At 09:21 PM 8/3/96 +0000, Robert wrote:
>On 1 Aug 96 at 14:15, jpomo@gate.net wrote:
>> The choice as to good and how good or bad and how bad is
>> one which is made by the bosses.
>
>I think this paints a very bleak picture of employees...of people who will
>not decide to function well, unless management sets standards that are
>good. This is consistent with the notion that staff have no values of
>their own, and set no standards of their own but for what they acquire
>from management. Joan has stated elsewhere that she feels that employees
>(in fact most people) are conformists.
>
>I am trying to figure out how a learning organization can be based on such
>assumptions about the emptiness of staff, that they conform, acquire their
>standards and values from leaders of the organization, and take no
>independent pride in their work.
I have worked in, and have been consultant to many organizations in which
the major problems were directly and totally attributable to senior
management. Furthermore, in some of these cases, had management sought
advice of the employees, they would have discovered good and sound
solutions to 90% of their problems. Of course, one of the difficulties in
soliciting advice from a large number of employees is that the answers are
not always clear, complete, and unified. Some processing, sorting, and
collating is required.
In the absence of being consulted, these groups perform on the basis of
their own high value system, occasionally at considerable risk. Bad things
can happen to people if they get caught doing the right thing in an
organization whose leadership has lost sight of what is right. (Comments
on that kind of disloyalty?)
It is that kind of experience that evoked in me such confidence in the
idea of a Learning Organization.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
H. Brock Vodden
Vodden Consulting
"Where People and Systems Meet"
Ontario, Canada
brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca
--Brock Vodden <brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>