What makes prioritizing learning difficult now is a challenge facing both business leaders or business teachers: learning online is a lot more complicated than setting up a Zoom account and continuing business as usual. Whether you are a CEO, senior manager, or junior professional, if you neglect learning, you stop adapting and forego leading. Leaders must learn how to keep a distributed workforce focused, energized, and attuned to customers’ changing needs. As the world shifts to online work and businesses struggle to reinvent themselves, organizations need to learn what kinds of new products and services will appeal to their consumers and learn how to create them. Learning will be the foundation of our survival, then, for both organizations and the individuals who make them up. Like all major crises, and perhaps more than most, the COVID-19 pandemic is bound to leave behind lasting changes in the way work and business take place. “ We can’t afford it when we need to secure operations and get the basics done.” Further Reading Leaders put aside their intent to include and develop, and revert to command and control. In times of upheaval, anxiety runs high and the instinct to preserve the world as we know it takes over. They slash learning budgets and cancel mentoring sessions in a downturn. Companies do that all the time: They pause major learning initiatives, such as training courses, and minor ones, such as process checks after team meetings. In such conditions, organizations and leaders might be forgiven for going into survival mode and putting learning aside. As in many organizations, the transition happened almost overnight in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis that has disrupted everyone’s private as well as working lives. Then, in the past few weeks, everything else moved online, too. At INSEAD, the business school where we work, we’ve been expanding virtual meetings, ramping up virtual classes and coaching, and introducing digital tools to enhance face-to-face work. Over the past five years, we have been taking our work online deliberately and at a steady pace. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. But maintaining that focus on learning, and specifically on learning about relationships and emotional responses, will prepare us all for the new world that will emerge out of this crisis. Learning will be the foundation of our survival, then, both as organizations and as the individuals who make them up. For the authors and for the teachers we work with daily, the biggest obstacle to a swift transition to virtual work has been the difficulty of focusing on learning - our own, our colleagues’, and our students’ - as the novelty of online platforms and the concern with sustaining performance take over. Organizations and leaders might be forgiven for going into survival mode and putting learning aside in the middle of a crisis, pausing major learning initiatives like training courses and minor ones like process checks after team meetings.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |