Leadership Development & Team Learning

For a team to discover gaps in its plan and make changes accordingly,

team members must test assumptions and discuss differences of opinion openly rather than privately or outside the group.

–Amy Edmondson

During the lifecycle of an organization, growth and responsiveness can be endorsed or inhibited by leaders, consciously or unconsciously. Organizations depend on their leaders to not only set strategy, defining the path forward, but also to set tone, defining how the organization values it's staff and how the organization learns from within. This skill of learning from internal skill and expertise has come to be defined as "Team Learning," and the elements of a team or organization with a team learning culture can be identified using the Team Learning Survey tool developed by Columbia University.

i4cl uses that tool, among others, to help leaders understand the role their own leadership plays in setting a learning culture for an organization and supports leadership strategies that cultivate the elements of team learning throughout an organization. Organizations with values that indicate a team learning culture have been shown to be able to respond better to disruptive surprises, enjoy lower turnover and have higher productivity.

In helping an organization engage in this kind of cultural exploration and change, i4cl employs a variety of training and coaching tools. In addition it draws on significant academic and practical qualifications of its fellows and their experience in working towards change within governments, ministries, universities and nonprofit organizations. With organizational learning, as with individual learning, our ASKS learning model provides a concrete way to make sense of the complexity of learning and can serve as a useful diagnostic tool for researching the kinds of learning that a team or an organization may need to consider.