Reading this article, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I am so unhappy in my job is that nearly everyone is averse to learning from anyone else. It’s a frustrating phenomenon, particularly since I work for a public education agency.
Case in point: Last week I went to a workshop with several other co-workers. Back at the office one of those co-workers asked me my impression of the session. I told her I thought it was useful information and I could see how I’ll need to be able to use the information in the future. Her response was that even though her job doesn’t require in-depth knowledge in this field, she already knew most everything presented in the workshop but was pleased to have gone for the 10 minutes of new information that she did glean.
Are you kidding me?
In a workshop that is peripherally related to her job, was it really the case that she already knew everything except 10 minutes of information? Did she mean to tell me that she knew more about this topic than the people our organization pays to do the job that this workshop was about? And if so, why isn’t she the one doing that job? It’s not enough that she thought she knew everything there was to know about the topic before she went to the workshop—she then had to then articulate that knowledge to me upon her return to the office? Aside making this colleague look like an elitist with a superiority complex, what productive goal could this action have served?
But it’s not just this person—it’s everyone in the organization. They are all impervious to learning from others. None of them leave our guest speaker series having gleaned anything applicable from the speakers. The employees complain that our guest speakers are lousy, unprepared, and do not speak on relevant topics. These speakers are carefully vetted, selected, and prepared and they are experts in their fields. Okay, let’s just say for argument’s sake that the employees are correct and the speakers suck. Shouldn’t they be able to find something worthwhile from the presentation? As educators, we expect students to learn a lesson from nearly every conversation and instructional module. Shouldn’t these same educators be creatively engaged enough to be able to find at least one nugget from a 60-minute talk?
This resistance to education is rampant. Managers refuse to attend mandatory trainings unless executives personally tell them to do so. Employees talk over each other during meetings to offer insights that are often completely unrelated and inapplicable. People talk. A lot. But no one listens, and hardly anyone learns.
I long for a place where employees want to learn from each other. For a place where people don’t walk into an educational session intending to teach the course while attending as participants. I long for a place where people do not protect their own knowledge for fear that sharing information makes them less valuable to the organization. And I long for a place where managers don’t use their own knowledge as a weapon against others.
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