Becoming a Teaching Organization

“In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers.  They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models—that is, they are responsible for learning.” --Peter Senge

I can’t believe we are a week out from our NTCUE presentations in Savannah!  I am so excited to share my project with everyone and also learn how the other finalists have impacted their organizations with their projects. 

As I started my journey, I had many people recommend that I read the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.  From this book, I was able to understand the importance of becoming not only a learning organization, but a teaching organization.  As I started to put together our course catalog for Learn to Earn, I realized that we needed to cultivate the knowledge of our senior management team and create courses that would allow our employees to interact with each of our senior leaders.  For example, our CFO will be teaching a class on credit union finance and our CEO will be presenting information about our strategic plan, both of which will be required classes in the program.

Our staff will benefit from learning about these concepts and be required to demonstrate that knowledge, but the biggest takeaway in this process will be the interaction with the senior leaders during the class.  As we all know, our employees can feel removed from the credit union’s senior leadership, especially if they are at an outlying branch.  By working directly with senior management, employees will feel more connected with the organization.  Also, this gives our leaders the chance to hear from these employees and understand their perspective. 

In the end, I am hoping that the teachers learn as much as the students, so we can continue the cycle of continuous learning. 

See you in Savannah! #NTCUE

Colleen Tilton