Developing an Organisational Learning Culture: Values into Action

What is it?

It is a values driven culture change intervention strategy offered by LSN. It provides strategic direction, and sustainable organisational change and development, through a holistic programme which engages the whole organisation to enable higher performance

Could you benefit from it?

If your organisation is considering the following questions, this value driven culture change programme will help you :

How can we move towards ‘excellence’?
How can we build confidence with change?
How can we learn from our past mistakes?
What strengths can we build on ?
How can we improve our capacity for self improvement?
How can we improve our organisational learning?
How can we start a whole institutional change that will make it sustainable?

How does it work ?

This strategy creates four ‘building blocks’ to achieve strong capacity for self improvement – transformation from within :

A managed organisational culture built on an agreed values framework, as a new means of managing performance
More distributed leadership by building transformative skills where staff, normally in receipt of change, lead it
Change coherence: building greater confidence in leading and managing change
Using a model of organisational learning to increase the rate of collective learning, a key to sustainable change

What does it look like ?

The intervention has three distinct stages, any one of which could be utilised by organisations for their improvement needs, although the full benefits can only be achieved by engagement in the whole process. Stage four is a continuous process throughout all other stages

Stage 1: Engagement: liaising with sernior managers (This stage is necessary as the initial step for any of the subsequent stages)
Stage 2: Culture Audit of the Organisation
Stage 3: Formation and Actions of a Change Team
Stage 4: Continously reviewing progess, getting feedback, identifying fresh actions

Stage 1: Engagement: Liaising with senior managers

This involves: meeting the CEO, MD or Principal and senior management team, to outline and clarify what is involved in this intervention
Benefits at this stage:

organisations have examples of the kind of organisational culture that effective organisations, in and outside the sector, have developed and have enabled sustained higher performance
awareness of the aims, scale, resources and commitment needed for this intervention
an opportunity to compare this with other change interventions offered in the sector.

Stage 2: Conducting a Culture Audit of the organisation

This involves three steps:

Using a culture audit tool : an Organisational Overview Questionnaire to identify staff perceptions of the current state of the organisational culture, and the key challenge for the organisation, is distrubuted to a cross section of staff, reflecting the four levels - teachers, support staff, middle and senior managers
discussion groups to follow, with staff from the same four levels on the type of 'psychological contract' in operation there, facilitated by the consultant
consultant report with analysis and summary of perceptions and challenges

Benefits at this stage:

organisations will have key first hand evidence of ‘Where are we now?’, including the kind of organisational culture perceived by staff, the key challenges, the differences in perception between key groups (e.g. between managers and teachers) and the gaps between this and effective cultures
evidence provided can be used in the self assessment process and linked to the organisation’s ‘the capacity to improve’
the consultant report acts as an initial needs analysis which identifies key barriers to improvement and creates an agenda for action.
the process itself is perceived by staff as an indication of value given to them and their opinions
the consultant report is also seen as valuable, as it is based on local evidence and comes from an ‘external’ source

Organisations may find this stage challenging; meaningful feedback invariably includes issues which staff perceive as frustrating even if previous attempts have been made to tackle them, such as workload, teacher-manager relationships, trust and risk, blame culture and lack of work autonomy.

Stage 3:Formation and Actions of a Change Team

This involves two steps :

forming a Change Team, representing all four levels, whose role will be to tackle long and short term barriers to improvement identified in the report, and develop an effective organisational culture, through engaging with as many colleagues as possible
the Change Team actions,will involve two types of activity:
developing a values framework - stimulating enactment of agreed organisational values in everyday behaviour, as a new means of managing performance
work with staff on 'how is the work working?' identifying local issues e.g. 'hygiene factors' and helping change them; the Change Team also develop a means of publicising their activities and continue to develop change momentum.

Benefits at this stage:

'new' conversations about change are initiated, increasing capacity for self improvement
staff normally on the receiving end of change in traditional, unsuccessful initiatives, are now leading it
initiative becomes part of strategic planning with specifically targeted improvements
organisations now have values framework likely to have more impact as developed with staff and not top-down
organisations developing organisational capacity through distributed leadership through the Change Team establishing support for the intervention, and using transformative techniques to engage with disengaged staff.

Stage 4:Reviewing progress, getting feedback (continuous process)

This involves the Change Team continuing to build change momentum, embedding values and new thinking into everyday working, working to transform specific targeted groups, and consolidating ‘gains’ from the intervention (NB It is planned for a fourth stage which would involve a further series of Focus Groups to evaluate progress and distance travelled )

Overall Benefits of this process:

the organisation has a means of enabling quicker decision making on change issues.
tangible and intangible improvements become evident; ones we have seen include:

- Learner: improved recruitment, retention and success rates, and better behaviour.
- Staff: increases in staff satisfaction in surveys, reducing resistance and increasing staff confidence in change, greater involvement in issues affecting them, reduced staff turnover and absenteeism
- Organisational development: more open communication; a ‘common language’; effective, enacted organisational values; better performance management; effective value driven processes.
All these stages involve detailed LSN consultant support and facilitation

Some comments from those involved

“The benefits derived from working as part of the LSN initiative, with the consultant support have been many and the positive culture shift is already evident even within a relatively short time-scale.’(Principal)……
‘How liberating it would be if we were all on the same side….’
‘To be more effective, you have to be more creative otherwise you just end up repeating the same things that failed…’
‘To be outstanding we do not need to work harder: we need to work differently, take more risks and be more imaginative, in enabling change…’

Or for further information, please contact Ben Griffin, Development Officer

Telephone: 0845 602 5668
Email: Bgriffin@lsneducation.org.uk
Text phone: 020 7492 5002