Published by colleague Maya Townsend in Chief Learning Officer Magazine April 2009
Copyright © 2009 MediaTec Publishing Inc
To make the most of their learning initiatives, CLOs must understand the power of informal workplace networks and know how to leverage them to drive organizational change.
The executive team of a small, community-based West Coast hospital received a major wake-up call a year ago. After a string of big wins — instituting best practices, winning external recognition for clinical quality and earning significant profits — executives learned they had made a strategic misstep that threatened the very existence of the hospital.
They needed to correct the error. More importantly, they needed to figure out how the misstep occurred and learn how to prevent similar strategic errors in the future. “What they missed was that they weren’t sharing information or learning together about what the business demanded,” said consultant Dr. Sarah Fisk. Read More
I know! We’re so focused on online social networking these days that we forget: much of it is based on live human interaction. Yet, at a meeting last week, I asked how many had gotten a job through LinkedIn. 0 people. How many through personal connections? More than half the group. Of course, this isn’t a scientific sample, so more research needs to be done. But organizations today work through human networks, supported by online social networks, in order to get things done. To forget the human networks is to miss something significant.
Interesting article, with all the talk about online social networking, I had almost forgotten that networks exist in the real world too.