In another life, I was a high school teacher. During the process of getting my teaching license, one of the core concepts I was asked to affirm was that "all children can learn." Fine. No problem. Of course all children can learn, right? Well, unfortunately, in the classroom things sometimes got a bit more complicated. While in theory I believed all my students were capable of learning, there were days when I doubted that all of my students were equally capable. I sometimes believed that a particular student was at his or her capacity—that this child could go no further. Sometimes I even acted on that belief, to the detriment of all involved.
At this point I can hear you thinking, "What does this have to do with me and my bottom line?" Good question, and I'm sorry to say that the answer is surprisingly straightforward: These students and your employees aren't in all that different of a position.
I don't know about you, but I've never known anyone who took a career-type job with the explicit understanding that they weren't going to advance. Yet all too often employees find themselves in this situation, feeling that there's no room for them to grow, or worse, that their manager isn't interested in their growth. There are many reasons this can happen: assumptions about the employee's ability (or disability), cultural background, or education, or even about the position itself. At Novations we would say that the employee has been negatively positioned within the company. The repercussions to the bottom line, especially when multiplied by a potentially large number of employees, is nothing to be ignored. And for individual employees, the situation can be terribly alienating and have a tremendous impact on this person's ability to deliver his or her best work.
The way to prevent this kind of "negative positioning" is to develop a capacity-building mindset within your organization. This mindset, in its simplest form, means not only believing that "all children can learn" but also acting like this is true.
A capacity-building mindset is fostered by a company-wide implementation of learning loops where an appropriate stretch project leads to higher capacity, which leads to new stretch projects, and so on. These types of stretch projects foster continuous learning and continuous improvement.
A continuous learning/continuous improvement project can be anything relevant to the position and the current needs of the organization. Worked out between the employee and manager, tapping into the employee's motivators, and applied across the board, it can create an infectious energy and enthusiasm once it gets rolling. Employees expand their limits, sometimes even surpassing what they themselves thought they were capable of; employers expand not only the power and versatility of their workforce, but in doing so increase their capacity to respond to the demands of an ever-changing global business environment.
I'd like to believe that I never completely wrote off any particular student. Certainly I was always willing to be surprised by unexpected success, even if my surprise stemmed only from the fact that it was unexpected. In any environment—education, business, whatever—true inclusion starts when an individual's differences, that multitude of things that make the person who he or she is, are viewed as expandable assets. Sometimes it involves rethinking hiring practices to look for this belief in potential applicants. Sometimes it even involves convincing the individuals themselves of this truth. But you know what? Trust me. It's worth it.
Global Novations
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