining the organization whose leaders declare this approach and here how we try to reveal if the words of the leaders correspond to reality, culture and practice:

1- The HR position in organizational strategy. Does HR manager attend the meetings of the strategy to take notes and take orders or he is on equal terms with the managers of finance, marketing, sales, production and manufacturing in drafting and crafting strategy.

2. Does human resources role in the organization is as recipient and obtaining orders and review of routine procedures and policies or it has a role to support emoloyees development, adviser to leaders and departments, change agent and driving organizational culture.

3. Dealing with training and development as a reward for employees and not instead of relating it to organizational need to achieve objectives, strategy and vision.

4 - limiting human resources decisions making to the issues regarding labor law, policies and procedures of personnel affairs or the decisions raise to the strategy, goals and vision of the organization.

These are some of the factors that we measure as consultants and trainers of strategic human resources to determine if the organizatiom is strategic thinking or they are more believe in financial factors and profit and loss in making crucial decisions and fundamental changes. There are other factors that explain the behaviour and mindset of the leaders if they really believe that employees are the organizational assets and capital or it is just media show off talk.

HR In knowledge Economy

Knowledge economy is an economy in which growth depends on the quantity, quality and accessibility of available information, rather than the means of production.

If we look at the each section of the organization, there are those who work, strive, think, develop, change and there are new people join the organization and make change and development . All these practices result in valuable information and become the legacy of the organization over time, whether resulting from successful practices or failed or incomplete.

It may be surprising that the clarification, analysis and revision of information in a way that benefits the rest of the organization and decision makers is in the human resources because it is linked to everyone and everyone is associated with it.

It is true that each department specializ, but the information resulting from individuals success and failure, change and development are all stored in human resources and information is now stored using information technology cloud, human resources are the cloud of the enterprise.

Because the knowledge economy depends on information, all human resources are strategically developed in the organization. All the information is valuable, up-to-date and well analyzed, and cloud technology is being developed today.

It is certain that the information of the organization is stored in other places and it is also important, but the important information for the survival and continuity of the organization remains in hands of human resources because it is related to the human element, competency development, changes, innovations, requirements, successes and failures.

Thats why the successful organization made HR strategic partner and in return not just survive but also the become 10 steps ahead of their competitors and adaptable for external environment challenges.