Editorial

Citation

Gimson, A. (2010), "Editorial", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 24 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2010.08124daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 24, Issue 4

The effects of the difficult economic climate continue to reverberate around parts of the globe, albeit in some areas the shock waves are diminishing. There are three key themes running through this issue of the Journal that can assist organizations to move forward in the complexity of current markets:

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  “keeping it real” – ensuring that our interventions help people to work on their actual opportunities and problems;

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  the need for learners to participate in the development and implementation of learning experiences; and

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  leadership – identifying some of the challenges faced by leaders after nearly ten years of the new millennium.

Let’s start with a question. As professionals, how important is the accuracy with which we use language to describe the learning experiences we are offering people? Ian Cunningham’s Viewpoint, makes a case to say it is crucial. He takes the profession to task over the indiscriminate use of the term “workshop”. As people in organizations grapple with the challenges, surely our learning interventions should be about their real situation – their real work – their real needs? I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Paul Lyons introduces us to the concept of a “performance template” that moves away from the more detached world of competencies – often so full of HR speak that they do not seem relevant to the business. Through collaboration and real dialogue between managers, team members and trainers, he describes an opportunity to record and refine common templates to build skills, continually improve performance and create shared knowledge.

Looking at knowledge sharing from a different angle, Fernando Sandoval-Arzaga and Manuel Suarez-Barraza provide a framework to assist improvement teams to access more of the tacit knowledge that resides within those seen as “experts”. Kaizen (continuous improvement) teams are categorized into three different types and the critical roles that can be played by experts are highlighted.

Massive investment, both in terms of time and money, has been made in knowledge management systems over the last ten to 15 years. Some question the level of ROI that organizations have achieved. Drawing from motivational and social psychological principles, Joachim Kimmerle calls for more emphasis on the needs of the people who are being asked to contribute to these systems. His comment on self-determination is thought provoking.

Improving employee creativity is often the subject of a taught course – and the results can be less than spectacular. Dennis Self and Diane Bandow share some examples of ground floor innovation that resulted in massive corporate gains (remember the post-it note?). More importantly, they move on to offer an illuminating set of five principles that can be followed to foster a creative culture.

You may recall that our Special Issue for 2010 has a focus on Leadership Development – and it will be the next issue of the journal. It seemed prudent therefore to precede an exploration of how we should be developing leaders with a taste of what is being written about leadership itself.

“Leaders of the future-identifying authoritative research in leadership studies” describes the process undertaken by two researchers in China to identify the most influential authors and themes on leadership to emerge from some of the literature during a ten year period up to 2006. It gives an interesting mapping and an even wider study might be beneficial.

The expectations of the Y Generation (those born after 1980) are explored in “Pied piper to the Y Generation: What type of leadership meets the needs of a 21st Century workforce”. Calls are made for collaborative, non-hierarchical and transparent leaders who are also able to innovate and meet the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce.

The importance of diversity is explored further in “Acquiring a global leadership mindset: the new competitive advantage in the marketplace”. This article proposes three sets of dichotomies that will take leaders beyond the old adage “think globally and act locally” as well as providing a framework of four approaches that will help leaders develop a global mindset.

Our last review piece “Entrepreneurs’ and managers’ leadership roles compared” does what it says in the title. It compares the experiences of people who are operating as employed managers with those who have chosen to run their own businesses. Four themes for each group emerge as significant in shaping their leadership practices and the differences between them are illuminating.

I hope these pieces whet your appetite and provide an interesting backdrop to our next issue on Leadership Development.

Anne GimsonStrategic Developments International, UK. anne@stratdevint.com