It is the single biggest ammunition in the hands of a #hr professional.
If you don’t know which ones to pick, you can start with any one under my #bookrecommendtaion series.
Today’s pick-
Book Name: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Year of Release: 1990
Author: Peter Senge
Who is he: an American scientist, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management & the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning.
Why this #bookrecommendation: It forces you to think long term. In today’s fast-paced, short-term gains kind of working, the biggest sufferer is the #learninganddevelopment professional. Despite their best efforts of designing & executing relevant annual training calendars, they massively struggle to identify the linkage between these activities to the impact it has on the organization.
This book is a must read for every #hr professional, & not only L&D folks. In a non-textbook manner, the author explains the benefits of being a #learning organization & ways to become one.
Truth be told, most HR folks won’t get an experience to implement these learnings in their #workplace. And still I’d recommend you to read this- to visualise an org like that, of the impactful work you could do, of what can be.
Some of my favourite lines from this book are:
– The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary results.
– When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar “vision statement”), people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.
– Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where the rubber meets the road; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.
– As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.”
– When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact. Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that “someone screwed up.”
– The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems. We must look beyond personalities and events. We must look into the underlying structures which shape individual actions and create the conditions where types of events become likely.
Stay tuned for more content on #humanresources & #communicationskills