What are the major benefits of Action Learning?

Benefits of Action Learning for organisations, leaders, team and individuals

Organisations, leaders, team and individuals face real and complex challenges. Action Learning is a process that involves a small group of people working on real problems, taking action, and learning as individuals’ team, and organization.  It is an approach that helps to use the strengths, creative thinking, knowledge, experience of all resources within an organisation to solve problems. 

Key aspect of Action Learning is that it does require expertise or high level of knowledge for the participants to contribute to solutions.  This is a huge change in the usual approach to problem solving. Action learning process is very democratic and allows all members, equal power to contribute. People participate in their own capacity and the process allows them the opportunity to think critically, actively listen, collaborate, build on ideas, share feedback and deliberately learn in a safe environment. It is the emphasis on learning that makes the process strategic rather than tactical. Action Learning allows the group to determine the goals as discuss and discover, rather than being a rigid framework. All it requires a diverse group of people meeting and discussing a identified challenge , asking questions ,under the coaching of certified action learning coach.

Action learning can be used by individuals, teams, and organizations and can be great for personal development of individuals as well as in building a successful team and a cohesive work organization. Here is a summary of benefits for actions learning as we explore the benefits for individuals, teams and organisation.

At an individual level, action learning helps:

• Enhance personal effectiveness and productivity
• Use reflection to enhance learning from personal experiences 
• Enhance personal leadership and soft skills
• Develop self-confidence and assertiveness
• Improve awareness of how assumptions, beliefs, attitudes and organizational interests influence thinking, decisions and actions
• Augment self-awareness, awareness of others and the intelligence to adapt to the presented situation. 
• Self-expression as the practice the idea of speaking freely 

Action Learning helps teams:

• Dramatically enhance team performance.
• Develop positive, mutually-respectful working relationships among   co-workers at all organizational levels.
• Augment the capability of individuals , groups to solve problems and take decisions . 
• Develop leadership and team participation skills 
• Enhance capability to reflect on and learn from collective experience rather than work in silos.
• Develop awareness in the context of multi-culturally diverse teams.
• Continually monitor and enhance team functions

Action learning helps organizations:

• Enhance business performance at all levels
• Rapidly solve urgent and important and business challenges to evolve best, collective solutions 
• Develop innovative approaches and solutions that lead to substantial cost savings and increased ROI
• The Develop a culture of staff engagement, involvement and performance, at all levels
• Set strategic direction of the company as it approaches collective solutions to many challenges
• Leverage the Action Learning process for effective succession planning by allowing the opportunity for potential members to work in real life problem solving process. 
• Start with a one- off problem-solving approach, test its value before rolling to any other parts of the organisation 
• Enable managers and leaders to develop a collaborative work environment, and provide a safe space for members to work within their own capacity, in cross – functional teams without using any expensive tools 
• Become a learning organization.
• Become more strategic in goal setting

For more information on Action Learning, connect with our TC Global learning team and they will connect you with the right resource.