Putting learning back into the work
There is a dominant paradigm in organisations in which staff functions have become central to the way that things get done.
“Staff functions” is a slightly old-fashioned term that comes from the military. According to the current version of the relevant Wikipedia page:
A military staff is a group who serve the commander of a division or other large military unit in their command and control role through planning, analysis, and information gathering.
In organisations, staff functions are things like HR/PeopleOps, finance, legal, etc. They are the parts of the organisation that are not directly involved in the main value chain. That is to say that they do not sell or deliver the thing the organisation does for customers. Instead they sit ‘off to the side’ in an org chart, and are there to support and augment the executive team.
In contrast to staff functions is ‘the line’. The line is the part of the organisation that sells and delivers things. It also includes the intermediate management layer(s) that connect the front line of the organisation, where the value is generated, to the strategic apex of the organisation (IE senior leaders).
This is the sense of ‘line’ from which we get the phrase ‘line manager’. Line managers get a pretty bad rap these days. The very phrase conjures up a sense of micro-management and bureaucracy. We think we’d prefer to do without managers as much as possible. We therefore end up with organisations where staff functions are more important than the line. We see this in particular when it comes to learning and development.
The standard way to orient to L&D today is to make it the responsibility of the HR department. They should build some kind of programme that allows people further their education, by buying books, or taking online courses, etc. I’m not against these things - almost all of the good ideas in these blog posts come from books I have read. Encourage people to read, by all means. But this approach, where learning is delivered primarily through staff functions, misses something.
If organisations are willing to re-embrace the value of the line then they would see that L&D does not have to be an add on1. It’s not something that you have to attend ‘away from your desk’. It’s something that happens all the time, in the course of you doing your job. This happens when we see the job of managers as teaching people to solve client problems. Managers are there to know their reports, and know their work, in sufficient detail that they can ask questions and frame problems in a way that pushes people to take on progressively bigger problems and become capable of solving them on their own.
People don’t just learn in this way from their managers, they learn from their peers. This is another reason why conversations with colleagues are not taking you away from doing useful work - they are useful work, because they help others to learn and grow.
Staff functions actually have a crucial (but indirect) role in making this approach work, by providing the right support and guidance to line managers and building tools and systems to help them.