What motivates lifelong learners
Parent Post
Most executives and talent
Most executives and talent management professionals who are charged with getting their people to learn aren’t thinking about what drives real learning — creating new knowledge.
As a result, many companies are missing opportunities to motivate their employees to engage in learning that will help them innovate and keep pace with their customers’ changing needs.
Start by identifying a
Start by identifying a part of the business confronting significant performance issues.
Find ways to help employees start addressing problems that have never been tackled.
Cultivating an explorer’s passion enables innovative thinking in the organization at a whole new level.
Harnessing that opportunity requires us to move beyond fear and cultivate the passion of the explorer that lies waiting to be discovered in all of us.
Simply having employees participate
Simply having employees participate in upskilling programs is not enough.
These training programs are largely focused on sharing existing knowledge — skills that already exist. But in a rapidly changing world, existing knowledge quickly becomes obsolete. We need to broaden our definition of “learning” to include creating new knowledge.
Large institutions worldwide are
Large institutions worldwide are driven by a model of scalable efficiency where the key to success is to do things faster and cheaper.
In a rapidly changing world with growing uncertainty, front-line workers find themselves consuming much more time and effort because they have to deviate from the tightly specified processes, so scalable efficiency is becoming increasingly inefficient.
Developing new knowledge requires
Developing new knowledge requires significant and sustained effort and on-the-job risk-taking, much more so than a traditional upskilling program. Thus learners need to be much more deeply motivated to engage in it.
Executives believe that workers need to pursue upskilling programs or else they will lose their jobs as their existing skills become obsolete. So, the motivation executives bank on is fear — your fear of losing your job.
But once we recognize
But once we recognize the passion of the explorer, we need to make a transition from scalable efficiency to scalable learning, where the focus shifts from executing routine tasks to helping everyone learn faster together.
To do this, we need to redesign our business practices and work environments to cultivate the explorer’s passion in all our workers.
But people who did
But people who did grow under fear possess the passion of the explorer which is a powerful motivator and has three key elements:
- Explorers have a long-term commitment to achieving impact in a specific domain that excites them.
- Explorers are excited in the face of unexpected challenges and view them as an opportunity to learn and achieve even greater impact.
- When confronted with new challenges, explorers have an immediate desire to seek out and connect with others who can help them get to better answers faster.
Most of us have
Most of us have been discouraged from pursuing something that is intrinsically human so that we can fit into institutions that want us to become cogs in a machine.
That’s because employers have traditionally been suspicious of this form of passion.
Passionate explorers ask too many questions, they deviate from the assigned script, and they take too many risks.