Leaders' Critical Role in Building a Learning Culture

By taking a deliberate, thoughtful role in facilitating learning, leaders can propel change and build employees' problem-solving skills.

- By Henrik Saabye and Thomas Borup Kristensen

Organizational learning and adaptation are vital to business survival and success in the face of disruptive technological advancements, increasing environmental challenges, and rapidly shifting customer demands. Yet many business leaders overlook their critical role in facilitating learning, especially when new initiatives demand it at scale.

During organizational transformations, leaders often delegate the learning component of change management to learning and development specialists inside and outside the company. While this approach can bring teams up to speed with new ways of working in the short term, it occurs outside the context of the work itself in a classroom or workshop setting and doesn't build a capacity for ongoing organizational learning from the work, including the ability to analyze and solve problems from which learning emerges.

To understand how leaders can become effective learning facilitators, we conducted two longitudinal studies at Lego, a leading toy company, and Velux, a global leader in manufacturing skylights and roof windows.¹ Our research highlights a key insight: To become effective learning facilitators, leaders must embrace the counterintuitive approach of going slow to go fast.² This principle underscores the impact of deliberate, thoughtful leadership in driving lasting change by focusing on building employees' learning and problem-solving skills. At both companies, leaders embraced the role of learning facilitators and actively prioritized the development of employees' systematic problem-solving abilities. By framing each problem as an opportunity for growth, leaders encouraged employees to approach problems with a focus on strengthening long-term skills rather than just resolving the issue at hand.