Your organization needs a learning ecosystem

There is a symbiotic learning relationship between an employee and his organization. High-growth individuals who embrace learning make the organization smarter and contribute to its growth, but they can’t do it alone. They need their managers to have a reciprocal interest in individual growth and create a learning ecosystem to foster it.

Like biological ecosystems, organizations are either growing or they’re

dying. And organizations grow when their employees are learning. If you want a high-growth organization, you need to create a learning ecosystem to support high-growth individuals.

When people are no longer engaged by their work, their benefit to the organization is diminished. Redeploying them on new learning curves within the organization keeps their expertise inhouse and allows them to share and build on it — a potentially exponential gain. Job swapping of this kind is only one strategy to put employees on new learning curves and help break down silos. Ongoing training and educational opportunities, job sharing, and mentoring and outreach programs are a few other examples.

By creating an ecosystem that fuels continuous learning, an organization can build capacity ahead of the competition. And research indicates that the companies that survive are those that develop capacity — new technical skills and domain expertise, greater adaptability, and ways of leveraging institutional memory — before they need it. This capacity weakens when too many good people leave for greener pastures.

If individuals aren’t learning, neither is the organization. When we facilitate learning, we create new carrying capacity for growth throughout our organizational ecosystem.

• Whitney Johnson is anexecutivecoach