CASE STUDY: A 100-YEAR-OLD INSURANCE COMPANY
The company had survived for a long time, but increasingly felt under pressure from competitors and a rapidly changing marketplace.
A large number of initiatives had been undertaken ranging from the introduction of performance management, total quality, and an employee assistance programme to a Leadership Forum for the future leaders of the company. At the time, there was a total of 14 initiatives, all with the general goal of improving organizational performance in the future, but they were not linked within a coherent framework.
The senior management team of the largest division within the company (which contained two-thirds of the total workforce) decided that there was a need for a unifying theme or "lubricant", as they put it, to help ensure that the various initiatives already in place actually worked.
The senior management team decided to examine the concept of a learning organization by means of the workshop in Action 1. It carried out a SWOT analysis and used the output to develop an action plan (see Figure 2).
Part of the plan included putting the middle management team through the same learning experience the senior management team had been through. The senior management team also recommended that the central personnel function should attend an adapted workshop so that the HR specialists in the company would understand and support what personnel were trying to achieve, working with rather than against them.
The objective of one of the divisions was to take responsibility for its own training and development rather than respond to initiatives from the HR function.
The independence of the division in creating a new learning culture for itself initially caused tensions with other divisions within the company, until the Chairman of the Executive Board intervened and supported the action, holding it up as an example of the empowerment which the company was seeking to create.
Gradually the company cascaded downwards an understanding of the learning organization and developed in managers the ability to encourage and sustain learning in others as part of the management development program me (see Figure 3). (Figure 3 omitted)
The company did not commit itself to becoming a learning organization by signing up to a formal definition, but, by becoming a learning-orientated organization, it would ensure the success of its change program me and achieve the long-term vision it had created.