Empowering Team Learning

Citation

(1999), "Empowering Team Learning", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 23 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeit.1999.00323cae.002

Empowering Team Learning

Empowering Team Learning

Michael Pearn and othersInstitute of Personnel and Development (IPD)1998176pp.ISBN 0 85292 77347 7Paperback, £17.06 for IPD members, £18.95 for non-members, available from Plymbridge Distributors on Tel. 01752 202301

Keywords Employee, Empowerment, Organizational culture, Teams

Empowered team learning is a revolutionary technique to enable "ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things". According to the authors of Empowering Team Learning, most employees operate in a state of "learned apathy" where they willingly "subordinate their intelligence and creativity to others".

As soon as they are given the chance "to overcome fear, lack of confidence and a presumed lack of competence" workers start "to achieve things normally expected of those in expert or superior roles", helping to "bring about embedded and sustainable change ­ change that is led from the ground up".

Empowering Team Learning was written by occupational psychologist, Michael Pearn and colleagues at Pearn Kandola, and describes a series of rigorously practical steps to promote a culture of team learning.

It looks at how:

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  shop-floor operators at Europe's only alumina-extraction plant carried out a project which transformed both their behaviour and attitudes to safety without the involvement of any safety experts;

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  a consortium of small businesses set up a network of owner-managers, which helped them to overcome their isolation and take personal responsibility for their individual and collective learning;

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  the Local Employment Services in Limerick enabled a team of unemployed people to assess the needs of the area's employers and prepare a skills register of what was available among the unemployed;

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  a team of HGV drivers at one of the UK's largest oil companies designed and carried out their own attitude survey and presented a raft of concrete recommendations about working practices (many of them implemented by management).

Pearn examines the nine distinctive features of empowering team learning, the 12 essential steps to achieving it and the six main facilitation processes. These range from brainstorming and formulating keys to understanding through to a sequence of five workshops designed to explore issues, plan information gathering, make sense of the findings, develop a solution and implement it. They also incorporate physical learning exercises to maintain the momentum and provide light relief.

Pearn argues that being dis-empowered is often "compounded by the constraints of organisational structures, policies and culture". Empowering Team Learning shows how to break through the barriers and release the potential available in every workplace.