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Yours A Learning Organization (Garvin, Edmondson, Gino, 2008, PG 3), Differences of Opinions

The document discusses the author's reflection on their organization, Tesla. It states that Tesla encourages innovation and new ideas but can improve by setting more realistic expectations and focusing on employee growth. Specifically, the organization often works long hours and has high turnover. The author proposes leading their team with regular retrospectives and individual skill goals to foster learning and improvement at both the team and individual level.

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Akhilesh Malla
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95 views2 pages

Yours A Learning Organization (Garvin, Edmondson, Gino, 2008, PG 3), Differences of Opinions

The document discusses the author's reflection on their organization, Tesla. It states that Tesla encourages innovation and new ideas but can improve by setting more realistic expectations and focusing on employee growth. Specifically, the organization often works long hours and has high turnover. The author proposes leading their team with regular retrospectives and individual skill goals to foster learning and improvement at both the team and individual level.

Uploaded by

Akhilesh Malla
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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M4: Reflection Paper

I would say that my organization is strongest in exploring new ideas and doing something

out of the norm to achieve their goals. I work for Tesla and even though they are a large

company, it still runs like a startup. There are little to no processes that limit exploration of

innovative ideas and everyone is energetic and passionate about the company’s mission. Along

the way, there are heated discussions, trial and error, sometimes even ambiguity and a sense of

lack of progress. However, this has set a culture where nobody is scared of being belittled or

feeling dumb when raising questions or sharing ideas. As covered in part of building block 1 in Is

Yours a Learning Organization (Garvin, Edmondson, Gino, 2008, pg 3), differences of opinions

are well professionally handled and leadership encourages different points of view before

finalizing on a direction. It truly feels like a democracy where people are freely able to voice their

opinions, appreciate each other’s strengths and show a level of humility and respect for one

another. All of this is backed with a sense of pride that we are working towards a mission to

change the world by accelerating the transition to sustainable energy.

An area where my company needs to improve is setting realistic expectations from

employees and focusing on personal and professional growth. My company is known for setting

ambitious timelines and because of that, the workplace is usually challenging. Everyone is

consistently working long hours to deliver on time and keep up with quarterly goals and

expectations set by the leadership team. After a while, it gets exhausting, as there’s no

opportunity to look back and reflect on our progress. Moreover, there is a high executive turnover

and we tend to overwork and make the same mistakes that sometimes lead to mediocre results.

Our organization also does not invest time and resources in providing education and training to

improve skills as much as they should.

If I were leading a team at my organization, I would instill a learning environment based

on history and experiences that can be done with team retrospectives after the completion of a

project. Retrospectives help identify what went well and what could have gone better during the

project. This facilitates transparency and gives an opportunity for everyone to reflect on the

experiences they had working on the project. This notion is also captured as part of the four
principles to cultivate a learning environment in the same HBR article where it suggests the use

of post audits and after-action reviews to allow more time for reflection. In addition, I would also

have individual team members to set quarterly goals for themselves that pertain to their skills

and/or personal attributes, and have them evaluate it at the end of the quarter. This will hopefully

foster learning at an individual level, because, after all, if we are a better version of ourselves we

tend to be efficient and productive which will translate to better results for the team and the

company.

References

Gino, F., Garvin, D., & Edmondson, A. (2008). Is Yours a Learning Organization? Harvard

Business Review.

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